OYM Day 62: Susceptible to Cults — Part 1

I had just put my daughter down to sleep and looked at my watch. I was going to be late for my “me-time.” I threw on some clothes and sprayed some rose water on my face. Apparently it was hair oil and I immediately regretted not wearing those glasses I spent so much money on. I headed to the kitchen and reached for a Ball jar and felt like I had officially crossed the threshold of poser-dom, but I truly can’t stand the way luke warm water tastes out of a plastic bottle. I smelled the jar before filling it up. A hint of pickles, but hell, I love pickles. It would work.

I pulled up to the meditation center, sandwiched between a smoke shop and a reptile supply store. My nerves always kicked in as soon as I put the car in park. This was my tenth or so time coming to this place for yoga, meditations, and workshops, but I was still very much a stranger here.

I walked into the lobby and people were hugging, asking about weekend trips, if they had tried the tea recipe for sinus congestion, if they planned to come to the full moon circle next week. I stood near the back and fidgeted with my dumb jar, rubbing my neck as if to say I was sore from all the yoga and spiritual practice I had going on. The door to the studio opened and I exhaled in relief to lay on my mat and disappear into the dimly lit room.

I arranged my space among 20 or so other participants in today’s reiki healing. I have a few friends that are reiki practitioners and have had a reiki healing before, on a whim, but it’s nothing I took seriously. But I was feeling desperate. Desperate to experience something, some sort of sign, and have it stick. I wished it would come to me like a flash of white light and say “you’re in the right place, you’re doing the right things, it will make sense soon, don’t get bangs…”

Instead it came to me in the form of a very tall, tanned, short-haired woman named Betsy. She wore sky-blue yoga pants and a white gauzy tank top that accentuated her coat hanger collar bone. She looked to be in her late 40’s and her eyes said something along the lines of “you WON’T believe what happened to me yesterday!”

Betsy climbed atop a small stage at the front of the studio. She sat on a white fur rug and spoke into a small microphone perched at the edge of the platform. There were crystals, feathers, bowls of water, and flowers on any side of her, against the background of a giant, golden gong. I imagined myself up there, tanned like her, with a nice basting of coconut oil on my skin, telling a crowd of strangers how to breathe properly. Imagine, they’ve been doing it all wrong! This whole time! It looked like Betsy took supplements or lived off of raw ginger, because the whites of her eyes were sparkling like lakes and she radiated an energy of someone that only needs 2 hours of sleep a night. I was almost jealous. Almost.

Why? Because I was tired. Dead tired. I wore black worn out yoga pants that I needed to pull up every 30 seconds and a white top I had picked up at Marshall’s for a few dollars. There wasn’t a rule that you had to wear white, but everyone did. Is this code for something, other than “this is a cult?” Just curious. I had my hair pulled back in a braid and I could feel it pulling my forehead taut, producing a small, throbbing pain behind my much neglected eyebrows. My nails were bit down to the cuticles and, unlike Betsy, my diet consisted of whatever my 2 year old didn’t eat. But who cares! I drink from a jar!

Betsy introduced herself and mentioned that there was 1 more spot left in the group of members that were headed to an ashram in India next month. I imagined a caravan of sunburned white people in t-shirts that said stupid things like “spiritual gangsta,” gagging at the site and smell of small children bathing and washing their clothes amongst the plastic rubbish of the Ganges River. After a few more minutes of trying to sell that last spot, Betsy told us about her weekend.

“I went to tea at a friends house and she had just adopted the cutest dog. I mean, the cutest. Don’t you guys just love dogs? And how they can look into our eyes and see us for the beings we really are? How they can just strip away those facades we’ve created, and peek into our souls and smile? Gosh, I just love dogs.”

I had about zero things in common with Betsy. She talked fast and was excited about practically everything, it seemed. Her hands moved around her face as she talked, like she was swatting a swarm of bees or conducting a tiny, tiny orchestra. Her legs were as thin as my upper arm. She probably had a cabinet full of tumeric and a regular colonic. I was aware that I was judging her, hard, but I knew I was just annoyed at seeing someone experience a level of happiness I had not known for quite some time.

She asked us to go around the room and introduce ourselves. She wanted us to say our name, tell us if it was our first time at a reiki circle, and share something that made us feel deeply. And if you can believe it, Betsy went first and she told another story about a dog.

I did what most people do while others are talking and thought about what I was going to say. I stopped thinking about my answer, periodically, when someone would say something really bananas.

One woman was swimming at the YMCA and saw a mother helping her handicapped child wade in the water. She said she cried at the site of the child and wanted to give her a hug. She was sad when the mother said no and then felt so ashamed for asking that she started to sob uncontrollably and had to leave. I imagined her hugging the child anyway, without asking, and feeling sad when the child couldn’t just get up and walk away afterwards.

A man shared that he recently saw a commercial of neglected dogs and cats in cages and it made him teary eyed. I wondered how in the world he was just seeing this commercial for the first time.

Another woman shared a story that she had recently lost a good friend to cancer. I was noticing a trend of people sharing really sad stories instead of happy, and I was going to share a story of getting a flat tire recently and how comical the screw looked, jutting out of my tire, but it just needed a patch and the guy at the shop did it for free and told me to just repay the favor to someone else. This clearly wouldn’t do! I imagined them kicking me out of the reiki circle for not feeling deeply enough.

The man next to me was just wrapping up his introduction. He was 47, it was his first time at reiki, and the last time he felt deeply was last week, when he found out his wife was having an affair with his best friend.

I immediately forgot my tire story and wanted to know all the details. His eyes brimmed with tears and I took comfort that my life could be much worse. Don’t worry, I already know that this makes me an awful person. I repositioned myself to get a better look at this man, clearly in pain, and bam. Glass shattered and eyes turned in my direction.

“Oh goodness,” Betsy yelped. “Is that a jar?”