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