Within aphasia
gra went into aphasia in October 2019. At that time, she had moved to Maia Earth Village with the purpose of studying innerdance. Having travelled around southeast Asia for a year, she had left her life in Brazil and her teaching job so as to find more authentic and conscious ways of living on Earth. In her innerdance process, she retrieved a lot of memories and, after revisiting the womb space, her language shut down. Having had studied linguistics and analysis of discourse in college, her innerdance has been looking at the structures of language and consciousness across time and space. Below, she attempts at writing about what it was like regressing to a baby-like mind at the age of 28 for the first time:
*Take note that this is a subjective experience and by no means it intends to be a rule for anything. We all go through different waves within the process and sharings like this help us build context around the frameworks of innerdance.
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I woke in one morning and went from deep sleep straight into a journey by myself. There was a lot of electricity in my body, that was epileptically shaking from feet to head. My eyes rolled up and after a while I was once again going through a life review that ended up in the womb experience. The process took around two hours and when finished, I headed down to the communal kitchen to start my morning. While talking to one of our cats, something felt different in my skin: I felt a shift of vibrations and it was almost as if someone was slightly pulling me up. Instantly, no words were coming out of my mouth anymore, only sounds. As predicted a month before, I had lost my language and was unable to speak English or any other human/natural language. |
The journey into aphasia was a deep lesson of trust. Trust in the self, trust in the symbolic, trust in the innerdance process. For around one month, I was only able to speak proper English after 4pm. Before that, I would either just make sounds or stammer words with the biggest physical effort ever seen or experienced. It took around five months for me to be back into fully speaking terms. During that time, speaking was physically painful. It felt like my entire body was being forced to make every cell work just to utter one single word out while on the other hand, uttering sounds (what for some is called light language) was the easiest and most natural thing. For those witnessing, it was palpable the changes in my own personality: I was suddenly experiencing this childlike way of speaking, walking and being. My emotions would fluctuate more than ever and my sensitivity heighten to such extremes that even the common noises made by crickets and birds at 6pm would interfere in my own thinking process, scrambling everything within my brain, shifting things from thoughts into waves of sound.
Around that time, I started seeing the colors to all sounds around me. From dogs barking on the road to people talking during a communal meeting at Maia, everything had a color visible to the opened eye. It became easy then to identify the places people were speaking from. As I was shifting from verbal to non-verbal communication, true meaning became visible and accessible in different and unconventional ways.
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After a while, I grew into my own new language and felt natural languages (in this case, English) in very different ways. It was as if whenever people talked around me, I was behind curtains, trying to trace the words back to their meanings, and witnessing language finding its way: rather than people, I started to see stories, discourses taking place at every single act of speech. That sensory stage helped me to finally ground aspects related to the structure of language: 1. we are constantly drawing words out of a number of possible choices. these words are supposed to best describe reality, translating source. 2. after selecting the words, we begin to speak or write them in such a linear way that it actually imprints in our body-minds the concept of time as it is usually known. |
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Aphasia for me felt like being back into the basket of choices. The place from which meaning is created. The Real place that we can only very poorly describe. In that place, a lot of our believes, thoughts and ideologies were not making any sense for me anymore. I could not understand words like ~woman for example. They simply did not make any sense because in the end, they felt like being something built outside of source, something created by a society that learned how to separate more than integrate and whose language was, therefore, a materialization of polarities. My body-mind began to feel dense or heavy whenever around discourses coming from this space and, on the other hand, experiencing a deep sense of openness when surrounded by speeches free of judgments and dissonance. I could feel the vibration of every single word.
Besides not being able to address connotations to what was said, I could not feel resonance between the speaker and the words uttered. Everything felt disconnected, empty and mechanical as if there was nothing between content and form, meaning and functionality. For more than a year, nothing outside my body made sense and everything that was happening inside it was far from being reached by the words commonly known. I grew more and more tired of social roles and whatever remaining there was of an identity, I was clearly willing to let go off.
I was feeling and seeing so much that I just could not find words to better describe life anymore. At that point, I understood I was going through Regression in order to reset, to reboot my own system of interpretations. I needed a new way of speaking: new words to properly translate what life and in order to do so, I had to go backwards into the early years of childhood prior to language acquisition, when I had just come out from the womb to dive into reality as it was presented to me at that time and from there, find a pathway to a new way of being, thinking, feeling and speaking.
Besides not being able to address connotations to what was said, I could not feel resonance between the speaker and the words uttered. Everything felt disconnected, empty and mechanical as if there was nothing between content and form, meaning and functionality. For more than a year, nothing outside my body made sense and everything that was happening inside it was far from being reached by the words commonly known. I grew more and more tired of social roles and whatever remaining there was of an identity, I was clearly willing to let go off.
I was feeling and seeing so much that I just could not find words to better describe life anymore. At that point, I understood I was going through Regression in order to reset, to reboot my own system of interpretations. I needed a new way of speaking: new words to properly translate what life and in order to do so, I had to go backwards into the early years of childhood prior to language acquisition, when I had just come out from the womb to dive into reality as it was presented to me at that time and from there, find a pathway to a new way of being, thinking, feeling and speaking.
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Writing also changed: the golden codes I was once writing on the air during my first innerdance in maia were now being written on paper. I began to describe reality using a different set of tools. Something way different than words, they helped me to arrive at different ways of being on earth, the different dimensionalities of thought and multiple and diverse ways of accessing the unseen and unspoken, the backstage. I could not yet translate everything that was being presented to me in the traditional and linear sense of it. Still, sometimes, a certain number of codes made up to a word in English; or the sounds of the language in my mind were instantly translated into a word or clue to something. In my head, different layers of communication began to take place. |
People would talk to me and in the background of what they said, I would hear my own language; sometimes, when uttering those sounds, I would see some words right in front of my forehead, almost as if an instant subtitle; at other times, I would speak with people in both ways, alternating between light language and English, one complementing the other.
It always felt like some aspects of the space were becoming palpable through that new language. Whatever perceived by the intuitive right brain that now had the space to speak in its own way. It could be during innerdance sessions, when being with someone or even just by myself, whenever writing those codes down and uttering those sounds, something different would happen regarding time. During immersions, I used to play a guessing game with myself: when in circles for sharings and frameworks, I would close my eyes and start writing whatever symbols and words would pop up in my mind, just so I could cross them over once they were spoken by the many people around me. The linear structure of time had broken down along the structures of linear thought and language.
It always felt like some aspects of the space were becoming palpable through that new language. Whatever perceived by the intuitive right brain that now had the space to speak in its own way. It could be during innerdance sessions, when being with someone or even just by myself, whenever writing those codes down and uttering those sounds, something different would happen regarding time. During immersions, I used to play a guessing game with myself: when in circles for sharings and frameworks, I would close my eyes and start writing whatever symbols and words would pop up in my mind, just so I could cross them over once they were spoken by the many people around me. The linear structure of time had broken down along the structures of linear thought and language.
It did not take long to realize how my time perception changed after aphasia. I started having out of body experiences. My body became a time travelling device: when in deep REM stages, I would feel strong buzzy sensations from crown to toes, specially in the arms, in a snap of fingers, I would access deep layers of my own mind, its memories, symbols and patterns. Besides, I also started seeing intermixed events with different people. Such events would later on happen during my wake states. Up until now, almost two years later, things that I dreamed about or wrote in codes at that time are happening. The perception of my body also changed, I realized that aside from the codes and light language channeling different timelines and events into this one reality, my body was sensing things – hearing sounds, smelling different things, having different symptoms such as nausea and headache – ahead of time, overlaying just like sound in the innerdance playlists. Multiple frequencies, multiple waves, multiple dimensions, multiple thoughts from different people and their stories were all dialoging from deep within my body.
In the beginning of my process, I lost money and documents; gadgets would break around me; I didn’t feel like showering as regularly as before; I would easily loose or forget things at markets; once I even peed during sleep; I wasn’t able to be around people, hold eye contact or stablish connections with anyone for too long; when outside Maia, far from nature and in the city, I would experience moments when everything would just break down under my feet. I was surrounded by people who trusted, but also by some who feared the process and both sides were extremely important to my own growth: over the months, I had to encounter every inch of fear, lack, insecurity, doubt, hatred, judgment, shame, abnormality, just so they too could decompose and be converted into another way of being on Earth.
In the beginning of my process, I lost money and documents; gadgets would break around me; I didn’t feel like showering as regularly as before; I would easily loose or forget things at markets; once I even peed during sleep; I wasn’t able to be around people, hold eye contact or stablish connections with anyone for too long; when outside Maia, far from nature and in the city, I would experience moments when everything would just break down under my feet. I was surrounded by people who trusted, but also by some who feared the process and both sides were extremely important to my own growth: over the months, I had to encounter every inch of fear, lack, insecurity, doubt, hatred, judgment, shame, abnormality, just so they too could decompose and be converted into another way of being on Earth.
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A year after my first experiences within aphasia, I began to grow interest in reading, studying and speaking again. Assisted by the innerdance frameworks and my insane curiosity and willingness to experiment on things, something began to take shape again. Things are not happening differently than before, but there is a careful composition at place. Something that is learning how to emanate its most authentic vibration. It feels like learning how to speak all over again: be it by repeating other people’s words or ways of expressing themselves, by creating new ones, or simply by accepting the old that is still part of what i am now. The story never ends. |
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A journey through Aphasia