Imagine yourself in a hot tub, gently massaged by a loving group of people. : In Touch With Myself

I picked up a magazine called the Whole Person at one of those cosmic health food stores and T-shirt centers that abound in Los Angeles.

It is a catalogue of activities that relate, for lack of a more colorful term, to spiritual self-improvement, a powerful if capricious pastime in a city that simultaneously deified John Wayne and open-mouth kissing.

Listed in Whole Person are sessions in numerological cybernetics for a more positive reality; an introduction to non-structural, free-flowing wing-chun gung-fu, and lectures by a visitor from Venus on trance-channeling for interplanetary energy exchanges.

Get the picture?

I read the publication not becauses I am interested in either enhancing my soul-infused personality or in self-discovery of my past lives through private regression, but because I am always curious about what the folks out there are involved in.

Well, I am here to say they are involved in transpersonal neo-Reichian breathing exercises and in the development of their romantic radar.

I learned of these through discussions with Helaine Harris, a Van Nuys psychotherapist who directs an organization called Awaken, which will help you find the real you if, indeed, there is one.

I picked her out of the Whole Person catalogue because she was one of the few who did not offer miracles of metaphysical restoration through out-of-body experiences.

I like a little off-the-wall as well as the next guy, but there is no point cluttering anyone’s psychic space with galactic fantasies. (What did he just say? Damned if I know.)

In addition to the aforementioned sessions on breathing and radar, Awaken will also assist in a search for the inner you by evoking your feminine warrior, by transforming your life through the Tibetan method of lucid dreaming and by the creation of aqua-energies through hot tub immersion.

Right. They dunk you.

Since singles in the Valley, like monkeys in the mating season, are endlessly sniffing about for partners of the opposite sex, I felt that exploring romantic radar might be of some value to those of you who hang around Houlihan’s and T.G.I. Friday’s.

Romantic radar, as Harris explained it, is the use of energy to determine who is right for you.

“Rub your hands together,” she demanded as we sat in a quiet upstairs room of her combined home and office.

She is a middle-aged lady with an effusive manner. A thick coating of lavender eye shadow emphasized the no-nonsense attitude of her stare. So I rubbed my hands together.

“Feel it?” she asked.

I was about to wonder aloud if she meant did I feel something like a spiritual awakening, but fortunately she beat me by asking did I feel the heat. I did.

“That,” she said, satisfied, “is your sexual energy!”

“Hey,” I said.

Hey is what I say when I don’t know how else to respond.

Harris went on to explain that she teaches her clients to use their sexual energy by having them stand five inches apart for 10 minutes and stare into each other’s eyes while breathing in coordinated rhythm.

“It gets them functioning on a different level,” she said.

A room full of silent people standing nose-to-nose while breathing together ought to get anyone functioning on a different level.

I asked how this method would help an unattached person find a partner, since, if they were already exchanging breaths, they would be fairly, you know, friendly to begin with, and she said that wasn’t the point.

“The point,” she explained with the patience of a fifth-grade teacher, “is to open them up, to define their feelings.”

“Hey,” I said.

Another method of defining one’s feelings, as it turns out, is through the aqua-energetic workshops. A brochure distributed by Awaken invites us to dream along with them:

“Imagine yourself floating in the womblike warmth of a gigantic hot tub while you are supported, rocked and gently massaged by a loving group of people.”

Well, now, I don’t know about that. . . .

“Now you detect your favorite aroma coming from the flowers you selected.”

Brightly: Oh yeah?

“Then the waters of the pool come alive , vibrating with the music you love played through underwater speakers. Every note massages your entire body. Your senses are saturated and you float weightlessly . . . . “

Hold it.

Being groped by a crowd in vibrating waters while surrounded by the fragrance of flowers seems a little too, you know, esoteric for someone from East Oakland, so I think I will pass.

I similarly will decline any invitation to breathe in rhythm, meditate transcendentally or explore my stress muscles with strangers, although quartz crystal visualization and the powerful science of foot flexology certainly sound, er, interesting.

(Beam me up, Scotty. They’ve got me surrounded.)