Are you strong, or are you skinny?

“Does this mirror make me look wider?” I asked my friend, the Queen Of Butt Club. On Sunday I moved to my fourth location of this trip to Mysore. I felt like I appeared less wide in my old apartment. The Queen of Butt Club examined the situation.

“Not sure,” she said. “I feel like I have been consistently widening since Preethi moved in.” Preethi is QOBC’s roommate from Bangalore. She is quite talented at cooking chapatis, parathas, pakoras and most importantly dosas. All through November, Preethi passed on her gifts to my friend via unbroken lineage or Parampara. My friend was delighted to learn the correct method in such a traditional way. As fate would have it, she loves dosas so much that she named her dog Dosa.

I should mention that my friend did not earn her title “Queen of Butt Club,” due to the size of her butt. Rather, in another lifetime, she became quite skilled at pilates and fitness. During this era, she accumulated knowledge of many compelling and effective butt exercises. Nobody ever authorized or certified her in this area, but that was a big mistake. All the members of our Glutes Group agree that our asses had never been in better hands than with the Queen of Butt Club. My Cool Friend from Belgium was adamant that her exercises were way better than Eddie Stern’s. Eddie Stern’s butt exercises do not generate adequate burning.

A couple of weeks into it, Butt Club died out when the Queen embarked upon Seventh Series and adopted five little kittens. It was a good lesson for the Glutes Group slash Butt Club to learn that some things are more important than your pelvis. And we learned about the importance of self-practice.

Anyways, back to the Fun House mirror at my fun new apartment.  The Queen and I examined the fronts of our torsos for about three and a half seconds.

“Hard to say,” I said. “Especially when all we wear is spiritual pants.” Spiritual pants are these great items you can buy in Mysore. The waist consists of three to four inches of ruffled elastic and the seam of the crotch falls nearly a foot below your secular vagina and/or spiritual beard.  Everything is exciting and mysterious when you wear spiritual pants.

Spiritual Pants

“Well,” said the Queen. “I guess if we start busting out of the Spiritual Pants, maybe then we can ask Malcom about his diet.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Only then.”

Malcom, whose real name luckily isn't Malcom, is an earnest young ashtangi who we always see eating plates of raw vegetables and smoothies. He dips his veggies in tiny containers of tahini butter. Otherwise, that seems to be it. How sad for him.

“I’m a control freak,” he explained, crunching on a raw beet. “Eating is one thing I can control.” How interesting. Sounds like the clichéd description of an eating disorder. “My life felt out of control and so I controlled my eating.” And then what happened?

Seven Augusts ago, when I walked into Darby’s Mysore room, I met The Vegan Life Coach, a great and temporary source of sexual gratification. Although our relationship was short-lived, his influence was enormous. The Vegan Coach encouraged me to keep practicing in the most traditional way possible. He also warned me of the perils of consuming dairy and eggs. And he said that drinking a bunch of coffee while on Prozaac (which I happened to be on) was probably a horrible idea. He never told me outright that I should become vegan, but it seemed like an obvious step towards my moral evolution, and thus I did. And I figured that if it was between coffee and Prozaac, I’d pick coffee. I quit Prozaac cold turkey, after being on it off and on for six years.

So there I was, a mighty and devoted Ashtanga practitioner. Egg-free, dairy-free, prozaac free.

This was before the gluten-free days. Otherwise, I’m sure I would have taken that up too.

As fate would have it, daily Ashtanga and going vegan coincided with the end of Rumination Syndrome, a rare and unpleasant bulimia-related symptom that took forever to get rid of following my somewhat significant bout with an eating disorder. Rumination involves regurgitating food in your mouth and then reswallowing it over and over again. This would go on for up to an hour every time I ate. This went on for years. It’s quite disgusting, but oh well. I forgive myself.

You can imagine how relieved I was when the puke just disappeared. I attributed the newfound lack of puke with my Ashtanga practice, and being vegan.

I had eight ecstatic months of ostensible freedom.

Then May came, and suddenly I was really hungry and anxious. My practice was getting longer and longer. I was biking all over Montreal to get to school and my very physical job working with people with disabilities.  And I was eating less and less, since many of the other yogis in my teacher training program seemed to do fine subsisting on salads and green drinks in mason jars. The puke came back, first once or twice a week, and then all the time. I wouldn’t let myself consider the fact that maybe if I ate more and practiced less or at least less aggressively, my anxiety might decrease along with some of the eating chaos. No, without giving everything to practice, I was convinced I’d be even more of a disaster. I kept going full throttle with little to no increase in sandwiches or cheese.

In August, Daniel Vitalis came to talk to our teacher training group about nutrition. Daniel is a vibrant and seemingly magical person with the claim to fame of only drinking and using water that he gathers from springs. He also doesn’t eat much that he hasn’t scavenged from the wilderness. At our teacher training, Daniel told us a story about finding a blue robin’s egg in the forest. He took a bite and what a surprise, inside was a budding bird fetus. Figuring that he shouldn’t let it go to waste, he ate the whole thing, webbed feet and all.

“That’s bad karma,” said Joanne, Darby’s wife. 

The Wild and Magical Daniel Vitalis

For whatever reason, I decided to consult Daniel about my battle with toenail fungus which had persisted even longer than the puke in my mouth.  He said that likely the microorganisms that caused my fungus had also invaded my intestines and joints and were contributing to my depression and mental health problems.

“Do you crave sugar a lot?” he asked. In my experience, the more I deprive myself, the more I crave sugar. So yes, I was craving sugar all the time. Alcohol, chocolate and grapes.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Yah, that’s the fungus. It’ll keep coming back as long as you eat sugar.”
“Even fruit?”
“Yah, fruit’s the worst.”

The list of food I wasn’t allowed to eat was lengthening steadily. By September, I hired a naturopath who prescribed an extremely restrictive 90-day raw food cleanse. I immediately stopped menstruating. At the time, Darby was having me practice full primary all the way to Karandavasana. Although I’d become disturbingly lighter, Karandavasana remained a lost cause. That said, as my muscles started breaking down, backbends became significantly easier.

“Don’t expect to be able to do that when you start eating again,” Darby said as he easily yanked my hands to my heels in Kapotasana. Several unempowered head trips ensued. Luckily, by mid-October, even Darby advocated that I cut the cleanse short. I felt and looked horrific. At the end of October, I bailed, surrendering to a lifetime of hideous and infested toenails. My weight stabilized within a several months; however, now a whole bunch of old eating hang-ups and patterns had returned including puke in my mouth and in the toilet. It took another two and half years for the puke to disappear completely, and I hope it never returns.

My Cool Friend From Belgium claims I’m the best eater in Gokulam. (While we’re at it, I am also probably the best at pooping and menstruating). The Queen of Butt Club, one of the most wonderful vegans I know is also quite good, though alas, our competition is rather pathetic. I would be so rich if I got money for every time I heard someone complain about how full they were from lunch, at 6 P.M, or maybe even the day after. Or how repulsively heavy Indian food is. I find the food here is spectacular and delicious. And my digestion is better than ever. Back home, I eat way more salad and as a result I am way more gassy. In Mysore, the food is so well cooked that I barely ever fart. Congratulations to me.

Maybe it is okay for people to experiment with food during a certain stage of their practice. Some people’s diets could be more healthy and nourishing. That said, a great number of people come to yoga with tendencies towards perfectly sensible and reasonable food choices. Despite this, many practitioners seem to suffer from a widespread lack of faith in themselves and their bodies. As though if they were left to their own devices, they’d expand into massive hedonistic Buddhas.

Having essentially completed a PhD in eating disorders, I have come to the conclusion that although everyone is different, upon depriving themselves, most people become neurotic, irritable and anxious. I have consolidated a few sentences containing my Excellent Advice About Food. Whether or not you want it, here it is:

Stop having food rules. Even if your arms are too short to bind in various yoga postures or you think your life would be way better if you were thinner. I am terrible at reading spiritual texts but I am quite certain that nowhere in the Bhagavad Gita or the Yoga Sutras does it say you must starve yourself until you can catch your wrists in Pasasana or lift up in Karandavasana. So unless you are missing internal organs, trust your deep internal wisdom and give yourself permission to eat whatever you want, whenever you want. I promise that you will not turn into a mammoth. Being neurotic about food is really bad for digestion, and also really bad for having fun with your friends. Eat in a way that doesn’t leave you hungry and thinking about food all the time. Ideally what you eat will allow you to sleep and shit and have a nice time with the people around you. If you’re having trouble shitting, let me know. I have lots of tricks. The End.

The only thing I would add is, watch out for rocks. Yesterday, the Queen of Butt Club was biting into a chick pea, and it turned out to be a rock. She broke a chunk out of her back molar. Besides the molar, there were no other casualties.

The Very End.

I have more advice in my self-help book, “I Let Go.” I increased the price to $2.99, since the price of coriander in Mysore has gone up 200%, even though I never buy coriander.

Also, The Queen of Butt Club is leaving this week. Besides fellow Butt Club members, she leaves behind Sambar the kitten, who defeated great odds and survived. Look how fluffy and cute he is. Sambar will be living with a generous foster mom until January at which point he will need a new home. Who loves kittens?!? Preference will be given to people living in India or Mysore, but if you live somewhere else and it is love at first sight, Sambaar will probably be strong enough to fly by the end of the month. Please get in touch if you’re interested!  

The Fiesty and Fluffy Sambar
Update: Sambar found a home in Mexico and he is fluffier than ever!

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor

Related Posts:
You Cling to Things Until They Die 
Food Belly 
The Day Yoga Almost Gave Me a Stroke 
Butt Club et. al. 
21st Century Yoga and an End to Self-Care

 

21st Century Yoga and an End to Self-Care

Someone just wrote an article called, “An End to Self-Care.”  The author claims that our society is way too concerned with avoiding burnout.  We should focus our energies on social engagement, on community action, on making changes.  No more, change yourself, then change the world.   Change the world, and you yourself will be transformed too.  Everything changes all  at once.  It’s so efficient.  Although I understand some of what the author has to say, I find the article to be a bit preachy and one-sided.  That said, I love Nathan’s response to it.  Nathan happens to be one of the contributors to the book, “21^st Century Yoga:  Culture, Politics, and Practice.”  Writers Carol Horton and Roseanne Harvey have compiled ten excellent essays that discuss contemporary yoga in our western society.  Yoga’s potential, its gifts, its limitations. 

21st Century Yoga: The Website

Buy the Book Here.    Or on Amazon.

21st Century Yoga: The Website

Topics range from healing anorexia through yoga to teaching yoga in the military, and how yoga does and doesn’t challenge the political status quo.  Just because we become more clear-headed and self-aware does not mean that we will go on to lead a more peaceful life, to be a “better” person.  Nearly every essay hit home for me, but these two essays are  spurring the most thoughts for me right now:

Matthew Remski’s “Yoga Will Not Form a Real Culture Until Every Studio Can Also Double As a Soup Kitchen and other observations between yoga and activism,”

And Michael Stone’s  “Our True Nature is Our Imagination:  Yoga and Non-Violence.” 

To put it simply, both authors urge teachers and practitioners to move beyond the fabulousness of our acetabular rotation and use our practices to serve others, to build community, and transform the world. 

Before the arthritis sneaks in.
 
Transforming the world can take place on a small scale, as small as nourishing and giving within a loving committed relationship, within a friendship.  I've experienced this sort of transforming love with the Boatman, and it's something I've never had before.  And of course we cannot forget the Big Black Dog.  I don`t discount the great importance of these relationships but lately it seems that in other areas, I am paralyzed, alone on my yoga mat, waiting for my acetabulum to become more fabulous.  I have been waiting for a long time. 
 
I have written about how yoga transformed me and my life, how it taught me not to llie.  I wasn’t lying when I wrote these things, but I’m not convinced that “Yoga made me a better person.”  Before I committed to a daily practice, I made concrete and honest contributions to the world.  When I was a teenager, I helped my parents take care of Glendon, a little boy with cerebral palsy.  I spent summers working at camps for children with special needs.  Two years into university, I left school to live and work at a home for adults with intellectual disabilities.  I stayed there for two years.   Many of the people around me didn’t own yoga mats-they still don’t-and perhaps they wouldn’t necessarily become better people if they did. 

Marc and Isabelle from L'arche, a home for people with disabilities where I lived

Marc and Isabelle from L'arche, a home for people with disabilities where I lived

It was when I left the house for people with disabilities that I found Darby and Joanne at Sattva Yoga Shala.  After five or six years dabbling in different types of yoga in different capacities of commitment, I finally had the time and energy to embark on a daily practice.  My acetabular rotation became increasingly fabulous.  I learned how to go upside down.  Most importantly, within days of beginning morning Mysore with Darby, with the help of a temporary source of sexual gratification, (The Vegan Life Coach, not Darby!), I stopped puking in my mouth.  Puking in my mouth, or my deal with rumination syndrome/bulimia, is this long, sad, boring story that is just one variation on the plethora of stories of people around the world who struggle with eating disorders.  Even though I never “achieved” a trophy anorexic weight, or damaged my body to the point of a stroke or a heart attack, I come back to this story again and again, not only because the puke came back again and again, but because the experience was Hideous and Traumatic. Before my yoga practice became consistent, everything I did was tainted with puke.  I was young, with pure intentions and an open heart.  I wanted desperately to serve: to transform the world and transform myself.  But in the background of all the valuable work I did, all day long I could taste the puke.

While I was caring for others, feeding them, changing their diapers, the taste of vomit stopped me from fully experiencing where I was.  I wasn’t fully there for them. 

Of course, we can’t all be “fully healed”  and “fully in the present moment,” before we’re ready to serve.  Otherwise no one would ever do anything for anyone.  But how much self-care is reasonable?  How much is necessary? 

When I left the house for people with disabilities, I felt both extremely guilty that I would no longer be serving in the same capacity as I was before, but also convinced that I never wanted to do anything so all-consuming ever again. 

Five years later, those years at that house are probably the most tangible “contribution” that I’ve ever made. In the meantime, I’ve maintained a daily Ashtanga yoga practice.  I can count the number of unsanctioned days off I’ve taken (besides Saturdays, moondays and ladies’ holidays) on less than one hand.  In misguided attempts to further cleanse and purify my body, and a failure to curb my tendencies towards overexercise, remnants of my eating disorder returned within eight months of daily practice.  My symptoms lingered for a few years, and then went away.  Ultimately, my yoga (asana) practice has shown its potential for healing, self-absorption, and shall I admit it, some physical violence.  Although sometimes I would like it to be, practice isn’t an insurance policy that gives you a pass for the rest of the day. 

That said, this is not a “breaking up with Ashtanga” letter, and I do feel that my practice has benefited me immensely and it remains a necessary part of my routine of self-care.  I will keep practicing wholeheartedly, but perhaps I can let go of some of the neurosis that’s wrapped around completing the same postures in exactly the same way every day.  And I need to remind myself that even though there are things I learned on the mat that I couldn’t realize while I was frantically changing diapers at the house for people with disabilities, other very important things occurred while I was changing those diapers.  Despite my then mediocre acetabular rotation. 

In his writing and interviews, Michael Stone always speaks about yoga being an act of intimacy.  Our yoga practices should allow us to engage in more intimate relationships, both with ourselves, with others, and with the world.  I guess that this means we may be practicing yoga more often than we think, or perhaps not as often at all.

In any case, I thank Carol Horton, Roseanne Harvey and all of the contributors to 21^st century yoga for inspiring these reflections.  I highly recommend this book, and I look forward to the next volume. 

The End.

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

A Broken Body is Not a Broken Spirit
My Life's Purpose
The Benefits of an Ashtanga Yoga Practice
 

 

Supersize versus Superskinny: A Spiral of Shame

Readers, I’m sorry.  My mind has gone dull and I’m totally ashamed.  I blame it on Lady Gaga.  A week or so ago, she announced to the world that she has endured a lifelong struggle with anorexia and bulimia.  At the time of her great announcement, it was evening and the Boatman was working late.  Instead of following  James Altucher’s Seven Habits for Highly Effective Mediocre People, I made the evolved decision of going on Facebook.  There I learned that in response to someone calling her fat, Lady Gaga launched a movement called “Body Revolution.”  

Lady Gaga poses for “Body Revolution.”

Lady Gaga’s movement is a forum on Lady Gaga’s webpage meant to promote body acceptance.  People post photos and stories about their struggles to adopt a positive body image, be they due to eating disorders, illnesses, disabilities, or whatever reason.  Clicking away I travelled from one article about Lady Gaga to another.  Miraculously, my psyche remained undamaged despite the fact that Lady Gaga is 26 years old just like me and like Kiera Knightley (also my age), she has accumulated heaps more fame and success than me and my sad blog and self-help book. 
 
In case you forgot, the moral of the heartbreaking I-wish-I-was-kiera-knightley story was:
 
We all have high vaginas.  Me, you, Kiera, Knightley, Lady Gaga.  Everybody.
 
Here’ s my High Vagina.  Again.  



Me and my High Vagina at the Boatman's mother's cottage

But a twist of fate occurred when I came across the site, “Healthy is the new skinny.”  Like Lady Gaga’s cause, this site also promotes positive body image.  It also seems to advocate for realistic and healthy models in the media.  Wonderful. I’m all about this.  Healthy is the new skinny has a section of videos from Youtube and beyond.  Some of them feature people sharing their own journey towards body acceptance.  Others contain different news stories about disturbing diets, stereotypes and the fact that if Barbie a real person, with her disproportionate body, she’d suffer horrendous back pain and be hard-pressed to walk.  I like this sort of thing, so I kept scrolling down and clicking.

Then I came across a British reality television show called

“Supersize vs Superskinny.”  The whole thing’s on Youtube.
 
As the title suggests, the show profiles a “diet swap”  between one morbidly obese person and a waif-like, usually eating disordered person.  For five days, the large person will eat the emaciated person’s measly diet, while the poor person who’s used to eating nothing has to stuff his or her face with the multi-caloried mountains of food that the big eater consumes every day.

As someone who used to have a litany of food rules and restrictive habits, I find the diet swaps to be a bit unlikely.  Most of the time, the participants change their ways far more quickly and amicably than is realistic.  After five days, almost all of the superskinnies are putting dents in the piles of the supersize’s feasts.  And just about every time, the supersized participants make peace with their meagre portions, and end up leaving something on their plates.

Apparently a lack of sound, realistic journalism isn’t that important to me.  I didn’t count how many episodes I’ve watched, but I made it to approximately season five, where the outcomes of the diet swaps become slightly more realistic.  I know way too much about this show.  I’ve watched it way too many times.

Between meals, other journalists examine different diet and weight related issues.  For one season, a reporter tries out all sorts of fad diets.  On a couple others, they follow a group of anorexic and bulimic patients.  Season five, if you’re interested, does a bit of both.  The doctor on the show travels to Evansville, Indiana, apparently the fattest city in the United States.  In Evansville, they have ambulances that can carry a 1400 person.  So far most people max out around 800 or 900 pounds.  But still.  Oof.

 This guy would need an enormous ambulance to move him which must make him feel terrible.

Seriously, these people have wounds from surgery that won’t heal because they’re covered in fat.  They have to get someone else to help them shower, or wipe their asses. 

I can’t believe I’ve watched this show more than once. Surely once would be enough.  But no, I can’t stop.  I know I shouldn’t look, but I can’t look away.  It’s a big fat binge. 

Although I’d love to hear your thoughts on all this, if I were you, I’d avoid this show.  My obsession with it has caused me great shame.  I wish that I could say something profound and meaningful about obesity and eating disorders and the world’s ridiculous obsession with food and weight, but after so many hours watching these youtube clips, I’m consumed with lethargy and self-loathing. 

Now it’s time to go teach a core strength yoga class. Let’s hope that my students work very hard, igniting the fire deep within their lower stomach so that I may vicariously burn away this spiral of shame.

The End.

Me being skinny in India. Kerala, 2016.
India is the best diet. Or the worst.

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

Tell Me I'm Fat, by This American Life

Are you strong or are you skinny?
Day 69 of Not Puking in Your Mouth
The Benefits of an Ashtanga Yoga Practice, Part Two
 

 

My Eternal Tits

I have no boobs or retail experience, and I just dropped off my resumé at a Bra Fitting store.  This is probably a lost cause, but it does provide an excellent segue into the excellent story about my excellent tits. 

My Small Breasts used to be my Designated Issue.  Designated Issues are large or small matters whose resolution you designate to be the cure of your existence. 

For example, I used to think that my life would be considerably more manageable if I found an effective eradication of Pubic Hair that wasn’t too expensive and didn’t leave hideous red welts in awkward places around my crotch. 

I had a similar attitude about getting bigger boobs.  By the time I was thirteen, my Small Breasts became an immense concern of mine, accompanied with considerable dangers.  The first main danger was that if you are afflicted with a tiny flat rack, your stomach could only get to be a certain size before it started to stick out further than your boobs.  My fourteen-year-old mind, feared that this would be both hideous and tragic.   Actually, I’m pretty sure this fear began as early as age nine.  I remember taking on an unreasonable regimen of  crunches and abdominal exercises and an unreasonably young age.  When I turned thirteen and started lifting weights with the swim team, I refused to do the bench press, convinced that it would stunt my growth.  Well, apparently there was not much growth to stunt.  Despite refraining from the bench press, my boobs never expanded to fill more than a junior sized bra, available at LaSenza girl.

These are not my boobs. Mine are smaller.
  

Alas.  Although my abdomen never ended up protruding beyond my tiny tits, the terror that one day it would prevailed.  So too did my terror of a second breast-related danger.  This one had to do with what I call the “bum-to-breast ratio.”  According to my pubescent theory, the size of your butt had to be intimately in harmony with the size of your boobs.  Thus, if you butt grew, then your boobs needed to grow too.  In contrast, if your boobs failed to blossom, then your butt had best remain the same size.  I think it was around my development of this theory that I began squeezing my ass compulsively and repeatedly wherever I went.  At school, in the movie theatre, and during band practice.  Figured it burned extra calories and provided damage control for my ratio.  Looking back years later, I wouldn’t recommend this.  A tight ass is hard thing to cure and I’m not sure my ratio ever benefited much from the ass-clenching...

Still, I remained faithful to my ass-clenching and abdominal crunching for a number of years. Just shy of eighteen, and armed with Baby LaSenza padded bras, I entered first-year university in Montréal.  I’d barely had a boyfriend since kindergarten, and I felt certain that my tits were the reason.  One day, at a residence party, in a moment of uncharacteristic oversharing, I bemoaned my sad fate to the girl beside me.  She was relatively well-endowed, with an excellent bum-to-breast ratio. 

“Oh don’t worry,” she reassured me.  “My boobs used to be small too.  I just went up two cup sizes.”

I looked at her dubiously.  “What’s your secret?” I asked. 

Generously, she revealed it.  Five cups of 2% milk.  Every day.  More than a bag of that shit.

Well folks, I went for it, trudging to the grocery store every two and half days to buy four litre bags of the fatty white liquid.  I guzzled a hefty glass at every meal and snack.  All the liquid was terrible for my weird rumination syndrome eating disorder, which involved stomach contents travelling up and down my esophagus for up to an hour after I ate.  Still, I rarely fully expelled anything, and so I figured all of the two-percent goodness was making it into my boobs. 

A couple months later, it still wasn’t time to throw away my Baby LaSenza Bras.  All my ratios were the same size, but for some reason, I was so tired, I could hardly function.  Although I mostly slept a solid eight hours at night, I would regularly fall asleep in the afternoon, wake two hours later and wonder what happened.  I was less active than I’d been in my whole life, and ten times more tired. 
I went to the doctor who ordered a blood test.  She called me back, surprised I was able to pick up the phone.  Minimum iron levels for women are supposedly 12.0.  14.0 is better.  My hemoglobin was at 6.  I was severely anemic.  The doctor suggested I go to a dietician.  I showed the dietician what I was eating. 

“Why so much dairy?” she asked.

“To make my boobs grow,” I replied with great conviction.

I guess that the calcium in dairy can bind with something or other and prevent your body from  absorbing iron.  And the only way I could get my boobs to grow would be to a considerable amount of weight everywhere, which would put all my ratios at risk. 

I was left with no option but to un-designate the issue.  I surrendered.   My boobs were my boobs.

For a couple more years, I continued to wear my padded Baby LaSenza Bras, and by my some miracle, I ended up with my first boyfriend.  He called my boobs “very nice”  thoroughly agreeing with his grandfather who had always claimed that what mattered was shape, and not size.  God bless grandfathers.  Plus he said that it was unlikely that my boobs would ever sag.  I would defy gravity forever. 

Essentially, my tits were eternal.

I was twenty when I left my last padded Baby LaSenza Bra at the apartment of a man named Charlie.  (Don’t worry, mom, I would never ever have sex with a stranger.)  But the bra was removed and Charlie had the chance to say, “You have beautiful breasts.”   

34 F. Not for me.

The bra I'd worn that night had cost 50 bucks.  It had “hydralife insertions,” and was a slightly paler shade of turquoise than the margueritas I’d consumed that evening at the party where Charlie and I were acquainted. 

I escaped Charlie's apartment the next morning without saying good-bye, and without the bra.  I never went back for it.  I didn’t need it anymore. Apparently all you need is a handful. 

The End.

Perhaps now my Designated Issue is my pelvis: Twitter @mypelvicfloor!

And the fact that I want one million facebook Fans:  Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook.

And that I want one million people to buy my book. 
 
Peanut Butter, Pubic Hair
Keira Knightley's High Vagina
What the fuck should I do with my life, Part Two

 

 

Forever on the Lips

"Why do I always get the runs when I'm on the rag?"

 

We all have similarly compelling sentences and phrases that we hear or read once and that, like goodness and mercy, end up following us all the days of our lives.  I was eleven years old when I read the above sentence in the “ Ask Anything” column of Seventeen magazine.  At the time, I had never been on the rag.  But I had gotten the runs.  It was just a matter of time before I would get both at the same time.  Peanut Butter and Jam, my friend Fern calls this.  Every month, when the Peanut Butter and Jam comes, I ask, “Why do I always get the runs when I’m on the rag?”  I can’t remember the answer.  Only the question.

Another soul-permeating phrase of mine is, “A moment on the lips, forever on the hips.”  The first time I encountered this one was in Marya Hornbacher’s anorexia and bulimia memoir Wasted.  I read this just as I was beginning my anorexia and bulimia career and the pages, though excellently written served more as a how-to manual than offer any hope for healing or recovery.  And to this day, that lovely sentence about lips and hips remains with me.  It came from the lips of Marya Hornbacher’s teacher.  Marya had been kept after school for some reason.  Alone in the classroom, Marya ate a bag of Doritos, the only thing she had eaten for some time. 

That’s when her teacher uttered her magic hips and lips phrase.  So Marya went to the bathroom and puked up the Doritos. 

 


Wasted, by Marya Hornbacher I do believe that Marya Hornbacher had done very well in throwing her eating disorder away.  She is also a very talented writer, and in the many years since Wasted was published, she has written a number of riveting and Doritos-free books.   



I was never a big chips person.  Since meeting the Boatman, however, I’ve taken up corn chips.  And pita chips.  I prefer the broken ones at the bottom of the bag because then I don’t pay attention to how many I am eating.  That said, I’m allowed to eat as many as I want.  Sometimes there are chips are on my lips for very many moments.  I never ever throw them up and so far my hips have stayed exactly same size.  There is no Big-Fat-Chip-Belly either. But sometimes my hips complain of seething pain.  I do not think it is from the chips.  It has something to do with my pelvis, which everyone is tired of hearing about.  Still, when my hips hurt, I never stop talking about it.  Now we have a new catch-phrase:

“A moment on the hips, forever on the lips.”

And once my lips take hold of something, they shelter it for a long, long time.  Another phrase:

 “A moment on the lips, forever on the lips.” 

I’m sure you’ll get the idea and derive thousands of your own happy catch-phrases that you’ll be able to luxuriate in at any given moment.  I would love to hear what your lips come up with.  

The Day that Dr. Seuss died seems like only yesterday.

Hips, Lips, Chips.

Kino has Very Open Hips:

This Panda Bear is made out of Lips:

And the Boatman drew a Chip with Ruffles.



"Very Refreshing"  featuring Chip with Ruffles.  More Drawings by the Boatman at verysatisfied.com

"Very Refreshing"  featuring Chip with Ruffles.  More Drawings by the Boatman at verysatisfied.com

He's Refreshing.  He's on Vacation.  And he never gets the runs when he's on the rag.
The Chip doesn't and neither does the Boatman.
I was going to go on a contractions diet, but then I decided I wouldn't
I wouldn't and I couldn't
I won't.

The End.

The High Vagina, Coming Soon

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

Exalted
The O's in the Totos have Hats
My name is Erica, I love coffee