The Magical Rock Vagina Cleanse, by Erica J. Schmidt

SNAG, S-N-A-G stands for Sensitive New Age Guy. At Café Olimpico I always see this SNAG and he’s one of those people who’s ultra-busy running his micro-nation the MacBook Pro. And so, he never has any time to talk to me. But one day he decided he could spare a moment to grace my life with his secret to success.

“Erica,” he said. “You have to Name Your Wounds.”

As fate would have it, I am average to mediocre at naming my wounds; however; I am just about phenomenal at naming the dudes whose legs I hump and whose dicks end up inside of me.

For example, there was: the Vegan Life Coach, the Tall Cute Cauliflower, Rob One, Rob Two, and one of my favourites, the star of my life’s beautiful blogging fairy tale, The Boatman. As his name suggests, I met the Boatman on a boat. We happened to be at a wedding. Lucky for me, the full moon whispered in the Boatman’s ear and told him to kiss me. In about twenty minutes, we fell in love, and in his beautiful delusion, the Boatman invited me to leave Montreal and go live with him in Halifax in his Big Blue House with his Big Black Dog, and in my beautiful delusion, and also because I had seven and a half part-time jobs and maybe five dollars, I said yes.

As the blogging fairy tale goes, we lived happily ever after for three and a half years, except I had no friends and refused to go on Prozac.

I would highly recommend that everybody move for love at least once, it’s just that sometimes you have to move back. So, two Aprils ago, I had to move back and within a few months, I met the man who would one day inspire, the Magical Rock Vagina Cleanse.

This man I named, the Generic Married Man (GMM).

For me, the best is when dudes are ultra-unavailable, and when they have deep and beautiful and impossible wounds. As fate would have it, the Generic Married Man was all over this criteria. Like I imagine most philandering husbands are, he was ultra-busy running his micro-nation with his kids, a really important job, in theory his wife, as well as the highly time-consuming task of mourning and wailing over all his dead and broken dreams.

But Generic was clear and relatively considerate right from the start.

“Erica,” he said. “I just want you to know, I am never going to leave my family. Like never. That is not who I am.”

And I responded, “Yes! Definitely! Do not leave your family for me. Of course not!”

The other thing he said was, “I’m also not going to be all that available for the next 18 to 25 years.”

For me, this was no problem since I was not the kind of person who would move eighteen hours and give up my whole life for some silly love story.

"That's perfect," I said. "You are exactly what I am looking for!”

So we were off to this erotic, steamy passionate affair, and we met on the monkey bars every three to seven to seventeen and a half weeks.

On the monkey bars, Generic would tell me about all his deep and beautiful and impossible wounds, and I’d sit there shivering, and I’d wish that he did not have a wife. And then, we’d make out.

But not all of Generic’s wounds were deep and beautiful and impossible. Some of them were pretty Generic, and unsurprising.

For example,

“I haven’t had sex since 2010, or like maybe once, but that was to make a kid.”

Or like,

“All my wife ever thinks about is the kids and then I go to spoon her and she recoils onto the other side of the bed, and I’m all lonely and tired and horny.”

Or,

“My life is so ridiculously crazy busy! I don’t know who I am anymore.”

Now, I love parents and I love children and I love babies. Some of my favourite friends are parents and I love their kids. As one of my current seven and a half semi-retirement projects, I tie-dye onesies for babies I will never have. But families, I love them. Having said that, one of my favourite things to do is to complain about parents complaining about having children. As though the inherently fulfilling biological task of ejaculating inside of someone you kind of like (like that must be a little bit fun), and then you combine your own special DNA to make this extra unique and exceptional child that comes out of a vagina which is really interesting, and the child is so tiny and adorable – and you find it extra adorable, because it reminds you of you – and then it starts to talk, and everything it says is extra brilliant and extraordinary because it reminds you of you, like as though this whole process is so tragic and selfless and heroic – and also compulsory. Because it’s not compulsory. You know, I always want to tell people, you could have pulled out.

But poor Generic hadn’t pulled out and now he had a couple of kids and a wife who ostensibly recoiled whenever he went anywhere near her. Poor guy was stuck using condoms with me. Although it is not charitable to publish details of one's sexual experience on the Internet, I will say that Generic gave indisputably excellent and redemptive head. Also, he let me hump his leg which, as fate would have it, happens to be my favourite.

Unfortunately, since he was so ridiculously crazy busy, I did not get the chance to hump the Generic Married Man’s leg quite as often as would have been ideal. But that was okay, since besides complaining about parents complaining about having children, and besides leg humping, one of my other favourite things to do is to be a pen pal. I am a remarkable pen pal. While I may be a little intense and self-obsessed and one-sided about it, I would say that in general, I write delightful emails, letters, haikus, postcards, and text messages, and I would say that for the most part, it makes the world a better place.

For the most part, I made Generic’s world a better place. I filled his days with heartfelt and extraordinary emails and haikus and text messages, and every night I’d sign off, not just with the regular and generic x-o. Oh no! I wrote out my x’s and o’s. It was like the opposite of abbreviations. I spelled them out, “E-x, o-h, e-x, o-h,” and I added the innovative and provocative emoticon, the eggplant.

E-x, o-h, eggplant

Generic absolutely relished my stunning and enchanting creativity. He somehow believed that I was spectacular. This was a dream come true, and the best part was, since we barely ever saw each other, he never had a chance to change his mind.

So the whole thing was mostly magnificent apart from the fact that one of my main objectives in life is to be relatively to thoroughly well fucked. This is hard to pull off every three to seven to seventeen and a half weeks. The other issue was that I experienced a degree of conflict in my heart about the fact that Generic had a wife and children. As penance, I would force myself to stalk his beautiful wife on Facebook. Like most people, she had horrendous privacy settings which allowed me to peruse her happy mom photos. I would scroll through all the birthdays and milestones and the millions of ways her precious little children filled her heart with more love and joy and surprise than she ever could have imagined before the little creatures had come out of her vagina.

This made me feel very gross.  

But otherwise, I was relatively happy with how things were going. Having said that, I had accumulated a few other problems in my life. My heart was sort of broken from my last ex-boyfriend and I kept refusing to go on Prozaac. I decided my best option was to fuck off and pull a geographic, and I decided the best place to do this was in India.

Thus, in November, off I flew to Delhi, and I proceeded to bop around India for four and a half months. I spent a great deal of these four and a half months squatting over small holes and shitting buckets of liquid diarrhea. Then, when I got out of the bathroom, slews of horny and sex-deprived men would come up to me and ask, “Oh, Madam, you are very big awesome. Have you made the sex? Would you like to make the sex with me?” To which I would reply, “No.” So India was super interesting, a little hard, but lucky for me, I had my loyal and supportive pen pal Generic to get me through it.

Half Dead in Bangalore
Photo by the Stunning and Exceptional Photographer, Maansi Jain

Generic especially nailed his pen pal duties this one time when I was in Bangalore. I had gone to the latest movie Star Wars with some friends from the youth hostel. After about eleven minutes, I had to leave and projectile vomit into a garbage can. Twice.

I remember nauseously Ubering back to the hostel all by myself. By some miracle, Generic was available. I messaged him on Facebook chat, mourning and wailing that I might be dying and wanted to go home except I didn't really have one. .

Generic’s response was so perfect and comforting.

“Oh Erica,” he said. “Take heart. I’m waving my virtual Erica Flag for you.”

And you would think that this would not be so helpful. Generic’s in Montreal, waving not-a-flag for me, as I puke across the world in a garbage can in Bangalore. But astonishingly, it was a little bit helpful.

Even so, I decided that when I came back to Montreal, the whole thing needed to end. I mean, we hadn’t had sex in four and half months, he had a wife and kids, most of the love was probably in my imagination and I was convinced that once I saw him in person, it would be over. So we arranged to meet on the monkey bars, and I was all ready to can it.

And then, we made out.

And despite thirteen and half more attempts to can it, the ex’s and oh’s, and the emails and the haikus and even the occasional leg hump went on and on and on. Until suddenly it’s the end of the summer and I really don’t like myself that much.

I came to the decision that I needed to resort to drastic measures. The drastic measures were, The Magical Rock Vagina Cleanse.

Pretty much nobody knows what that is, so let me explain.

The Magical Rock is black, it’s called an Onyx, and you can buy it for about three bucks. I bought mine at the Mont-Royal sidewalk sale. What you do is while you are menstruating, you put the rock in your underwear – not your vagina, that’s where the diva cup goes. And as you menstruate, the magical rock is supposed to absorb and dispel all of your vagina’s trauma and disappointment and wounds (and/or ingrown hair issues and yeast infections, etc…). I was hoping the rock would also absolve and relieve my tendency to make pretty inappropriate and inconvenient sexual choices. And then there was one other thing I wanted, which the SNAGS are always going on and on about. It’s called Radical Self-Reliance. Immensely inspiring, Radically Self-Reliant people wake up in the morning, they have a shower, perhaps they even go to work or something like this, and somehow, they don’t need a Vegan Life Coach or a Generic Married Man or a Boatman or whoever to send them encouraging produce emoticons to affirm what they had for lunch.

I was thirty years old and I wanted Radical Self-Reliance.

My first step was, I put the rock into a jar of salt water. This was supposed to purify things.

Next, I composed my last brilliant epistle to the Generic Married Man. The subject line read, “Attachment Wounds.”

Poor Generic wrote back mourning and wailing about some terrifying dream he kept having where his wife and his children are up in a skyscraper, and the skyscraper is burning down, and Generic is stuck on the sidewalk and his legs are so tired and heavy and weak because he has no time to work out since he’s so ridiculously crazy busy, and he tries to climb and he can’t, but even if he could, the building is burning down way too fast, and no matter what he does everything is going to disintegrate and perish. And then Generic wakes up and he’s all alone sweating and screaming silently on his own side of the bed.

With mild sympathy I offered Generic a virtual flag, mentioned that he could maybe text me some eggplants on my birthday, but right now I really needed to focus on me and my rock and my vagina.

Very spiritually, as though my vagina knew what needed to happen, I started to menstruate, right in sync with the New Moon.  And thus began Day One of the Magical Rock Vagina Cleanse.

On Day Two, I got in the car with my tiny mother and my darling grandparents who were both around ninety years old, and the very best people of life. We drove to Algonquin Park where my beautiful and perfect and exquisite cousin, a medical doctor, was getting married at a summer camp.

I sat in the backseat next to my grandmother. I shoved black licorice in my mouth, as the black rock sat beneath my crotch absorbing trauma and disappointment. To enhance our minds, my grandmother read us a National Geographic article called, “When Sex is Shocking.” It was about a bug.

We got to the summer camp where my cousin introduced me to her beautiful and perfect fiancé. They had about a hundred perfect twenty-eight-year old friends who all had magnificent careers and had been in beautiful and perfect relationships since kindergarten or at least high school. I made some small talk about tie-dyed onesies, bug sex, and cleaning out other people’s refrigerators.

The next day, to prepare everyone for the wedding, I was scheduled to teach a yoga class to all these beautiful people who were also rather athletic. And I realized that, I absolutely did not want the magical black rock to fall out of my underwear. Like this just couldn’t happen.

The other thing was that all the trauma and disappointment was starting to make the rock smell crotchy.

So I came to the conclusion that you know what, the hell with this. The hell with Radical Self Reliance. The hell with Magical Rock Vagina Cleanses. I was canning it. For once, I was able to can something relatively promptly. I took the rock out of my underwear, rinsed off the trauma and disappointment and stuck the onyx in my purse.

The yoga class turned out to be brilliant, the wedding was spectacular and before we knew it, we were all sitting at the dinner table and suddenly I was little bit drunk.

There was one of those fun and exciting happy wedding games where you have to do something to get the bride and groom to make out. At this wedding, every table was supposed to write a limerick. In my drunken charm, I decided that limericks were dumb and generic and that we should write a haiku about the magical rock in my purse. To my great fortune, no one at my table objected and I wrote my first haiku since canning my “relationship” with the Generic Married Man. I presented the haiku to my stunning cousin and her new husband. As a bonus, I handed over the magical black rock. Whether or not they decided to keep it remains a mystery, but my best guess is that the Magical Black Rock is now somewhere in Vancouver.

After the wedding I went to go hang out in Toronto. And I thought, you know, yah I bailed on the Magical Black Rock Cleanse, but maybe I have managed to acquire a little bit of Radical Self- Reliance. You never know.

As fate would have it, Toronto is an excellent place for resetting your vagina. You don’t need a magical black rock, and you don’t need radical self-reliance. The hell with it. In twelve hours, I got to hump two people’s legs. This was more action than I got from the Generic Married Man in like six months. It was spectacular. Loved it.

The most persistent temporary source of sexual gratification was this sad, successful and horny actor – he was a little bit older than me, pretty cute, funny, also super depressed. The sad, successful and horny actor was struggling with a whole slew of physical, emotional and psychological problems. He definitely had the deep and beautiful and impossible wounds going on, not to mention an extremely weird dog. Weirdest dog I’ve ever seen. I called the sad, successful, horny actor, Dead Inside Man. D-I-M. Dim. 

DIM's weird dog

Dim has been going to therapy twice a week for twenty-seven and half years. He just discovered his inner child and so he spends a great deal of time lying on the couch and soothing his inner child. And every once in a while he lets me hump his leg which is very fun. After the leg hump, I ask him how he’s doing

Mostly Dim says, “I feel so sad and tired and broken.”

“There, there,” I reply, patting his head. And I offer consolation with a special imaginary flag. Eventually, Dim lets me hump his leg again, and it’s wonderful. One time after a nice leg hump, Dim gives me a nice speech.

“You know, Erica,” he says. “You’re lovely. You’re amazing. But… I just really don’t want to get too attached to you. You know?”

“Oh you too? How interesting! But that’s okay,” I say quickly. “That’s perfect. You are exactly what I'm looking for.”

Dead Inside Man is so neurotic that for him to drive four and half hours to see me would be this massive ordeal, and mostly unrealistic. Plus he has that really weird dog. So pretty much we’re confined to being pen pals. But Dim does think I’m spectacular and this brings me great comfort.

Every night, I’ve trained Dim to text me, “E-x, o-h, e-x, o-h.”

For now, Dim is a little too dead inside for eggplants, but maybe we can work on it.

The End.

Ex, Oh.
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Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go

Bodhisattva Business Ventures:

Deep Cleans by Erica J. Schmidt (@deepcleanswitherica)
Montreal Hippie Threads (@mtlhippiethreads)
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Soul Fucking
Not That Kind of Girl
Mythological Unconditional Love

 

The Benefits of a Vegan Life Coach

Long or short, every temporary source of sexual gratification leaves you with something that will follow you all the days of your life. The Vegan Life Coach was hardly an exception to this. Having long ago processed VLC inflicted pubic hair, forehead wrinkle and vaginal recorder baggage, I remain primarily and perpetually grateful to him for his following areas of influence:

1.       An unwavering commitment to the Ashtanga Yoga practice. When I first met the Vegan Life Coach, I was certain that six days a week was far too many. I was entirely set on taking every Tuesday off, for no particular reason. The Vegan Life Coach convinced me otherwise. Eventually the Vegan Life Coach was banned from the studio. Darby said that he caused too many disruptions. I, however, kept practicing as though my life depended on it. Perhaps it did. The habit stuck for seven and a half years.

2.       A fancy looking bottle of red wine that costs less than $12. It was called Borsao, and it had an orange label. I think it was from Spain. In 2007, it cost $11.45. When I brought it to parties, I appeared quite a lot more sophisticated than I really was.  At their first sip, my hosts would nod, so very approvingly. “Just pairs well with everything, doesn’t it?” I’d say. As though I had any idea.




Borsao, Very Fancy



3.       Excellent Guacamole Recipe. Today’s blog has resorted to a list. Will it also resort to recipes? No, absolutely not. But here are the ingredients, from most to least: Avocadoes, tomatoes, red onions, garlic, salt, turmeric and cumin. The Vegan Coach said that it was all very good for inflammation, and cold sores. I like to eat guacamole with corn chips which is probably also very fabulous for inflammation and cold sores. When I moved to Halifax to date slash live with the Boatman, corn chips became a food group. This was one of the Boatman’s many wonderful areas of influence. The big secret is that Restaurant Tostitos are actually much more delicious than any of the colourful organic types that come in biodegradable packages. We experimented extensively. I am going on a picnic today, in case you couldn’t guess.

Excellent Guacamole, from comfytummy.com
Perhaps VLC Guacamole looks like this.
Food Selfies are typically beyond me.



Not surprisingly, the last time I saw the Vegan Life Coach was at a vegan restaurant. His skin glistened with sweat, and he appeared rather thin. He demonstrated a polite and convincing level of interest in my life in Halifax, my job at the Montessori school, and my creative endeavours.

“So, what are you writing about these days?” he asked.

“Oh, well, a bunch of stuff,” I replied. “I still write about you sometimes,”

“Well, you know,” he told me. “What you write about other people reveals a lot about how you feel about yourself.”

I couldn’t make this guy up if I tried.

The End

Avocadoes

A note about avocadoes: Everyone has experienced the dilemma of avocadoes being either terribly hard or mushy and brown. Together, the Boatman and I derived deep wisdom about avocadoes. Hopefully, this will follow us all the days of our lives. I am sharing this wisdom with you now. Should you find yourself in possession of a hard avocado, put it in a paper bag. You can place it next to ripe or ripening bananas, though I myself feel that banana flavours morph into everything they touch. But the paper bag, this works. Once the avocadoes are soft to touch, put them in the fridge. There they will transform into a state of magical creaminess, and for quite a long time, this magical creaminess will remain available for you to spread across toast, or crackers, or to dice into salad, or mash into guacamole, or engage in whatever other applicable avocado activity you can think of.

Good luck.

Follow me on Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook

More goodies from the Vegan Life Coach, which reveal a great deal with regards to how I feel about myself:

The Day Yoga Almost Gave Me A Stroke       
The Sperm Cleanse
(Ashtanga Yoga and Oral Sex was reverted to draft.)

 However you feel about avocadoes, you should definitely watch the Vegan Life Coach video at least once. I have definitely watched it at least once. OM.

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

The Benefits of an Ashtanga Yoga Practice, Part Two

Ocean Invertebrate Personality Quiz (for those of you without a Vegan Life Coach)



 

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

 

Peanut Butter, Pubic Hair

Somehow I have made it through three and a half years of blogging without inflicting friends and strangers with my long elevator speech about pubic hair. Pubic hair used to be my Designated Issue. A Designated Issue is a matter you deem to be of such utmost importance that should you succeed at dealing with it, then all of your problems will disintegrate. Common designated issues include paying off your mortgage, finding a life partner, or perhaps finally achieving a sought after yoga posture. Once you cross the Designated Issue finish line, the whole world becomes easy. In my early twenties, this is how I felt about pubic hair. A good friend of mine from high school shared in my misery. Because we had thick curly hair on our heads, we were certain that the hairy reality down there was much worse than everyone else’s. The roots ran deeper and our razors left behind itchier, redder and more hideous bumps.

Also, I’d been traumatized by the Vegan Life Coach who had once complained that the hairy abundance on my nether regions was “not aesthetically pleasing.”

One summer I was back for a visit to my home town, when my friend and I decided that enough was enough. It was time to get our bushes ripped off professionally. We found a newly certified aesthetician who raved about the sugar wax she used to complete her full Brazilians. I have yet to find anyone quite as cheerful and enthusiastic about ripping out pubes.

“It won’t hurt that much at all,” she promised.  The cost was 35 dollars. We considered drinking beforehand but our appointment was at noon and we decided that maybe this was too early. My friend popped a couple of advil and I went in sober.

“This will be so easy. You’re so flexible,” said the Cheerful Ripper. Then I took off my underpants. “Wow.” she said. Our sessions took about 45 minutes each. I tried not to make too much noise. My poor friend cried out profusely and consistently. It was the closest I have come to witnessing a birth.

“You guys are hairy beasts,” the Cheerful Ripper exclaimed. When it was all over, my fellow Hairy Beast had sweat stains down to her waist.

“You’re going to feel so great though,” the Cheerful Ripper promised. As fate would have it, we felt okay.

Back in Montreal a few days later, I walked up the stairs to my apartment after biking home from the yoga studio. Something felt a bit off. In the bathroom, I found a large pinkish bump along my groin.

Even though I hadn’t had sex in ages, I felt absolutely certain that I had herpes. I walked across the street to the hospital where I begged for a spot at the walk-in clinic. Three and a half hours later, the doctor on call said that herpes was highly unlikely. She took a swab anyways and suggested I might come to the hospital’s anxiety workshops.

My herpes scare provided no cure for my Designated Issue. I made room in my poor student budget to get my pubes waxed off every four weeks or so. I also had to budget for alcohol since going sober was far too painful and humiliating. In the metro, I sipped Mason jars filled with fruit juice and vodka. Mostly I went to little spas run by Asian women. Alas, none of them had sugar wax and I often hobbled away with a burning, pockmarked crotch.

“Oh. Very hairy,” said almost every single aesthetician I went to.

“The ass?” one lady asked after forty five minutes of seething torture. I rolled over and spread my cheeks.

After a few months of this, I found a lady in Old Montreal who used sugar wax. Everything in her spa was maroon and felt very exotic. Even so, aggressive ripping was still involved and my pubic area continued to suffer from its fair share of blood and pock marks. At least I was pretty sure it wasn’t herpes.

One time the ingrown hairs were particularly bad.

“You have infection,” said the Exotic Sugar Lady. “You are touching. Don’t touch!” Through my vodka buzz, I tried to promise Exotic Sugar Lady that in fact, I didn’t spend my spare time rubbing my ingrown hairs. She didn’t believe me. Cheerful Ripper suggested using a dry brush. This brought only moderate success, and as my student loans dwindled away, I felt it was harder to justify the 50 dollar monthly expense.

I gave home waxing a try and managed for about a year. This practice left me patchy and blotchy. It also became less sustainable as my tolerance for drinking during the day consistently decreased. I asked my fellow Hairy Beast how the pube situation was going, and she reported, “I just shave the sides and call it a day.”

In preparation for my Sex Trip to go see the Boatman in Halifax, I decided I would try for a similar tactic. I used a combination of the sketchy toxic smelling nair, a new razor and some tweezers. The Boatman had no complaints, but within a few days I was itchy and pockmarked. Despite this, the Boatman still invited me to move in with him.

When I arrived in Halifax a week later, we obviously got into the habit of having sex every day. Eventually, the Boatman noticed my red marks that had become worse from persistent shaving.
“You know, babe,” he said. “You should just let yourself heal. Let it grow.”

Over the past three and half years, there have been a multitude of signs that the Boatman and I are meant for each other. The “Let it grow” speech is one of these signs. From a bare waxed vag to a seventies bush, the Boatman is happy with all of it.

“It’s all about variety,” he says. What a saint.

Judging from models at the Boatman’s life drawing nights, it seems that almost all adults around my age have joined the “Hairless Generation.” Although zero pubes can be fun, exhilarating and exfoliating, it should definitely not be obligatory. To be repulsed if someone lacks the bald crotch of a seven year old seems highly questionable.
 



Caption: Life Drawing Model from the Hairless Generation

Drawing by the Boatman

Follow the Boatman on TUMBLR at verysatisfied.tumblr.com

 

That said, I hear that in India, you can get yourself waxed for pretty cheap. I thought maybe this would be a relatively interesting experience for the blog. Since I don’t wear Kino shorts, I was all set to let my pubes grow for the occasion. Then my friend invited me to a secret silent pool for the afternoon. I decided that this would be an excellent opportunity to chat while attempting to even out the farmer’s tan that I’ve developed from constantly covering my shoulders. Of course I would come. With bells. Despite my sincere efforts to have a fully liberated crotch, I had mixed feelings about letting stray hairs poke out the sides of my red two-piece bathing suit. My waxing excursion would have to be postponed. So I shaved the sides and called it a day.

Probably red bumps appeared within approximately 27 and a half minutes.

Oh well. At least it looked like I tried.

The End.

 



The Kino shorts that got lost in the mail, giving me a pass on grooming.
Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
My $2.99 self-help book, I Let Go

Menstrual Blood, Peanut Butter
I cling to things until they die
Everything You Need To Know About Butt Club
Spiritual Beard, Secular Vagina
 



 





 

The Sperm Cleanse

On Monday, my uterus or ovaries or some part of my reproductive system near my vagina was about to produce a new follicle.  Loads of creativity was about to erupt into my existence.  You can tell that this happened from the prolific, eloquent and delightful posts that have erupted onto my blog.  My last post was two weeks ago. The yogis say that men should save their seeds and avoid ejaculating regularly so that their bodies are not depleted from the arduous task of making new sperm.  My teacher Darby's son Shankara used to go on and on about this in teacher training.  There were only three men in our class and Shankara blamed this on the fact that all the other dudes were busy jerking off, blowing their loads.  After their strenuous masturbation sessions, they'd have no choice but to pass out on the couch in a half-assed attempt to regenerate their sperm.  The yogis say that instead of ejaculating out their dicks, men should apply various techniques such as squeezing their anuses and or moula bandhas.  Then the sperms will stay within them and the life force usually released in ejaculation can be redirected to heal organs or travel up the spine or something else that is similarly interesting.  Fluid Free Ejaculation.  I'm just wondering if perhaps the process of making new sperm could be healthy and therapeutic and inspirational.  Just as in exercise you break down muscles so that you can build newer, stronger and more, limber ones, it might be good to expel old stagnant sperm and then come up with something better.

Pattabhi Jois, Johanne Darby and Shankara Darby, inside his mother the day before he was born.



Today, Shankara likes to save his seed. And we know that he came from a good seed.

If a sperm is ever going to enter my uterus, I want it to be brand new and excited to be alive.  All this is very scientific. Probably sperms die anyways and the balls or whatever organ is involved makes new ones.  But is this as useful as a Sperm Cleanse?

In her awesome Ted Talk, "Loving Your Lady Parts as a Path to Success," Alisa Vitti talks about  the different phases of your menstrual cycle and how you can adjust and maximize your life according to the flow.  I wonder if there is a similar option for men.The vegan life coach used to say that he had to cum two times a day.  Less than that, I can't remember what happened.  More than that he felt drained and drowsy.  Just before we stopped dating he was figuring out the dry ejaculation thing.  He was very proud of himself.  Moula bandha and whatnot up his spine, and he felt SO GOOD.

At the time, most of the orgasms of my life were internalized and/or non-existent.  The vegan life coach never inspired either kinds of orgasm.  Not even that time I got drunk on the Easter weekend and went to his house and got more wine.  I lay face down blindfolded on his bed, and I felt something cold and plastic enter inside of me.  Whatever it was made a faint flute sound.  The tune was unrecognizable.  Then I recognized what the object inside of me was.  A recorder.  I wondered if the recorder had been inside anyone else.  In any case, it didn't do it for me.

Recorder teachers have terrible karma in this life time.  For their next life time, I imagine that things will be better.

Boy plays blue recorder

That was the End.  Approximately.

When I was a little girl, I played the recorder, and also the trombone.  I practiced very diligently.

This post was supposed to be about sperm, but the vagina got the last word.  The vagina, and then the recorders.

Happy Father's Day.

This Day has lots to do with Sperm, if you really think about it, or even if you think about it even just a little bit.

Sperms, Barbecues, and Mowing the Lawn.

The End, Precisely

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

Menstrual Blood, Peanut Butter
The Benefits of an Ashtanga Yoga Practice, Part Two
The Benefits of a Vegan Life Coach