Heart: Heart Consciousness, Good Energy, Going into the Pools

The energy around the pool area at Harbin is great. Thanks, Harbin pools. I experience an easing, a kind of 'coming home,' a sense of relaxed welcome, and a breath of fresh air. It's like an externalized relaxation response in this particular milieu of the Harbin pool area. It's a curious, salutary phenomenon, like a lot of other things in life just slipped away, or aren't there, as you enter the pool area.

(Why is this? How can 'energy' be great? Is this the stuff of 'spirituality' or Heart Consciousness Church, the church that operates Harbin? What role does the Harbin pool person, for the day, play? Harbin is about oneness, so this is a non-question, anyway).

While this is, of course, my subjective view, I think many people share this experience, and might or might not use different language to characterize it. If one posits the idea that cultural 'phenomena' are partly constructed, how is this ease upon entering the Harbin pool area shaped? To get to the pool area, you either walk up a fairly steep hill from near the Stonefront Lodge and the Gazebo and Fountain, or along the Village Path, which is around a 1/3 mile long. So a little movement gives rise in part to this good energy, I think. And people either know or anticipate positively going into the welcoming and receptive pools and area, and this contributes to the process and neurophysiology. Perhaps it's the spatiality there. And perhaps all of us Harbin residents who know the pool area contribute to shaping this 'energy' in the way we think about it.

While there's good 'energy' in and around Stonefront Lodge, too, as well as in the rest of Harbin and its Valley, somehow the pool area energy is great. Perhaps it's that people come there to soak, or sit naked on the Sun deck, or go up to Fern Kitchen, which is above the Harbin Dressing Room in the pool area. Perhaps it's the lessening of possible 'conflicts,' as almost no business transactions take place there. Or perhaps it's the smart water, and the cleanliness, the beautiful milieu of pool area buildings and trees, with views of the lovely ridge across the Valley, that occur when one 'comes home.'

How might I measure this energy neurophysiologically? R. Davidson's research at the Lab for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison? Herbert Benson MD's research?


Sometimes Harbin reminds me of the Czech film "Closely Watched Trains," which takes place at a very rural Czech railway station, and is about the wry, close scrutiny of the one train a day. ;) Naked people go into the Harbin pools with such regularity. {But technologies at Harbin are simple}.


And sometimes Harbin reminds me of the film "The King of Hearts," where a Scot goes into a deserted French town during WWI, after it's been evacuated, and finds the town's asylum door left open, and its now-free inhabitants exploring what they want too, delightfully. {Harbin is low tech - there's no bunker in the center of Harbin}.



Going into the pools changes things beneficially for me - neurophysiologically. It did so again this morning and yesterday. I think it does so for many people. Now, away from Harbin, with no easy warm pool nearby, I wonder how to find such a pool in Berkeley. Why not create easy-to-access, clothing-optional, beautiful, warm pools everywhere, and creatively shape easing, cultural practices for using them? They are delightful and transformative, and something that's central to the Harbin experience.