Laundry Day

Probably we could cure most of the world’s angst and obesity if everyone had to do their laundry by hand. Even if you do a terrible job like I did, it is still hard work.

It was yesterday morning when I decided to take my first stab at laundry in India. I woke up at 3 a.m. after falling asleep in a strange nauseous deep-fried food buzz.  Or maybe it was a coma. Hard to say. My bed is so hard it’s like rolling around on a wooden foam roller all night. If I'm lucky, this will cure my i.t. bands. When I woke up, the fretting began. Deep-fried food frets. Femoral Acetabular Impingement Syndrome frets. Changing apartment frets. Backwards time zone frets.

After practice and two meltdowns on Facetime, I ventured out to get locate some coffee.  I have a little portable French press, but no coffee to make it with. Jois Coffee, where all the yogis buy their ground beans was closed. So I grabbed some coffee on the street. Here it seems that coffee is made with about one tablespoon of espresso and then a bunch of boiled milk and lots of sugar. The sugar to milk ratio is pretty high

“You have any with no sugar?” I asked.

“One moment.” They were about to boil some sugarless milk for me when I thought, the hell with it. It would make up for the low caffeine and tie me over until my landlady made chai for breakfast.

My house is easier to find now. On the corner of the street there is a home with a sign advertising “Positive Health Classes.” Although I have seen this same sign in a couple of places, this landmark does help.  Maybe you are interested in “Positive Health Classes.” They promise to “Add Life to Years.”

Positive Health Classes
Add Life to Years

When I got back to the apartment, Pushpa my landlady was standing at the balcony.

“I wait for you,” she said. “You lock-ed me.” Oops.  All the doors at Pushpa's house open and close with horizontal metal latches. The day before Pushpa had asked me to make sure that I latched the bathroom door when I was done. I guess I became overly diligent about doors and locked her in from the outside. Luckily, I had only been gone a few minutes.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said, shaking my head. There were about forty-five minutes before breakfast. Already I’d been awake for over five hours. It felt like years. The day ahead of me felt like years. With no positive health classes, how would I add Life to Years?



my mildewed yoga clothes and underwear

I hauled my mildewed yoga clothes and underwear to the corner of the balcony. Pushpa watched me as I dumped my clothes on the big square laundry stone. She frowned slightly as I bent forward awkwardly and ran water over a purple American Apparel t. shirt.

“It's making wet,” she said, pointing to my bright pink long flowy skirt. “In bucket.” So all the clothes went into the red bucket that I hadn’t noticed before. Water filled the bucket and then I pulled out the purple t. shirt again. wet t. shirt

wet t. shirt

“Hmm, hmm,” Pushpa mumbled as I tried to figure out where to put the soap.

 
All I had was Ivory Bar Soap. You have to rub some soap onto the stone and then rub the shirt over that. The scrubbing part is vigorous and rewarding and it makes lots of bubbles. I squatted the whole time which was wonderful for my pelvis and my bowel movements.   Definitely the process counteracts angst and obesity. First you rub soap onto your clothes. Some people who don’t want their clothes to smell like mildew leave their clothes to soak in a bucket of soapy water. This is probably an excellent idea. I, however, wanted to get it all over with and so I rinsed everything right away. Pushpa instructed me on how to lift the clothes up and down as I poured more water over it. I got a bit lazy and probably didn’t get all of the soap out. So if you see me at the shala and I’m a bit mildewed and covered with soap streaks, you’ll know why.

The End.

 

Obesity and Neurosis Cures on a String

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
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Our lives will never be the same

Now I am in Delhi
Brand New Mysore Clubs
 

Presents from my father

Before I left for India, my father asked me if I’d bought pressure socks yet.

“What are pressure socks?” I asked.

“They’re so your legs don’t swell up on the flight,” he said. “You’ll be in the air for eight, nine ten hours.”

Pressure socks were supposed to increase my circulation so that my legs would stay the same size. My father was very concerned. He mentioned the socks several times while I was visiting him in Ontario.

“I’m telling you, they make all the difference.”

“Huh,” I said. “Never heard of them.”

“All the stewardesses wear them all the time.”

“Okay.”

“Tell you what. I’m gonna get you some.”

I didn’t insist upon it, but a couple of days before my trip, the Boatman and I went to a Shopper’s Drugmart in Ontario to stock up on toiletries. In India, when your jetlagged, shitting buckets and homesick, I've heard it’s nice to have the shampoo you like. We saw the socks next to all the foot cream.  You could get them in black or beige, and they came up to your knees. They cost 26 dollars.

“Did your Dad get you those yet?” the Boatman asked.

“No.”

“Do you want to get them?”

“Well...” I decided it was a little pricey, just for socks. On our way out, we ran into my Dad and his girlfriend.

“We knew you’d be here,” my Dad said. “I’m gonna get you those socks.”

I decided on the black ones, the biggest lady’s size they had for my mammoth, size eleven feet. I tried them on in the bathroom stall at the Halifax airport. They looked amazing with my sneakers. I emailed my Dad a picture. He wrote, "Very nice. Will make you very secure."

The socks

Even though I took the socks off in London and forgot to put them back on, my legs didn’t swell up for the entire trip.

Besides my legs swelling up, my father is worried I’ll get malaria even though there is little to no malaria in Mysore. And he has read about other horrific mosquito illnesses. I had bought myself a little mosquito net jacket that I could wear over my head while I was sleeping.

“How are you going to sleep in that?” my father asked. No, this net jacket wouldn’t do. He came home from mountain equipment co-op with an enormous white mosquito net.

Wedding Mosquito Net

When you hang it from the ceiling, it looks a bit like a wedding veil. That’s nice for me since I will probably never have my own wedding veil. I hung it from the ceiling fan. It fell down around 2:30 a.m. In my next apartment, I’ll be able to hang it up better. But for now I should be fine. So far I haven’t noticed one mosquito.

I thought that these presents from my dad were quite sweet. He is coming to India in November and will be passing through Mysore to visit. Definitely he will be bringing his very own wedding mosquito net and of course, the socks.

The End.

So yah, I'm here in Mysore, very safe. Feel a little slow in terms of brain functioning, but better than too fast in terms of bowel functioning. I woke up at 3 a.m. this morning, which I thought was a big success. I am trying to get to know my neighbourhood. So far I have gotten lost every time. Now I have a map. Some of the streets have labels on them and some of them don't. The place where I am staying until the end of the month is on the map on a street with no label on it.  My goal for the day is to walk to the yoga studio and back without getting lost.  And I'm bringing toilet paper because I haven't yet figured out how they wipe their bum in India without getting everything soaked. Okay, off I go...

 

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook 
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
My $2.99 self-help book, I Let Go

More on Going to India:

Our lives will never be the same
Our lives will never be the same, part two
Laundry Day 

 

Our lives will never be the same, Part Two

So folks, today is the day.

Friday’s brilliant segment of the Vipassana Diaries was hijacked by my Twitter feed. I did a search for “Air France” to see how the strike was going. There wasn’t much there. One out of two flights were being cancelled. Pilots were threatening to extend the strike if unions couldn’t come to a resolution. Some travellers had pissed off things to say, although not as many as you might imagine.

Then I came across a Vanity Fair article called, “Should airplanes be flying themselves?” It was about Air France so I thought I’d take a look. And guess what? An Air France flight from Rio de Janiero to Paris crashed in 2009. I only let myself skim over it, but this was enough to make me reverberate and tremble. If my flight on Monday ran, which was only 50% likely, then well, imminent death for me.

Reverberate, reverberate.

I was sitting at Just Us Coffee. Everyone else was sipping their lattes, happy and chatty. My gluten free espresso chocolate chip cookie was all gone. Soon I would be too.

Reverberate, reverberate.

I called the Boatman. He didn’t answer his phone.  Probably he was doing something important at work.

Then I went outside and happened to run into a friend who was happy and surprised to see me since I was supposed to be in India. I walked her to work. And I calmed down.

The other night I was going on and on about the people with spinal cord injuries that I had seen at the bus station and/or seen on the Internet.

I was close to tears worrying about spinal cord injuries and what the man at the bus station and the man on the Internet were doing at this very moment.

“What if they’re all alone and they can’t move?”

“Babe, you’re freaking me out,” said the Boatman.

“I can’t stop thinking about this,” I said. “What should I do?”

“Well,” said the Boatman, “You’re a bit neurotic. You sound like Woody Allen.”

“What does neurotic mean anyways?” I told the Boatman that he should look it up in the dictionary.

This is what dictionary.com says

Neurotic

1.       Also called psychoneurosis, a functional disorder in which feelings of anxiety, obsessional thoughts, compulsive acts, and physical complaints without objective patterns of disease in various degrees and patterns dominate the personality.

2.       A relatively mild personality disorder typified by excessive anxiety or indecision and a degree of social or interpersonal maladjustment

The Boatman laughed and became extremely satisfied. Because it was so me.

Well, the Boatman’s neurotic darling is finally heading to India today!

Me and the Boatman on the Happy Stairs

Air France’s strike ended up being extended.

I tried really hard to stay really calm.

On Sunday morning, I woke up early and did 108 sun salutations for the Fall Equinox, which is sometime around now. Then I got on the phone with Air France.

They had a marvellous alternate itinerary that stopped in New York, Atlanta, and then Dubai before going to India. The customer representative said I’d be in the air for 21 hours. My father generously purchased me some magical circulation socks. Still, 21 hours sounded a bit hideous.
So I called the online travel agency to see if I could refund my ticket and get something better.

Not so much.  That last minute, the prices were pretty mediocre considering the amount of time I had to spend in Sri Lanka. Plus he was had to confirm details about the refund with Air France and he was on hold with them for over 45 minutes. Probably an hour and fifteen minutes in with him was when the first tears came.

I decided to try again with Air France. Maybe Dubai wouldn’t be so bad. Once my brother-in-law did a concert for a royal family in Dubai, and they gave him a really nice watch.

After centuries on hold, I asked if they could plug me in for the Dubai itinerary. The nice lady on the phone tried to, only the flight from Dubai to India wasn’t going through.

“I can’t get stuck in Dubai. My mother will lose it.”

She talked to her supervisor who suggested that maybe I take an Air Canada flight to Paris on Wednesday.

“And then what?”

“Well, maybe a flight will run to India. Half of our flights are running.”

No, no. This sounded like not a good plan. All of my flights so far had been cancelled. Now, more tears.

“I’m sorry, I just find this very stressful.”

The customer representative was very understanding. She said that it had been very stressful for many people. Maybe I wasn’t the first to cry on the phone.

I googled British airways and found a flight leaving Monday. I read it out to her.

I reverberated for approximately one more hour and forty-five minutes and then it was a done deal.

The Boatman was proud of me, generously praising me for my independence and for being a lot less hysterical than usual.

We are leaving for the airport soon.

Our lives will never be the same.

The End.

At Vipassana, the best part of every evening discourse was when the camera zoomed out and you could see Goenka’s wife, usually sitting in a chair. Behind her huge glasses, her eyes were always closed.

When the discourse was almost over, Goenka would do some of his melodic chanting. It was nice to see the chant come out of someone’s mouth. After the chant, Goenka would say, “take rest for about five minutes, then start again.”

The screen would switch to blue and huge ghetto letters read,

“May all beings be happy.”

I wish I had a similar screen for you. Instead I have this face. That fanny pack.

 

Okay, the Boatman is coming soon.
Good-bye.

Deep love.
The End.

Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook 
My $2 Self-Help Book: I Let Go

More from the Vipassana Diaries:

 

Our lives will never be the same

Last Practice Before Vipassana

Bus 

Day Zero

Food Belly

 

The Vipassana Diaries: Food Belly

A very long gong woke us up at four a.m.  I could hear a couple of my roommates groan and roll over. I ,however, rocked the wake-up. Four a.m. in Montebello was five a.m. in Halifax. Old hat for this neurotic Ashtangi.

The sad part about jumping out of bed first is that if you end up in the hallway next to the gong, it’s horribly abrasive. Better to lie in bed until the gonging subsides.

During Vipassana, I brushed my teeth more than I ever do. Before breakfast, and after. After lunch. Post nap. Everyone else seemed to enjoy brushing their teeth too, and sharing these moments in front of the sinks was the closest we got to a conversation.

For the first couple of days we were supposed to meditate on the breath below our nostrils. When I worked at the Montessori school, I used to try and do this during my breaks. Mostly I’d be so exhausted that I would just space out and fall in and out of sleep. Other times I would try and focus on my nostrils. I realize now that instead of feeling the sensation of the breath below them, I pretty much just meditated on the word nostrils.

Nostrils, nostrils, nostrils, thinking, thinking, thinking, oh no, don’t think, back to nostrils.

Nostrils, nostrils, nostrils…

The technique of observing the respiration below your nostrils is called, “Anapana.” Anapana is supposed to loosen the roots of the impurities at the depth of your mind. Examples of impurities are anger, depression, cravings and addictions.  I think one of my deep-rooted impurities is boredom. I was extremely bored.  I remember thinking, “This is so boring,” several hundred times.

At breakfast I decided that I would take this ten-day opportunity to go on vacation from caffeine. I used to be obsessed with quitting coffee, believing that my addiction represented an internal moral defect. After many miserable self-imposed caffeine fasts, I came to the conclusion that coffee is an excellent beverage and life is way better when you drink it. Coffee helps your mood and your poops. I will consume it for the rest of my life. Still, probably I hadn’t had a caffeine free day since 2011 and all they had at Vipassana was Maxwell House instant. I figured it might be a good time to re-set my nervous system.  Plus if I was all spaced out and snoozy, the meditation process wouldn’t be so traumatic.

It was an okay strategy.

I floated through the first morning in a bored, decaffeinated daze. During anapana, we were allowed to switch our positions as often as we needed to. This was good because I had been previously terrified that I would break my knees sitting cross-legged for ten hours a day. Later I would obsess relentlessly about the most sustainable posture, but for now I remained in a spaced out sleepiness, considering the breath below my nostrils every fifteen minutes or so.

Even though I was bored, I felt calm.

Well, this will be a nice relaxing snooze fest, I thought. Then we got to lunch.
There was pasta and a lentil tomato sauce, and rice, and the vast, abundant salad bar with a million toppings and delicious tahini dressing.

It was only 11 a.m. and besides tea and fruit at 5 p.m., this would be our last meal of the day.
Don’t worry, my hard core Vipassana friend from the day before had told me. We’re used to yoga.  Here we just sit. You don’t need as much food.

But despite the lack of physical activity, I knew that with my eating disorder history, the reduced eating schedule was a bit risky. Skipping meals and losing weight is not a big deal for many people. When they get back to their normal eating routines, their body adjusts. But for me, any kind of weight loss and fucking around with eating usually causes a sketchy head trip.  Determined that I wouldn’t lose weight and/or damage my psyche, I piled my plate high, only skimping on pasta, which remains an intermittently frightening food from my past life.

As soon as I sat down, I felt like I was going to cry. The decaffeinated snooze fest was over.  Now I was deeply ashamed of all the food I had taken. It was falling off my plate. I felt certain that all the girls around me were judging my greed and mess. They all seemed skinnier than me and they weren’t overcompensating the evening’s lack of dinner with massive quantities of food. And I felt distressed by the fact that I was eating according to ideas in my head, and not really because of how hungry I felt.

All this seemed like such a superficial thing to be going through at this magical retreat where I was supposed to transform into a whole new person. While other people were probably seeing flashy balls of light or visions of their past lives, I was having adolescent food angst.

Oh well. Not every revelation can be beautiful and deep.

That night, Mr Goenka provided a seemingly endless discourse about the perils and dangers of Day One. Some people, he warned, made the enormous mistake of filling their plates two times at lunch.

“Nothing doing,” he said, waving his hands. “You can’t meditate if you eat all that.”

He said that if you usually have two plates at lunch, you should switch to three quarters of a plate. Then a quarter of your stomach would be empty which would help with meditation.


Happy Goenka

Mr. Goenka looked as though he hadn’t endured a minute of adolescent food angst in his whole life. He was serene, jolly, and pleasantly chubby. Probably he could leave half of his stomach empty without suffering very much. As for me, I decided that I wasn’t going to hold back, despite the apparent dangers. I would do my best with the no-dinner thing, and if it got to be too much, I’d turn myself in and become an evening Peanut Butter Sandwich Person. 

The End/To Be Continued…

Other News:

As fate would have it, I'm not in India yet. Air France pilots are on strike, so I'm back in Halifax for a surprise week with the Boatman.

Here we are on the flight from Ottawa to Halifax.

Me and the Boatman. Dorky and delighted

I have to admit I was  kind of relieved when I got to postpone the three-month good-bye. So far our extra time together has been dorky and delightful. Hopefully by Monday, I'll be feeling more brave. Fingers crossed that everything's sorted out by next week!

Have to give a shout out to the Air France customer service representatives. They were immensely helpful in rescheduling my flight, and even provided me with a chunk of cash to compensate for my inconvenience and reimburse my extra flight here to Halifax. I guess they heard that I had this famous blog.



In the sky, on the way back to Halifax
 
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook 
My $2 Self-Help Book: I Let Go

More from the Vipassana Diaries:

Our lives will never be the same

Last Practice Before Vipassana
 

Bus 

Day Zero
 
Vipassana Diaries/Ashtanga Memoirs: You Cling To Things Until They Die (Ham Wraps, S.I. Joints Etc.)
Why I Like to Pee Outside

   

The Vipassana Diaries: Day Zero

At the centre in Montebello, we had to fill out a form verifying that we were at an adequate level of health. Once again, I had to fork over details on my previous eating disorder history. I became all red and flustered. Despite the doctor’s note I’d begged an oblivious Halifax doctor to sign, I was certain the organizers would decide that my prior crazy times made me unfit to complete the course.

On the back of the form I had to provide a short autobiography. I wrote that I was a writer and then proceeded to write the most boring story of my life I have ever come up with.

I was born in Kingston, Ontario. I had an active childhood. I studied creative writing and translation. Apparently, this didn’t improve my writing skills very much. I have extensive experience working with people with disabilities. Blah blah blah. Once I had an eating disorder but now I’m totally cured. Please let me do the course. The end.

I handed in my form and never heard about it again.

Before going to our rooms, we had to hand over all our electronics, phones, writing materials and objects of spiritual significance. Rebelliously, I clung to my hot pink fanny pack which the Boatman had bought for me as a going away present. Otherwise I broke no rules.

Me and my dorky fanny pack. My goal is to bring back the fanny pack during my trip to India. It cost 6 dollars at the Park Lane Mall, Spring Garden Road.

That night, we ate our last dinner for ten days. The Buddha never ate meals after noon and so now we were all going to try and be like the Buddha. New students were allowed to have fruit and tea at 5 p.m. but otherwise we were out of luck. On Day Zero, however, there was an enormous platter of hummus and raw vegetables and an abundant salad bar that reminded me of the buffet at the all-inclusive I’d stayed at in Mexico. I loaded up my plate to mountainous heights and sat at a table of girls who all looked under 25.

“There are a lot of cute guys over there,” said one skinny blonde girl. “I just love guys with long hair. She stood up and went to the hot drinks table where she stirred some instant Maxwell house coffee into a mug of hot water.

She can’t be any more than 21, I thought. “How old are you?” I asked when she got back.

“21,” she said.

After dinner, I was relieved to see a fellow Ashtangi from Montreal. She was a hard-core vipassana meditator, having completed 20 and 30-day sits in much more austere centres in South America. I ran up to her and hugged her, forgetting the rules that we weren’t allowed to touch. She didn’t mind.

We circled around the trails of the centre and she answered all sorts of questions. Her commitment to the practice was clear. She said there was no other kind of meditation like Vipassana. It totally transformed her life.  I love a hard-core practitioner, having just completed seven years of hard-core Ashtanga yoga practice myself. She was sitting this ten-day course as a pre-requisite for a 30-day course Brazil the following month.

In Brazil, everything was way less cushy than here in Montebello. They went days without showers and their beds were all squished together. There were no little shelves to leave your folded clothes and at each meal all they got were tiny handfuls of peanuts.

I felt mildly guilty about my massive pile of vegetables and my trepidation about missing ten days of dinner.

But not everyone can turn into a Buddha all at once.

At 7 p.m., the Noble Silence would begin. We were not even allowed to look up at each other’s faces. I would prove to be rather horrible at this.

After they explained all the rules, segregation of men and women began. No more cute boys with long hair to look at. We went to the meditation hall where we put together our draft configurations of cushions and prepared for our first meditation instruction. This began with piped in Pali chanting by S. N. Goenka. Each emphatic melodious phrase ended with a somewhat half-dead drone. Then there was a big pause. It seemed like maybe it was over, but oh no, on he went with the next line. On and on and on.



Mr. Goenka. Charming fellow, I would later discover

I found myself thinking of the 21-year-old blonde girl and her cute boys with long hair. I imagined everyone I knew coming across Goenka’s voice for the first time and had to repress some irreverent laughter. Had I known how little laughter was in store for me in the days to come, I might have done a better job savouring it.

The End.
(Stay tuned.)



Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook

Twitter: @mypelvicfloor

I Let Go by Erica J. Schmidt

More from the Vipassana Diaries:

Our lives will never be the same

Last Practice Before Vipassana

Bus
Food Belly
You Clings to Things Until They Die
Why I Like to Pee Outside

 

The Vipassana Diaries: Bus

To get to Vipassana, I had to take a bus from Montreal to Hawkesbury. You could tell who was going to Vipassana by their sleeping bags. Two people hadn’t bought tickets ahead of time and barely got a spot. I was relieved to avoid this last minute stress. Since it was my third time applying, I still had in the back of my mind that somehow it was still going to fall through. 

The girl beside me was going. She had her luggage on her lap. We chatted a little bit, about it being our first time. About having kids or not having kids. About having dogs or cats. About having partners. Then she fell asleep.

I went to the bathroom and I saw my bum in the mirror. It was full and white, with small zits on it. Bums and hands are only bums and hands because we call them that.

Everyone on the bus had a bum and hands. When I was little, I always used to think about this.

Think of all the bums in this room, I would think.

Back from the bathroom, I texted frantically with my friend Rhetta from Montreal. Boyfriend this. Yoga that. I kept postponing when I was going to turn off my phone. Just one more text. Finally I decided I should probably save some battery for when I got out.

The Montreal bus drove us to Hawkesbury. Hawkesbury seemed like a hole of a town. The sky in Hawkesbury did not look as beautiful as skies usually look.

I looked around and wondered if anybody here would be my friend if I met them somewhere else besides Vipassana. Soon it wouldn’t matter because we wouldn’t be allowed to talk. Besides my incessant hair twirling and fawn eyes, probably I was relatively ordinary looking. I was wearing a long black joe fresh skirt, a tank top, a jean jacket and birkenstocks. But I felt like I was the weirdest person there. And I felt lonely.

With small tears in my eyes, I called the Boatman one more time to say I love you. The Boatman said, oh yes, it is a bit sad, but you will be okay.

A tiny school bus picked us up to drive us to the centre. It didn’t seem possible that all of our luggage and bodies would fit. My obnoxiously enormous black suitcase went on first. I noticed a bald middle-aged man with a cane and a limp.

This might be hard for him, I thought.

Packed onto the bus, everyone opened the windows and everyone’s hair blew frenetically. I wondered if I knew what frenetic really meant. I worried if I’d said good-bye and I love you enough times to enough people. That is probably what people worry about as they’re dying. Saying I love you before they turn off their phones.

The End.




 

 

Erica (me), ink on paper, July 10, 2014 by the Boatman Follow the Boatman on TUMBLR: http://verysatisfied.tumblr.com   Follow me on Twitter: @mypelvicfloor My $2 self-help book Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook

 
The Vipassana Diaries: Day Zero
The Vipassana Diaries: Food Belly
Vipassana Diaries/Ashtanga Memoirs: You Cling To Things Until They Die (Ham Wraps, S.I. Joints Etc.)
Why I Like to Pee Outside

Erica (me), ink on paper, July 10, 2014

by the Boatman

Follow the Boatman on TUMBLR:

http://verysatisfied.tumblr.com

 

Follow me on Twitter: @mypelvicfloor

My $2 self-help book

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook

 

The Vipassana Diaries: My Last Practice

On my way to Vipassana, I stayed overnight in Montreal. I mustered up the courage to show face at Darby’s Mysore, despite the un-spectacularness of my current practice.

Although at first it was somewhat liberating to just show up, I still felt apologetic as I fumbled through modified lotus postures, and remained mostly upright during forward bends. Darby didn’t say much.

Last year I went to Montreal to practice for two weeks. My knee was much worse then and the whole thing was a struggle.

After practice one day, I blubbered about how I was way happier when my practice was way shorter. The primary series was too long, too painful.

“Well,” said Darby. “Yoga Asana is not so important. I used to think it was important. It is not so important. You work with those kids now. That’s important.”

Despite this, the past year I continued to cling to the time when practice was physically easier. Lusting after the days when I cranked myself through second series every morning no matter what. Dropping back to my ankles, the tears and the sweat. It all seemed so important.

I ran a number of experiments this year in attempts to rid myself of my injuries. Certainly there was some improvement, but often I pushed myself too hard too early in the morning. Then I’d spend the day grinding my joints together as I ran after little kids.  

In May, I was so fed up that I restricted myself to only standing postures for a month. I made up a bunch of routines based around the standing postures.  Practice became a lot more calming and grounding. I had a lot less pain. And yet, I was still totally obsessed.

It occurred to me that maybe after Vipassana, I could take the rest of the month off practice and arrive at Sharath’s a brand new beginner.

Oh hi. What’s the primary series?

Of course, I want some rigid formula, some clear plan. Stop completely for one month. Do two sun salutations a day. Visualize your practice with your legs up against the wall.  Why does everything have to be a thing?

Often you hear people say that they’ve let their practice go, they’ve lost their practice.

But where did your practice go? Where did you lose it? Why is practice only second series? Only lotus postures? Without packaging something half-ass into a beautiful sentence, can’t practice be bigger than whatever we’ve let go? Whatever we’ve lost?

Once I heard an interview with Geneen Roth, author of the book Women, Food and God. I read the book and it is much less hokey than you might think. Geneen believes that people’s food problems will never dissipate until they fully accept themselves just the way they are, with their thighs and their urges to empty pints of ice cream.

The interviewer asked her, “So you mean that if someone is 300 pounds and bingeing all day long, she should work on loving herself just the way she is?”

“Well, yah,” said Geneen. “What choice does she have?”

Being cruel to yourself until your body and your practice finally measure up is a horrible option.

Love the life and the practice that you have. What other choice is there?

The End.

Darby on the seven steps of meditation

Don't forget your sweet smile

 

Women, Food and God

By Geneen Roth

I'd recommend it for sure

 

Oh, speaking of books, I am now unemployed, so maybe I will start promoting my self-help book again. Proceeds go to chais in India.

Plus it has awesome pictures by Sara E. Enquist.

 

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, self-help book by Erica J. Schmidt

Our Lives Will Never Be the Same, Part One
Our Lives Will Never Be the Same, Part Two

The Vipassana Diaries: Bus
The Vipassana Diaries: Day Zero
The Vipassana Diaries: Food Belly
Vipassana Diaries/Ashtanga Memoirs: You Cling To Things Until They Die (Ham Wraps, S.I. Joints Etc.)
Why I Like to Pee Outside