How I am violent, by Erica J. Schmidt

Since May, I have been taking an online course called, Embodying Ethics and Vows. It is with Michael Stone and Elaine Pierce. This week, our assignment was to write about how we are working with the precept of not causing harm (ahimsa) in our lives. Here's what I got:

How I am Violent, by Erica J. Schmidt

Instead of non-violence, I am thinking about violence. This makes me think of my relationships, especially with Simon and with my body, but with the Boatman too. Everyone saves their violence up for someone, for something. Actually, I have no idea what everyone else does.

It is hard not to tell the same old story over and over again. The story of Simon, my ex-boyfriend who I fucked at the Granola Party, on the biodegradable yoga mat. I was really drunk, and he wasn’t. Perhaps this should have been the last time. Instead, there was a big saga of alcohol, vomit, both passionate and ambivalent sex, and name calling. We wrote all this down in letters that were supposed to be published in brilliant books that were supposed to allow me to quit my three and a half low-paying jobs.

Simon used to say that I was like an eight-year-old sore loser tennis player. And I was always losing the match and so being with me was unbearable. He didn’t understand how the Boatman was able to stand me. Simon was probably more right about this than I was when I wrote,

“Sometimes I think that it would kind of be ideal for you to die.

Then our book would be a huge success.  I could feel somewhat sorry for myself, because a guy I fucked died and that is always traumatizing.  Everyone would look at me with odd sympathy. Especially if you committed suicide.  The sympathy would be immense.  Oh poor poor, Erica.  You slept with a sick and twisted soul.  Scarred forever.  How terrible.”

Highly mediocre writing, and unkind. This was from the second volume of the Little Savage and the Hermit. I wasn’t really into writing this book. Simon wanted the plot to be about how I finally got an orgasm. I felt like this was a dumb plot.

I am not the reason Simon jumped off his apartment building. I can just hear him say, “I would never jump off a building for you, you stupid fucking cunt!” His voice carries a tinge of love.

Simon’s most recent girlfriend gave me pictures and memorabilia from the funeral. When I first put the pictures on my meditation alter, I told myself that after a week, I was allowed to take them down. It has been awhile. They are still there. One of his photos is in a disposable coffee cup that is covered with the stream-of-consciousness poem I wrote during my French Literature Class in 2009. Simon kept this cup all the way until he died.  Those cups don’t biodegrade.

The alter, with spectacular lighting.

Simon once said that based on a study they did on rats in the 1970’s, I will never ever get cancer. The rats who expressed their stress by freaking out didn’t die or get any diseases. At this rate, I will live until I’m 98.

Not every day can be fulfilling and lucrative and productive. Some days are for melting down. Yesterday was a meltdown day. It was the first time I had woken up at 5 a.m. for a while. That could have caused the meltdown. I also don’t think I ate properly the day before. All the trivial and banal things tend to matter. Alas. I was stressed because I had this assignment to write, and Thursday is also blogging day. I thought that maybe I could combine the two activities, although I wasn’t sure whether or not the world should know that I told Simon it might be better if he died. As a creative practice, I have vaguely committed to myself and my four and a half fans that I will blog every Monday and Thursday. It started off being fun. Now I am starting to crap out.

Writing, with all its potential for redemption can also be violent.  Same thing goes for meltdowns.

My favourite person to have a meltdown with is the Boatman. No one can console and contain my eight-year-old sore-loser-tennis-player-self better than him. Plus I don’t really want to really want to impose this self onto anyone else. Some friends say that I should limit my contact with the Boatman. Otherwise, how will I possible get over him, move on. The idea of getting over anyone is so silly.  How can we possibly get over anyone?

Well, I suppose I am over the Vegan Life Coach. God bless the Vegan Life Coach, and his spirulina powder.

The Boatman and I talk once or twice a week. I try to make sure each time is not a meltdown. I try to ask him about his life. That was one of my goals when I began the ethics course. To ask people about their lives.

Yesterday, I called the Boatman in tears. “I can’t keep calling you like this. I will keep doing this forever.” For the rest of my life, for the rest of the world, I will compartmentalize myself to resemble a manageable and acceptable human being. Then when the eight-year-old tennis player appears, I will excuse myself to call the Boatman. I’ll be eighty years old, forty-nine years into a marriage, with seventeen grandchildren. Some blogging drama will emerge. “Excuse me, honey,” I will say to my geriatric husband. “I need to melt down to the Boatman.” The Boatman will be eighty-eight.

“It’s okay,” the Boatman told me yesterday as I fretted and wept about my lack of meltdown autonomy. “You can just call me.” Maybe they can make a special Boatman Meltdown App.

As for my body, well, I cannot believe the violence I have imposed upon it. Sri W. Ham Wrap was right. My yoga practice was super violent, and  I cling to things until they die.

People always say, “My poor body,” and/or “My body is not happy with me,” and/or my body is angry with me. I know what they mean, but I wonder who they are talking about.

Or what about, “my back was killing me?” My back was killing me the day I went to meet Simon’s girlfriend. Earlier I had spent two hours on my bike, to visit a friend. Now I was walking. I felt that if anything in my clicky, crooked eighty-year-old spine were to shift .035 mm the wrong way, the whole thing would surely collapse. Someone would have to wheel me and my body away.

"Jesus," I thought. People think about Jesus when their backs hurt. I remembered listening to Ashtanga teacher Tim Feldman talking about his herniated discs. He could barely move, but he thought about his guru, Pattabhi Jois, who said, “You taking your yanus.” So Tim started squeezing his anus like nobody’s business. Somehow this helped. Seemed a bit simplistic to me, or rather, perhaps too complicated. But what else could I do? As I walked, I brought my awareness to my anus and pelvic floor. I didn’t squeeze, I just thought about it. I considered how it was all connected to my feet that were touching the ground. And how my sitbones were also somewhat connected to my nostrils. And how the crown of my head sort of balanced on top of everything. There was still pain, but by the time I arrived at Simon’s girlfriend’s house, it felt like maybe things had shifted 0.035 mm away from me being in a wheelchair.

It is a good idea to try and keep your body happy.

This afternoon I’ll be taking a stab at my dream job. I am going to help a three-year-old learn how to use the potty. Very little is more grounding than helping someone else to take a shit.

The End.

The cup with the biodegradable poem on it
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My name is Erica, and I love coffee
Simon Girard, 1979-2015
The Benefits of an Ashtanga Yoga Practice, Part Two
Not Separate From All that Is 
The Real Me 

Michael Stone Teaching




Simon

Not Separate From All That Is

Michael Stone translates, Ahimsa, the first yama in Ashtanga Yoga as, “Recognizing that I am not separate from all that is.” Other people translate it as “non-violence.”

On Friday, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the young men responsible for the Boston marathon bombings was sentenced to lethal injections. Dzhokar Tsarnaev, his older brother and accomplice in the crime is already dead. He was shot in the man hunt. At the time of the bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was 19, and his brother was 26.

When I first heard the news, I felt really uncomfortable about it. My second feeling was relief that I’m not American, and so somehow I hold zero responsibility for how the trial turned out. As though all the other Americans are responsible. The logic was ambiguous.

I don’t know how it feels to lose my legs or someone I love because of something someone else did. I have a deep, unyielding fear of losing my legs. In the past, my politics have ended with potty training and pubic hair. But nineteen years old seems really young.

When I was fifteen years old, I spent about a month in an adolescent psych ward. It was run by a monstrous psychiatrist named Dr. Roberts. My mother brought me to Dr. Roberts because I used to eat packages of Ex-lax to complement my extensive exercise routine and other questionable weight-loss strategies. Ex-lax tastes like the most mediocre chocolate bar you have ever consumed. The other down sides to laxatives is that they don’t tend to make you very skinny, and they can really fuck up your electrolytes. Plus shitting your pants on the treadmill kind of disrupts your workout objectives.

Anyways, after checking my blood and heart rate, Dr. Roberts screamed at my mother that laxatives were extremely dangerous. She’d discovered that I had an arrhythmia and she wanted me hospitalized immediately.

At first I wasn’t even allowed out of bed. To this, I did not behave gracefully. I screamed and cried for three days straight, begging them to let me out. The muscles I’d developed from my multiple-hour exercise routine shrank from hysteria, anxiety and bedrest. I was convinced that I didn’t belong in the hospital. I had nothing in common with the other crazy teenagers on the ward. My first roommate was this sickly, yellowy looking 14-year-old girl from Sharbot Lake.

“I see dead people,” she told me.  One of my first out-of-bed privileges was going to school with the other patients. (I almost said inmates.) School was the kitchen table, about 100 metres down the hall from my room. Mary, the cheerful nurse with long horse-like hair, flowy skirts and bright red lipstick pushed my wheelchair into the kitchen. Altogether there were five of us. Me, Jenn, Curtis, Nathalie, and Steve. My roommate who saw dead people didn’t come.  Everyone was supposed to try and get caught up on the homework they’d missed while they were in the psych ward. We opened our books and pretended to concentrate. Besides being paralyzed with anxiety, depression or lethargy, I think we were also terrified that our psychiatrist would come charging down the hall on her two-inch heels.

Almost everyone had scars running up and down their arms. I did too. Most people used razors. My scars came from scratching my forearms over and over again until the skin broke. While I was scratching, I would repeat the ABC’s. Usually I would stop after five rounds.

“My God,” Dr. Roberts had told me. “It looks like you’ve dragged cigarette butts up and down your arms.” Her voice was filled with horror and disgust.

My school courses were gym, chemistry and grade 12 English. I feel like there should have been one more course, but I can’t remember. I spent most of the school hour alternating between writing in my journal and staring at everyone else. Nathalie quietly read The Hobbit. Jenn cut out photos for a scrapbook she was making. With neon markers, she drew cloud shapes around the inspirational quotes she’d transcribed. “Happiness does not depend upon who you are and what you have. It depends solely upon what you think.” She’d written this beside a photo of herself and her dog, now dead.  Steve didn’t have any books to open. He just stared into space, nodding his head back and forth.  Curt shook his legs vigorously until the table vibrated. He was scribbling something in his notebook.

“How are you doing, Curtis?” Mary asked in her happy sing-song voice. Curtis had written poem. “Why are we here?” it was called.

“Well, Curtis, that’s an excellent question,” said Mary. “Artists, scientists, writers have been pondering over that very question for centuries.” I had huge purple bruises in the crease of my right elbow from when Mary had tried to take my blood. Otherwise, she was a rather lovely woman.

“I hate this place so much,” Curtis told me after our school session was finished. He had recently been on a two-day pass. “It was such a relief to get out of here. I’ll never be suicidal again.” I hope that worked out for him.

When Dr. Roberts finally set me free, I too promised that I would refrain from purging and obsessing about my weight forever more.  This sort of worked for almost a week.

Being a teenager takes a long time. Everyone always says that time flies. I don’t feel like time flies. Even when there is too much to do, time doesn’t fly. I am twenty-nine years old and still there are many days when I think, “I am going to be myself forever. It is going to be a long life.”

While I was in the psych ward, I got to go home for a weekend. My parents and I watched the movie, “Ordinary People.” It is about a formerly suicidal young man who spent a long time in the psych ward. He was really sad because his brother died in a boating accident and he felt guilty he survived. It is quite a sad movie and an odd choice for the time. Watching it with my parents was awkward. I wanted to tell them I wasn’t as sad or as crazy as the guy in the movie. In fact, he did not seem that crazy. Just sad. Over the weekend, all I wanted to do was lie in bed and read The Diviners by Margaret Lawrence. My parents were worried about me. I seemed way more down than before I went to the psych ward. And all my muscles had shrunk so I looked sort of sick.

What does all this have to do with the Boston bombings? With lethal injections, or life sentences?

Lucky for me, I have made no commitment to coherence.

Ahimsa means recognizing that I am not separate from all that is. We may as well end with sex.

Last summer, the Boatman and I enjoyed a period of particularly impeccable sex. Some people write excellent poems about sex. Other poems are not so excellent. During the season of impeccable sex, I remember getting to the part that people always put in poems. And I felt like finally I’d arrived at something so precious and universal.  I cried, maybe because all this time, I never believed I was worthy of this level of joy. But that’s not true.

These were the words in my head: “This joy, this ecstasy, this isn’t just for everybody else. It’s also for me.” At the same time, this joy, this ecstasy, it’s not just for me. It’s also for everybody else.

Not just for me. Also for everybody else.

The End.


Michael Stone
michaelstoneteaching.com

Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
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