It’s only 11am on the first morning of Glastonbury and I have stumbled into a nightmare. Fifty festival goers yank their faces into Joker-like grins, “ha”-ing, “ho”-ing and “he”-ing in a circle of maniacal guffaws. A teacher stands at the front, jeering them along with a cackle.
I’m at one of the daily laughter workshops in Glastonbury’s Healing Fields that, our teacher explains, aims to boost endorphins and all-round positive energy through simple, clean laughter. We howl at complete strangers, pick smiles from the grass and throw them into the air, grin and shriek and whoop. By the end of the session, we’re outside – laying on our backs, arms and legs in the air, giggling dizzily towards the sky. “You don’t need drugs or alcohol,” our teacher squeals. “This is the best kind of high you can get!”
It’s a well-worn yarn that if you see any bands at all at Glastonbury, then you’re doing something wrong. Such is the rainbow of humanity that descends on Worthy Farm each year that, as legend has it, if you’ve not spent at least a few lost hours dissecting the pros and cons of a raw vegetable diet with a complete stranger in the Green Fields then, frankly, there are less muddy ways to pass a weekend. But increasingly, Glastonbury’s focus on making the world a “saner, greener, healthier place” feels less a hippy ideal, and more aligned with popular culture – be it the rise of vegan diets or the enduring appeal of yoga and reiki.
Keen as I am to suggest that my day spent in the healing fields this year was a quest for deep spirituality and self-enlightenment, the truth is somewhat less valiant. Ending up in a central London hospital with shingles a week before you’re due to work Glastonbury with a right eye that resembles the innards of a hot cross bun, probably goes top of the list of my all-time festival vibe killers.
I’ve been practicing yoga for around two years – so my first stop was the yoga tent. I’m a yogi, I’ll fit right in, I tell myself. Approximately 10 minutes into the class, it becomes evident that this is “partner” yoga. As someone whose capacity for human contact from strangers is limited to the occasional brush of a newspaper from a neighbouring commuter on the Hammersmith and City Line, this is a worrying revelation. My first partner is Cat – who, thankfully, is lovely. We sit legs spread, looking into each others’ eyes, flexing and stretching. Lucy, Louise, Hannah and Helen (who lives in rural Thailand and practices yoga on her own, usually) are all added to the cast of strangers I pull, stretch and breathe against. In one particularly intimate moment, I realise I have my hands on a man’s bottom, my face inches from his perineum in a downward dog – and I’m not entirely sure we even swapped names.
I wander out, stretched and energised, bewildered at the sheer multitude of healing possibilities before me. Of the many extraordinary things about the healing fields is that all the 180 practitioners working here – from reiki experts to osteopaths, hypnotherapists to tarot readers – work on donation. One spiritual healer told me how she once spent two hours “working” on a man, for him to turn out his pockets to give her 57p. “I didn’t mind,” she beams. I raise an eyebrow. “No, really. It changed his life”.
A calm-looking lady spots me reading a leaflet on the porch of her tipi. Sarah Oldfield has been practicing Shiatsu, a traditional Japanese alternative therapy, since 2007. Her tent feels like a warm embryo against the battering rain outside. When she asks what’s troubling me and I reel off my anxieties and ailments with such loquacity, I worry she’s running out of notepaper. I half expect her to huff at the shopping list of problems I’ve given her, but she smiles and goes to work, using gentle massage and pressure application. It’s a subtle, but glorious, calm.
I bump into a friend hanging outside a Tarot tent who tells me the latest “buzz” in the healing world is sound therapy. I’ve missed the gong bath but she points me in the direction of a green tent promising sound baths. Megan and Oliver have been sound healing together for a year and a half. “Everything in existence is vibrating, so everything has its own sound,” Megan explains. “When you create harmonious resonances and frequencies, our body really understands that – you can help raise the cells in your body up to a healthier vibration.” It’s at this point, a concerned looking women raises a hand. “I’m just about to go and see Motorhead in a minute, though. What’s that going to do to my vibrations?!”
After a moment of reassurance, Meg and Oliver gather a pile of musical instruments. I feel I should mention that my general view of bongo drums is that anyone in possession of one in a public place should be issued with an Asbo immediately, but in this setting, the gentle patter is theraputic, almost trance inducing. Swishes and rattles and oms and and ahs surround us. At one moment a didgeridoo is definitely blown in my face, and – somewhat worryingly, I don’t even care. I drift off, awaking to the chime of a gong above my forehead, and realise that my cheeks are laced with tears. I ask Oliver about it afterwards. He tells me that gongs are incredibly powerful instruments. He even read somewhere that bigger gongs can leave the molecules around them vibrating for decades after they have been played.
I wander down an alleyway of tipis and spot a man leaving a tent with a luxurious looking bed with a pink fur throw. The rain starts beating down again and I’m genuinely concerned I might start crying again. A sign says, “Aura reading”. My chakras and I have never been acquainted, so I feel now is as good a time as any. I meet Helen, who trained as a medical doctor initially but has been healing since the 1980s. I have, she says, “a spiritual gift of being able to tell truth from lies”. I wonder if I perhaps shouldn’t have told her I was a journalist. “You could be a lightbulb for truth and justice,” she says. No pressure. My only barrier is hate. “Just let it run out of you,” she says. “Like menstrual blood.”
It’s still tipping down when I leave Helen’s tent, which I’m grateful for as I start crying again – after she gives me a hug. I walk, and my hot tears meet the cold rain. It’s not sadness – but a general feeling of overwhelm. A man with a beard not entirely dissimilar to Rick Rubin’s offers me a chia energy ball and I sit and eat it on the grass, contemplating what one healer, Jayne Tovey, had told me earlier in the day about how the fields get more and more powerful as the week goes on. “People used to think we were just wacky hippies,” she says. “But they’re are now waking up to the fact that there is more to life – they’re connecting more and more with well-being. You’ll be a convert after a day here.” Jayne – if you’re reading this, you got me. If anyone wants me tomorrow, I’ll be at the gong bath. Namaste.
