to take it all in and engage with whatever you find there, but you can be
confident that we’ll be here keeping an eye on things. Think of us as
ground control. We’ve got you covered.”
For the astronaut being blasted into space, the shudder of liftoff and
strain of escaping Earth’s gravitational field can be wrenching—even
terrifying. Several volunteers describe trying to hold on for dear life as
they felt their sense of self rapidly disintegrating. Brian Turner, who at
the time of his journey was a forty-four-year-old physicist working for a
military contractor (with a security clearance), put it this way:
I could feel my body dissolving, beginning with my feet, until
it all disappeared but the left side of my jaw. It was really
unpleasant; I could count only a few teeth left and the bottom
part of my jaw. I knew that if that went away I would be gone.
Then I remembered what they told me, that whenever you
encounter anything scary, go toward it. So instead of being
afraid of dying I got curious about what was going on. I was
no longer trying to avoid dying. Instead of recoiling from the
experience, I began to interrogate it. And with that, the whole
situation dissolved into this pleasant floaty feeling, and I
became the music for a while.Soon after, he found himself “in a large cave where all my past
relationships were hanging down as icicles: the person who sat next to me
in second grade, high school friends, my first girlfriend, all of them were
there, encased in ice. It was very cool. I thought about each of them in
turn, remembering everything about our relationship. It was a review—
something about the trajectory of my life. All these people had made me
what I had become.”
Amy Charnay, a nutritionist and herbalist in her thirties, came to
Hopkins after a crisis. An avid runner, she had been studying forest
ecology when she fell from a tree and shattered her ankle, ending both
her running and her forestry careers. In the early moments of her
journey, Amy was overcome by waves of guilt and fear.
“The visual I had was from the 1800s and I was up on this stage. Two
people next to me were slipping a noose around my neck while a crowd of