Lying Prostrate in a Stranger's Dining Room

The studio lights at Yoga Flow are dimmed, drenching everything in the color of sunshine passing through honey. A row of circular, soft-gold and black gongs and thin, polished metal bowls cuts the room in half horizontally. The forespace is empty, but behind the instruments, thirty or so women and a sprinkling of men stretch on foam mats.

The burnished discs of the gongs–some the size of dart boards, others closer to archery targets–hang still in their frames. The gongs have been intentionally placed to project maximum sound toward those gathered for meditation on a Friday evening in this womb-like studio. Two stories below, pre-dinner pedestrians pass one another on Copeland Street.

Though we have all gathered for instruction, the assembled don’t feel like classmates. As a group, we emit a gentle pulse, like a church congregation, or visitors to a shrine or burial site. We speak in hushed tones or hold our tongues.

I unroll my mat and place the foam block I took from the side wall, at the hostess’ recommendation, placing it where I will rest my head. My group arrived just minutes before the session was scheduled to begin. The floor is crowded with bodies. All but one of the women I’ve come with scatter, finding their own slices of empty, hay-colored hardwood, arranging themselves for the meditation that will soon begin.

Nina stays near me. She’s the only one in the group that I know, and the planner of this outing meant for her social worker colleagues. I’m the beneficiary of a last-minute cancellation. A fortunate replacement.

Nina arranges her mat and block by mine; we lay back on the hardwood floor as instructed, pulling blankets over our shoulders. I regret wearing cigarette jeans and a heavy sweater, my inexperience on full display.

But my clothes, and my heightened awareness of their inadequacy, prove to be inconsequential obstacles. The gongs and bowls penetrate.

“Close your eyes and place your arms at your sides,” our guide begins. “Relax your legs and allow your feet to turn outward.” She explains that she’ll begin the session by talking us into a meditative state. She’ll direct our minds inward, away from the nearness of heads that are inches from our feet, feet that are inches from our heads, and hands that could grasp ours for reassurance or pleasure. “After a while, I’ll stop talking and we’ll begin sounding the gongs.”

Good. Do that.

Her lilting voice, its slow pace, distracts me from the sound bowls’ gentle pinging and humming. I throw some “get this show on the road” energy her way. I’m ready to sink into the low tones of the gongs like I would sink into the massage table under the warm, kneading hands of a masseuse. I expect I might slip into full darkness, an easy sleep.

Baaarrrrrrnnnnnnng.

Low and incredibly loud, the first gong vibrates. A quivering arrow of sound. An invisible band of air, expanding in concentric circles and reverberating off the walls, off me.

Bonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng.

The intensity and magnitude of sound is startling. I absorb it.

Once the gongs begin, the room is not quiet, the air not still, for the remainder of the session.

The sound tunnels through my ears into some secret recess in my subconscious. Colors begin to seep out of this place. Yellow grows like a puddle of watercolor paint on the periphery of something in the distance, something to mentally move toward. Blues and purples bleed into space and evaporate. It’s hard to hold the images that wax and wane, pulsing nearer and farther with the movement of the soundwaves.

It is a dream and a journey and neither dream nor journey.

Not long ago, I read a collection of short stories by Kevin Brockmeier. The top half of the book jacket’s cover has two pairs of empty shoes on a hardwood floor. A pair of men’s leather work boots. A young girls’ soft black leather shoes—Mary Janes, perhaps. The boots belong to the book’s main character, Christopher Brooks, the shoes to his seven-year-old daughter, Celia, who went out to play in the yard one spring day and disappeared.

Brockmeier’s collection is called The Truth About Celia, a novel, but even that is something of a fiction. The character Brooks is an author, and the reader is supposed to accept that he, not Brockmeier, is the author of The Truth About Celia.

Like many books by authors who have published before, the prefatory pages to The Truth About Celia contain a list of Brockmeier’s previously published books and his note of thanks to those who helped him publish this one. Unlike most books, these pages are then followed by a list of Christopher Brooks’ previously published works, which include such titles as Metaphysical Puzzleland and The Golden Age of Jumping (stories), and his dedication of The Truth About Celia to “Wednesday, December 6, 1989.” Following is a note from Christopher Brooks, in which he explains his wish for and disappointment over how his book turned out. He writes, “I think I believed that by writing [these stories] I could rescue or resurrect my daughter, that the fact might reconstruct her as she used to be, and the speculation might call her back from wherever she is today. It is not the book I hoped it would be.”

I try to relinquish myself to the power of the gongs’ soundwaves, to push deeper inward. At the same time, I try controlling where my mind is going, what I am experiencing—this feeling of being on the edge of some understanding. Of breaking through.

But my neck. This block. I should have laid flat, without my head at this angle. This stillness is becoming intolerable. I raise my hand to my neck and slowly slide the block out, careful not to make much noise. Unhinging my neck makes it worse. I try to recapture comfort, reenter the meditation. My jeans shush against my mat. People around me begin to shift. I’m certain it’s my fault.

How much longer? It’s just an hour, right? Feels like an hour already.

If I can’t resume my meditation, I want to stand up and stretch. After what feels like fifteen minutes, but is probably more like five, our guide begins to talk. Gongs give way to sound bowls. I can move without worrying about distracting everyone around me.

We collect our belongings, return our blocks, and exit Yoga Flow. The inaudible remnants of soundwaves escape into the night, slipping into the shoulder-bags of passing pedestrians, rolling over the cars lined up at the intersections, entering the shops across the street.

Nina, her social worker colleagues, and I settle around a table at Cozumel with margaritas and beers. We pass chips, guac, and salsa and talk about how surprisingly loud the gongs were. It’s the only opinion we share.

I marvel at the gongs’ effect. How their sound seemed to take up physical space, to push up against and through me, a welcome invasion. I regret losing focus, and I can’t wait to try it again.

“Really?” one of them asks.

“I didn’t like it,” they say. They might have been uncomfortable. Or fallen asleep. They just weren’t into it. And I wonder if it’s like having your cards read or your fortune told. If it only works for those who not only are searching, but are also open to finding or being misled.

I’ll definitely do it again.

Back home, I start scouring the internet like an addict looking to score, but nobody is peddling my elixir.

On Christmas Eve, I come downstairs dressed in wool slacks and a blouse. “I’m going to mass,” I tell Mark. It’s the first time in at least five years.

“You are? Why?”

Because I’m searching.

ↈ

Months pass. Periodically, I Google “gong meditation” and “sound meditation.” I check the calendars on yoga and wellness studios near me. I make plans with a friend to drive to Bedford Springs for an overnight getaway and search for gong meditation along the route between Pittsburgh and Bedford. I’d make the stop.

I search my phone for apps. Dozens promise deep relaxation and restful sleep delivered on the crests ocean waves, thunderstorms, gentle spring rains, birds calling through the leaves of rustling trees. But I’m not trying to fall asleep. I’m trying to wake the dead. It’s been months since my father-in-law died, and our world still feels like a slightly imperfect replica of our former reality.

One meditation app offers a guided experience accompanied by Tibetan singing bowls. I connect my earbuds to my phone; they are a stethoscope that will connect me to a place beyond my understanding or imagining. The guide talks while the bowls hum. She starts me on a journey. I slow my breathing, mentally ascend a mountain and look out over the expansive valley below. Over and over, I release my worrisome thoughts into the valley, but never reach my prior meditative state. Mostly, I fall asleep.

Then one day, I find something—Rooted in Sound—which offers sound-based meditation using bowls, gongs, bells, the works. The address is relatively close, 25 minutes. I book a session and stack my pillow and blanket by my front door.

ↈ

The GPS directs me to a residence in Highland Park. Porch lights and lamp posts cause the snow to sparkle on the sidewalk in the clear night. I sit in my car and study the quiet neighborhood. Nobody stirs inside their homes. Nobody is on the street to see me enter this home meditation studio.

I walk to the porch. It’s cluttered with old furniture, pots, watering cans. I peek through the window to the left of the front door into a sitting room with a couple of drab-colored, well-worn couches arranged in an L shape in front of a brick fireplace, reflecting the design choices of a college-aged male.

Beyond this room is a dining room where nobody can dine. Two massage tables occupy most of the space. I spot a variety of waxy-leaved plants. There’s a gong and some other percussion instruments on the floor. Without knocking, I leave the porch and return to my car.

Is this safe? I really want it to be.

A woman who can’t be more than 25 years old walks past the passenger side of my car. She’s carrying a pillow. Without hesitation, she knocks on the door of Rooted in Sound, and when a man answers, disappears inside.

I text my husband. It’s in a house. I provide the address. I should be done in an hour, but if you don’t hear from me, you know where to tell the police to start looking. I hit send and silence my phone.

ↈ

Inside, the girl is removing her coat and shoes. I do the same, and Wyatt leads us to the dining/meditation room. He explains how we will spend the next hour and invites us to choose whether we’ll begin by lying face up or face down. The woman, I’ll call her Josie, says face down. We climb on the tables, and I ask myself why I’m following her lead. I’m clearly far older and wiser. But I turn and fit my face into the donut-shaped headrest at the top of the table, spinning a scenario in which Josie and Wyatt are accomplices in my murder.

Wyatt strikes a tuning fork by my left ear and behind my head to my right ear. It reminds me of an auditory hallucination I had the first time I took mushrooms in college: haircutting scissors in surround-sound. My heart is pounding. I wonder if Wyatt can see it through my shirt. The top of my head is directed toward what I guess to be Wyatt’s kitchen. There’s a dog barking somewhere beyond the kitchen door, perhaps locked in the basement. I hear the soft thuds of footfalls overhead. A roommate?

Why am I lying here? Face down? He could stab me or smash something into my head. Despite this awareness, I don’t leave. I’m too polite. And nearly 40 years of being nice is a hard habit to break. I won’t offend Wyatt by peeling myself up from this massage table and running back out to my car. Instead, I settle into the vulnerable position I have put myself in. I accept that a combination of good manners and grief might be my cause of death, that a tuning fork might be the instrument.

As the humming fades to silence, I sense Wyatt near my feet, reaching for something. He strikes the gong, and the yellow begins to spread.

Can You Stand The Friend

Laundry Day