The Pursuit of Being Fully Alive

Naked as the Day I Was Born: Thoughts on Being Vulnerable

What I learned as a young adult from people floating naked in the pools at Harbin Hot Springs

I can only hope that if I lead by example, baring my inner-most thoughts and perceptions of the human condition, you will simply be drawn to the raw honesty of it all.

I grew up in Northern California, about an hour north of San Francisco.

After college, my wife and I moved to the Napa Valley where our three children were born. I taught high school there for seven years.

Crazy times.

Thumbing through a book — (remember those?) — on California hot springs, we discovered Harbin Spiritual Retreat in the mountains above Calistoga. Historically, this little piece of heaven has existed for maybe a hundred years, originally serving those with the means to get there from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Sometime in the 60s or 70s, the grounds became part of the Heart Consciousness Church, a residential community built around several spring-fed pools where the water flowed out of the mountain at scalding temperatures. There were weekend retreats focused on yoga, Tantra, and other forms of New Age enlightenment.

That was all a bit beyond our consciousness at that stage of our lives, but not so much so that we weren’t willing to hire a sitter on a Saturday afternoon, drive up to Harbin, and spend the afternoon soaking up the sun on the deck or engage in deep breathing in the pools. Nudity was not compulsory, but most everyone was nude.

In so many ways, those visits to Harbin set us on our lifelong naturist path. We never joined the girls on the porch decorating one another with organic berry paints, but we weren’t put off by it either.

It was all pretty surreal

In the warm pool, where talking was forbidden, most would simply hang at the edges of the pool, eyes closed or staring into space. The pool was never chlorinated, as the spring water flowing through assured an ever-evolving water exchange that not only kept the water fresh, but generated millions on tiny bubbles that adhered to your skin.

More often than not, there would be a Watsu therapist working with a client in the middle of the pool. Having done little research on the topic, and speaking mostly from recollection, Watsu is a form of meditative yoga that takes place while floating in the water. From the sidelines, if you let your gaze fall upon the contorted body floating by in front of you, you couldn’t help but synchronize your own breathing with theirs.

Sometimes we’d stay into the evening when lighting was restricted to candles and lanterns around the hot springs. Artificial light — that generated by electricity — was always subtle and diffused. Those practicing Watsu in the shroud of darkness seemed particularly at peace.

In the moment.

In touch with their physicality and calmly present in their peace of mind.

I teach singing and conducting at a large, eastern university for a living. While many of the kinesthetic skills involved in those activities are like any other learned motor-memory behavior— like knitting, riding a bike, or keeping your balance on a skateboard — there comes a point when a performer (e.g. singer, actor, conductor) must be willing to get naked with their constituency.

Sounds lovely, doesn’t it?

It’s scary as hell!

In working through this process with a conducting student yesterday, we took a deep dive on mastering the state of vulnerability. For a musician, that’s the point when you are no longer aware of your own physicality, but instead, you simply become the conduit of transmitting your inner most thoughts. In this case, that transmission is conveyed though the organic nature of the music itself. For singers (and choral conductors), this involves a reconciliation of music and prose to arrive at an auditory or physical representation of a human condition or response.

If that all sounds a bit academic, try this.

When we sing from the core of our being, we are exposing our most intimate thoughts, beliefs, and ideals, even at the risk that someone in our midst may not fully comprehend who we are or what we are saying. In that moment, the act of giving of one’s self far outweighs the potential judgement or rejection implicit in how that might be received.

I spoke to my students in class yesterday about those young-adult experiences we had at Harbin, all at once realizing, as I spoke, how formative those experiences actually were. Who’s to say how vulnerable that naked person in the pool actually felt as they were striving for a state of peace and self-realization. And would that have been different had not nearly everyone in our midst also been naked?

I didn’t go into the sordid details about all that with my students, though most, if not all, know that we — my wife and I — practice naturism. In the same breath, I doubt few, if any, could truly comprehend what drew us into naturism in the first place.

For me, in the ideal setting where social nudity is accepted and embraced, I find myself very much in the same place that I do when I’m singing or conducting. Each represents an alter ego that causes me to say…

This is who I am, and this is what I believe.

This are how these words resonate with me when I hear them in this musical context.

You don’t have to believe what I believe. You’re probably not capable of feeling what I feel. Your feelings are exclusively your own.

But I can only hope that if I lead by example, baring my inner-most thoughts and perceptions of the human condition, you will simply be drawn to the raw honesty of it all.

That’s a lot.

Harbin burned to the ground in the horrific California fires of 2015. Amazingly, they’ve been fastidiously rebuilding and reopened again about two years ago. I’ve only had the chance to return once since the fires, but the ambiance and sense of empowerment remain very much the same.

A colleague and I have mused for years that maybe we should hold a retreat where singers and conductors come together to study in the nude, with the presumption that coming to peace with one’s own physicality is the first step to exposing that which lies deep beneath the skin.

This is 2022. That’s never going to happen. Nor is it so simple to say that taking your clothes off will inherently result in transporting one to a deep place of calm and transparency.

But at least in the metaphorical sense, it’s certainly worth musing over. In my humble estimation, our noisy world is suffering from a serious deficit of people willing to be naked with one another — whether that involves the removal of clothing or not.

[Nor would I wish to suggest that all naked people are transparent and vulnerable. In either direction, one condition doesn’t inherently evoke the other.]

Sometimes we fail to recognize the depth and complexity of the human experience, let alone the individual intricacies of those trying to navigate their own lives.

Getting naked is… complicated.

Enjoy this story? Please take a moment to clap! You can clap up to 50 times, and each time you do that, it helps move naturist stories up the queue in the MEDIUM algorithm.

I write about naturism, travel, and other parts of the human experience simply for the joy of writing. Totally worth it. But every time somebody spends time reading one of my stories, I earn a few cents to help pay the overhead costs of being a blogger.

It’s only a few dollars a month to subscribe to Medium, which gives you access to thousands of authors and their work. And if you subscribe by clicking through the link below, I receive an incentive for that as well. Support naturism and thoughtful writing. Subscribe to MEDIUM… below…

Read more of our naturist musings on our blog…