If a Little is Good, More is Better: Meditating on a Bed of Nails By Laura J. Oliver

My friend Brian meditates five hours a day while running a successful multi-state business. We started as editor /writer and are now Zoom friends. We’ve never met.

Brian texts me that there is only one guaranteed path to self-love, the basis of all spiritual growth, and it is not relationship. (My theory.)

Which you do with others.

Which involves food, wine, and eye contact.

It’s meditation. Which you do alone.

“You do you,” I text Brian. I add a happy face emoji, then delete without sending.

Because I’m joking. And intrigued. I do get it that to love yourself, you need to be in control of your mind monkeys (those things you regret, those fears you imagine), which means you must be present. But meditating five hours a day? How about five minutes, I ask Brian? I can do five minutes.

Well, now, that’s a lie, he says.

Brian sends me a comprehensive history of Hinduism to encourage me on my limp to enlightenment. He warns that it will only make sense if I’m ready for it. This kind of bothers me. I’m deeply resistant to “us and them” organizations and ideologies. I want to be picked so I’m part of “us,” then I immediately drop out because I’m uncomfortable not including “them.” Ask those in my brief stint in a college sorority.

It also reminds me of being a teenager and my best friend telling me she had discovered the secret of life. To life! The answer was encoded in the lyrics of a John Denver song. We were all over John Denver at the time– Rocky Mountain High Colorado! Who hasn’t belted out the chorus in the car?

Oh.

And neither have I.

She wouldn’t tell me what the secret was. I had to come to it on my own. So, I internally hummed along. He was born in the summer of his 27th year…(we were 17, but okay), coming home to a place he’d never been before… I started to guess—wildly. Love? Is love the key to every door? We were on the phone. Forgiveness? Compassion?

The key, it was revealed since I couldn’t figure it out, is self-love. That club I’m still trying to get into.

In meditation, (sigh, thank you Brian), I see that the greatest obstacle to self-love is self-forgiveness. My immediate thought is that I don’t have that authority, but here’s why this is so important. People I trust assure me that if I don’t love myself, I can’t truly love anyone else. My love is a facsimile. A knockoff. This is a huge worry. As if all the people I think my love warms and protects, have been out there in 30-degree weather without coats. And I certainly feel like I love others, including you. But maybe it’s imposter love. Counterfeit.

So, to that end, and based on Brian’s claim, I decide to make a concentrated effort to find self-love in the now. I order a lotus mat to enhance my meditation experience. It’s made of needles reminiscent of the mats on which yogis meditate. I ordered it because my mother taught me that if a little is good, more is better, that suffering makes you a better person, and that if there are two ways of doing something, you should always choose the hardest way. Check, check, and check. Meditation is enlightening? Let’s do her on a bed of nails!

I take my mat from its packaging and unroll it on the living room rug while Lester Holt explains all the extremely bad news, which usually begins with the weather somewhere else and goes downhill from there. On my back, I arrange myself gingerly on my needle mat in my jeans and a sweater. It’s a weird sensation and not too bad, so I lift the back of my sweater to get the full effect.

 Aie yi yi. I can see why this may work. You’re in enough pain that when you get off the thing you feel good! You could also hit yourself in the head with a hammer to achieve this effect.

I leave my needle mat at home and take my conventional mat to a yoga class. When the teacher says softly, “And if this is available to you, bend your left foot behind your head while balancing on your elbow,” I’m going for it—inevitably attempting the most challenging option (thanks, Mom). I’m also glancing around the room to see if I’m doing this correctly because sometimes I think we are all still bent over with our foreheads on our knees, only to realize everyone else stood up two minutes ago.

I come home thinking about that phrase, “if it’s available to you.”  Is self-love available to me? I’ve been trying for so long. I can remember a time when I was very young, maybe five when I would scrub away the summer day as the call of the whippoorwill drifted in through the window screen. I’d slip on my pale blue shortie pajamas, then run downstairs to tell my mother that I was brand-spanking new, ready to start my life right then and there. I felt like a rocket on the launch pad, powered up and prepared for lift-off without coordinates.

I was so sure, in those moments, looking up at her at the kitchen sink, hands in the dishwater, watching the sun set over the pasture, that I could do and be anything in the world if I just tried hard enough. The coordinates were for whatever I was to become, and she was my witness.

I thought then that everything was a matter of choice and work. Now, I suspect some kind of divine osmosis is necessary—some kind of surrender to a power that can love me more than I love myself. But. I am still my mother’s child.

If being able to truly love others requires a near-impossible posture held on a bed of nails, I’m going for it.

Stand by, beloveds, stand by.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.