I have a famous bed. It’s a healing bed. All of my friends know about it. From successful motivational speakers to my best friends for decades, they come to me when they’re having a meltdown. I put them in my bed, I pull up the covers and I stroke their heads until they drop off to sleep. I don’t know exactly why they feel better when they wake up. It’s partially due to my soothing them but it also has to do with the fact that I treat my bed as a sacred space. When I need healing, the bed wraps its covers around me and gives me comfort in a world gone mad.
I wouldn’t call it my happy place. “Happy” is a sketchy word. There are no guarantees that we can get happy and stay that way. The word is mercurial as we shift from mood to mood. Rather I call my bed my peaceful place. Whether I’m happy or sad, at ease or angry, I want to be able to bring all of that to my bed where I can be honest about how I’m feeling and find some peace in truth.
No one stays happy all the time. If someone claims they do, the following true story defines what it means to be human and have a large range of emotions. It takes place in a spiritual retreat, supposedly a sacred space. A friend of mine, I’ll call him Edward,
went on the retreat that was run by a man called the Joy Guru. He only allowed joyful people in his retreats. If someone became upset or frightened or angry, he sent them packing.
There was a communal kitchen and Edward was on his way there to get something to eat when he arrived at the door and stopped. The guru was in the kitchen, making himself a sandwich. There was a dog in the kitchen and when the guru went to the refrigerator to get a bottle of water, the dog jumped up on his hind legs and ate the sandwich right off the counter. When the guru saw what had happened, he looked to his right, he looked to his left and when he was sure no one was watching, he kicked the dog.
Practicing honesty and seeing the truth as sacred would have allowed him to find room for all of his feelings. I try to search for a way to be honest and help myself calm down no matter what I’m
feeling. It’s about creating a space that invites and accepts all of our human emotions. That’s where my famous bed comes in. I lie back against a mountain of pillows and look around the room at my crystals, my wooden Buddhas and Quan Yin statuettes. They all make me feels safe.
You don’t need a large house or a large bed or a large anything. A simple altar with a favorite crystal in a small nook of your house will do the trick. It doesn’t need to be showy. It just needs to feel sacred.
I have a childhood memory about a boarding house in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, where we owned a summer boarding house. There were ten rooms, two cottages, a dining hall where the guests ate
and an annex with four more rooms. It had a white washed fence and a long front porch with side by side rocking chairs. It was called the Tide Rock House and it had a soul as ancient as the icy sea water. Houses with names often do.
We were just up from the beach and it felt like I was in a holy place when I climbed the rocks and poked my small fingers into the sudsy tide pools. I upset small fish, miniature crabs with transparent legs, shell chips and seaweed strands, colorful pieces of broken plastic and the occasional used condom that I mistook for jellyfish parts
One late afternoon when the sun was setting, I took home one of the shell specimens and put it on top of my wooden dresser. A tiny crab crawled out of the shell and scrambled the length of the creaky old dresser, scaled down the side and imbedded itself in a crack between two stuck drawers. My mother called me for dinner and when we were through, I went back to the dresser and the crab was gone. I figured it must have crawled away but I like to think that the Tide Rock House protected it until no one was around and somehow helped it get away.
That house was full of unusual things like a black pot belly stove and the ice man who delivered two huge blocks of ice with tongs and deposited them in the freezer on the back porch.When I was eleven, I had a crush on the teenager in the house next door and he once took me to a drive in movie. He cuddled up to me that night and I was thrilled and paralyzed.
I waited impatiently for memorial day when we opened the house for the summer. It was my placed of wonder. A place that welcomed me and seemed to wrap itself around me. It lives on in myv memory to this day as a sacred place and it brings me comfort to think about it. It lifts my heart and softens my mind so I can breathe deeply and see my blessings.
I’ve found a lot of places in my life that feel blessed. A mountain in the Philippines that my friends and I climbed at night to watch stars shooting through the atmosphere. Dancing to beautiful music on stage in a tutu and pick pointe shoes. Teaching a writing class and watching my students improve their writing and become more honest and authentic on the page.
When I look at the most sacred place in my world, it happens to be my famous bed. It reminds me to not dwell in the past, not to dream of the future but rather to concentrate my mind in the present moment.
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