When I was little, I would lie in bed and move it around the room.
I think I was about seven when I started. Everyone else had gone to bed. I hadn’t wanted to, so I lay with my eyes closed and imagined looking down at myself from somewhere near the ceiling.
From there, I could turn the bed and put it against another wall.
I would return to that image again and again, until I could feel myself lying in the new position. Then I would test it.
Where is the door?
With my eyes still closed, I pointed.
When I opened them, I was shocked. The door was somewhere else.
It took a little time to get my bearings, the way it does when you wake from a dream and the room around you hasn’t quite become your room again. I could see where the door was, but I could still feel where it should have been.
Then I would close my eyes and do it again.
I’ve been thinking about those nights lately, trying to remember where my work began.
The decision to study hypnosis is easy enough to locate. I signed up. I began learning. But then I remember that child in bed, discovering how completely an imagined room could replace the one around him.
Music goes back even further. The first song I learned on guitar was “House of the Rising Sun.”
I learned drums in the back seat of our Colt Vista minivan. My dad would be wailing away on the dashboard to Led Zeppelin, and I’d follow along on my legs.
For years, when someone asked what I played, I would say guitar, drums, piano.
Now I usually say crystal bowls, gongs, and other resonant instruments.
The first time I played a full set of bowls, I was surprised by how comfortable I felt. I was more at ease with them than I was with the guitar I’d been playing since childhood.
There was so much to learn, and I wanted to learn it. But sitting among those instruments already felt normal.
I could call buying my first bowl the beginning. Except something had made me want to buy it. And something before that had made me listen.
Now I sit among those instruments every week. People come in, settle themselves, close their eyes. I begin to play.
Often, before I begin, I haven’t noticed anything I particularly need. But I hear every sound along with everyone else. When it’s over, there’s a lightness I couldn’t have known to ask for beforehand.
Sometimes I call it mental flossing. You don’t always notice what was there until afterward, when you think, oh, I’m glad I did that.
I may still be tired. I may want to go straight to bed. But there’s a subtle clarity, a sense that things are moving a little more freely.
I feel it while I’m still sitting among the bowls.
When I bought my first bowl, I couldn’t have known who would eventually be in the room listening. Or how I would feel sitting there afterward. I wanted to hear what I could play.
I keep looking back for the decision that brought me here. Each time I think I’ve found it, I remember something earlier.
Before the bowls, a guitar. Before that, my dad’s hands on the dashboard, mine on my legs.
And somewhere in those years, a child lying awake with his eyes closed, waiting until he was certain before pointing toward the door.