Vipassana Diaries: Why I Like to Pee Outside

Kino MacGregor insists that you can’t hurt yourself meditating.

Kino MacGregor can pull her leg all the way behind her shoulder and then her foot hooks under her armpit and it doesn’t seem like this hurts her very much.

 Kino MacGregor and I are different

Kino MacGregor and I are different. Just like Margaret Atwood and I are different. Going into Vipassana, I could sit cross-legged relatively comfortably for half an hour. Still, I was positive that sitting for ten hours a day was going to break my knees, and probably also my hips, and maybe a few other parts while I was at it. When I am not meditating, I masturbate on the internet, inhaling thousands of yoga blogs. I have been devouring Matthew Reski’s series WAWADIA: What Are We Actually Doing In Asana. It’s a qualitative study on injuries in yoga. Of course I have devoured the whole thing. In one of the articles, Matthew interviews a guy who went to Vipassana. Someone this guy knew there had to do six months of physio for her knee afterwards. And I’d heard of a friend of a friend who had herniated her disc, just trying to meditate.

A phrase from the internet haunted my head, “Many meditators injure themselves meditating on non-violence.”

I was determined that this violence would not happen to me.  I spent my first two and a half days at vipassana frantically obsessing over the best and most sustainable position. Three cushions under my butt, two under each knee. Vice versa. Two under my knee with the bad I.T. band. Oh but then I’m imbalanced, what if I get compensatory pain? Yes, definitely there was compensatory pain. My vacillations went on and on. As for the pain, well, it wasn’t quite extreme, but I did feel some irritation above my left knee on the outside. And often when I got up, my hip felt sort of jammed, so I had to click it back into place. Although the sound of my hip was disgusting, I'm pretty sure my issues were mostly due to my tight I.T. band and probably not because of some surgery-requiring problem.  Even so, I fretted relentlessly. After two and a half days, I thought, the hell with this; I’m straightening my legs. I propped myself up on a mountain of cushions, and extended both legs diagonally in a v-shape with loads more cushions underneath. Smugly, I looked around the room as everyone else creaked themselves into folded legs and anatomically questionable versions of virasana. “Erica,” I thought to myself. “You have the best seat in the house.”

Surely, I’d be spared of both agony and surgery. Well, you’ll see how that went. On Day Four of the course, Goenka introduced the Vipassana technique. Up until then, we’d been luxuriating in Anapana, the delightful task of observing the breath below our nostrils. During this time, I alternated between being very bored, being very sleepy, being very hungry, being very obsessed about how I would starve because there was no dinner, and being very pissed off at a number of people, including Sri W Ham Wrap who once said that my yoga practice was violent and harmful. (I just wrote Hamful by mistake. How funny.)  What a blast. Then the Vipassana technique opened up a whole new exciting world. Instead of being stuck on our nostrils, now we got to move our attention from head to feet.  It was like going from no internet to suddenly getting a U.S. Netflix subscription. I remember walking out of our first session with immense relief. Thank God, I thought almost laughing. No more nostrils. But it felt like my sit bones had punctured through my ass. And I wondered if maybe my hamstrings were being overstretched.

On Day Five of Vipassana, Goenka wanted us to start cultivating adhittana, which means “strong determination.” Apparently the best way of doing this is to endure one-hour sits of extreme stillness three times a day. No opening your eyes, no opening your hands, no changing your legs. Having taken refuge in rules from a young age, I was all over this. Though my legs were uncrossed, I sat like the stillest Buddha in the world. The stillest and the stiffest. It usually took 25 or 30 minutes before my sit bones started to pierce my ass flesh to such an extent that I thought my ass might start to bleed. The rest of my ass wasn’t doing well either. I could feel intense stretching on either side. One of Matthew Remski’s case studies was about an unfortunate Ashtanga yoga teacher who tore all her glute muscles off her hipbone. She had been doing a bunch of hip openers to deal with a knee injury. Then one day after meditating, she did a tiny wide legged forward bend and pop, pop, pop, went all the muscles on her ass. At the end of Day Six, I felt certain that my injury would be even more serious. Both sides of my ass seethed in horrendous agony. Lying in bed around 9:30 p.m., I decided that all my butt muscles were pulling at my sacrum.  It was only a matter of time, likely just five minutes, before the muscles dislocated from my sacrum, my spine went to hell and then Erica’s greatest fear of being in a wheelchair would come true. I sobbed, alone, in my cubicle of a room.

“It’s going to break.” I said out loud, breaking the noble silence to announce my imminent spinal cord injury. My roommates in the other cubicles weren’t allowed to say anything back. I kept sobbing. “Sorry,” I said. I lay down on the floor, stunned by the torture. Finally the day of my Big Catastrophe had come. Ever since I was really small, I’ve been waiting for the day when something horrible and irreversible would happen to my body. Broken spinal cords, esophageal cancer, the flesh-eating disease. I’ve been anticipating my disaster since my parents took me to the Niagara Falls wax museum and I saw the wax statue of Terry Fox who only had one leg. Now my disaster was happening on Day 6 of jolly old Goenka’s vipassana retreat.

Within about twenty minutes the spasms or whatever was going on in my ass finally stopped. Later, I learned that during that night, I’d called out in my sleep. “I knew it!,” I’d yelled. I don’t remember saying this, but I do remember dreaming about Katy Bowman. Katy Bowman is a biomechanist and author who advocates as much natural movement as possible for the benefit of your pelvis and all the cells in your body. And she thinks that almost everyone in the Western World needs a stronger butt.

“Yah, I was at Vipassana,” I told Katy in my dream. “But it was too much.” While I was dreaming, I also remember having the very clear intention of doing a bunch of butt exercises. Sadly, the time and location never worked out. The butt exercises kept getting postponed. (Kind of like Butt Club in Mysore).

The gong rang at 4 a.m. Although I was quite relieved that I wasn’t yet in a wheelchair, I felt absolutely ready to trade in both yoga and meditation for a lifetime of butt exercises and/or anything else.  My ass didn’t hurt as much, but now I felt certain that there was inflammation behind my right knee, the one without the I.T. band problem. Upon careful examination, I realized that the bulge was merely my hamstring tendon.

I dragged myself to the meditation hall late and left when I had to shit. Instead of returning, I went for a walk in the little loop in the forest. It was pitch black. For someone terrified of a spinal cord injury, this wasn’t the most logical behaviour; however, I figured I’d already survived yesterday’s very close call and I wanted to work on my night vision. After a couple of times around the loop, I had to piss and so I pulled up my skirt and peed in the woods. I thought that this was quite scandalous for a vipassana retreat. I did not get any pee on my sandals.

In the afternoon, I went to see the meditation instructor. It was nice of her to view my body hysteria, not as severe, neurotic dysfunction, but rather as my sankaras coming to the surface. Sankaras are deep-rooted mental or behavioral patterns that tend to lead you into the same types situations over and over again. (The yogis often call them “samskaras.”) Some of my sankaras that fall into similar categories include going to the emergency room to see if my ingrown pubic hair is Herpes,  or imagining having to get my esophagus replaced with a piece of my colon, or worrying about getting a foot infection in India that will end with me losing my legs. When I told the instructor about the spinal cord injury scare, she suggested that maybe I was a bit too strict with myself. “Torturing yourself, this is not Vipassana," she said. “Vipassana is not the posture.” She gave the option of a chair, or a back support, if it got too painful. I considered becoming a chair person, but one of my life’s biggest rants is about the dangers of sitting in chairs. It’s up there with potty training, and sun salutations, and maybe also pubic hair waxing. I decided I would try one more day on the floor. If my sacrum seemed at risk and I had to sit in a chair, well then, so be it. The rest of this story is about how I ended up sitting cross-legged and sort of relaxed for about seventeen minutes. You are probably better off reading this excellent zine that the Boatman bought called, “Why I Like to Pee Outside.” It is so great. I even brought it to India with me and read it to some wonderful Canadians I met in the line-up to register with Sharath.

Zine: “Why I Like to Pee Outside,” by Amanda Stevens,
bent from its long trip to India

The Author Amanda Stevens made the zine at a 24-hour Zinemaking Challenge in Halifax in 2008. “Why I Like to Pee Outside” describes the Unnamed Protagonist’s journey of how she grew to love peeing outside. It is full of informative and compelling diagrams, lists and essential techniques. The unnamed protagonist used to be afraid of peeing on her pants or on her shoes. She even considered getting “one of those spouts that make peeing outside easier for people with vulvas.” But she practiced and practiced and now she can do it the way it’s meant to be done.

Peeing Outside, the way it's meant to be done. Watch out for pee splattering off the ground

“It’s a bit of a thrill,” says the Unnamed Protagonist. “It feels slightly transgressive and unladylike, especially when there’s a possibility of being seen doing it. It also makes me feel like I’m getting back to my natural self.” This is how I felt when I peed outside at vipassana. Thrilled, transgressive, and unladylike, and more like my animal self. 


Peeing outside: Thrilling, Transgressive and Unladylike

As fate would have it, peeing outside happens to be excellent for your pelvis, butt muscles included. Katy Bowman recommends peeing outside as often as possible. And I think that she would be happy with Amanda’s squatting diagram.

At the end of “Why I like to pee outside,” the Unnamed Protagonist dresses up as a Girl Guide for Halloween and her friend makes her a badge for peeing outside. Overall, “Why I like to Pee Outside” is a thoroughly satisfying read. I tried to contact Amanda about where people can find more copies. If you’re in Mysore, you can borrow mine.

If you have interesting techniques for peeing outside or a peeing outside story to share, you should email Amanda at redheadwalkingas@yahoo.ca. And/or share them at the end of this blog.

In India, people pee outside all the time. In Mysore, for the most part, you only see dudes.

The End.

I’m not sure how I mentioned so many things in one blog.  Perhaps to some of you, this is not all that surprising.

I don’t have time to edit because my father and his girlfriend are visiting and they are way better tourists than I am.

Oh well, think of all the people I promoted:

Kino MacGregor

Margaret Atwood: Once I wrote a story called, Why I am Different From Margaret Atwood and What I Don't Gain From Humping Duvets. It used to be all over the internet. Now I can only find a version with very strange formatting. Well, if you're dying to read it, I can hook you up, perhaps for the price of three coconuts. Haggling welcome. 

Goenka

Matthew Remski: Check out the prospectus for his WAWADIA book. And/or Contribute to his Indigogo Campaign

Terry Fox: Legs

Katy Bowman Katy's Cool Blog My Raving Review of her new book, Move Your DNA

Sri. W. Ham Wrap

Amanda Stevens, author of “Why I Like to Pee Outside.” I messaged her on Facebook raving about her Zine. Unfortunately, I got the wrong Amanda Stevens. Better luck next time.

And Myself:

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

Do Not Kill Your Baby

 

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, my $2.99 self-help book
Don't forget to send me your peeing outside stories!!!

 

The Vipassana Diaries: Food Belly

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

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

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

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

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

Nostrils, nostrils, nostrils…

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

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

It was an okay strategy.

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

Even though I was bored, I felt calm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Happy Goenka

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

The End/To Be Continued…

Other News:

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

Here we are on the flight from Ottawa to Halifax.

Me and the Boatman. Dorky and delighted

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

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



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

More from the Vipassana Diaries:

Our lives will never be the same

Last Practice Before Vipassana
 

Bus 

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

   

The Vipassana Diaries: Day Zero

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“21,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Mr. Goenka. Charming fellow, I would later discover

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

The End.
(Stay tuned.)



Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook

Twitter: @mypelvicfloor

I Let Go by Erica J. Schmidt

More from the Vipassana Diaries:

Our lives will never be the same

Last Practice Before Vipassana

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