I Slept Through the Sound Baths: how I knew I was pregnant

The teacher tapped my shoulder when the sound bath ended. I had been asleep for forty minutes. It was the third afternoon in a row I had fallen asleep through the gong-and-bowl portion of the retreat I had flown to Dharamshala to attend. She said many people fell asleep. I told her it was just the altitude.

I would find out, a few weeks after coming home, that it had not been the altitude.

I had been pregnant the whole time.

The Celts had a word for the places people walked to when they wanted the world to be larger than the room they were in. Caol áit, in the Irish is a thin place, a threshold, the spot on the map where the membrane between the ordinary and the otherwise has worn down. Mountains. Rivers. Stone circles. Dharamshala was, on the morning of the sound bath, the thin place I had flown halfway around the world to find.

It turned out, with hindsight, to be the second one I was in. The first had been my body.

My partner and I had been on the road, by the time we made it to Dharamshala, for sixteen months. We had taken a year, then another four months, then another two — leaving, returning, leaving again, the way some couples in their thirties do when they cannot quite agree on whether to stop. We had not, in any sustained sense, had an address since the spring before. We had given away most of our furniture. We had one suitcase each.

Dharamshala was one of the last stops. It was meant to be the door we walked through before we settled, a piece of slow at the end of a piece of fast, an exhale before the inhale of an apartment, a postcode, a job. We had imagined it that way for nearly a year. The trip ahead would tip us, eventually, back into a stationary life. The retreat at the end was the bridge.

I had been craving carbs. Naan, rice. I had finished, on the morning before the teaching, an enormous breakfast of dal and roti and was hungry again by ten.

McLeod Ganj sits in the foothills of the Himalayas, above the lower town of Dharamshala, at around 1,750 metres. The Tibetan exile community has been there since 1959, when the present Dalai Lama crossed the border at the age of twenty-three. The streets are narrow, the buildings stacked into the slope, and the prayer flags strung across them have, by the time you arrive, been weathered to the colour of old paper. I had imagined the place as more austere. It was, instead, quietly busy. Monks moving in pairs. Women selling momos out of stock-pots on the side of the road. The soft, layered murmur of mantras coming from open windows.

We walked the kora on the first morning, the path that loops the Tsuglagkhang complex, with a notebook. The monks who passed us were spinning the prayer wheels, chanting under their breath as they walked.

Then came the sound baths.

There were two a day. I fell asleep in all of them. I am not, by temperament, a person who falls asleep in things. I have been to a great many wellness retreats, in part because of the work I do, and I have always been the woman who stays past the finish time, in a meditative daze, but never asleep.

We came home. We lived in a hotel studio for awhile.

I had thought, on each of those afternoons, that I had been very tired. The body had been doing its work in the body’s quiet way, slowness, appetite, surrender, and I had read every sign as a story about myself, when half of each sign was a story about somebody else.

The Celts wrote thin place into their idiom because they understood — long before our generation rediscovered the word — that the membrane between the ordinary and the otherwise wears down at certain coordinates and not at others.

I will take her, one day, to the place I did not know I was carrying her through.