Do You Meditate?

Content Warning: Graphic description of eating disorders, a Prozac overdose, and meditation.

“Do you meditate?” asked the Million-Dollar Chiropractor. It was July 2021. I was weeping on her table as she engaged in some esoteric dialogue with my body and soul. Apparently, my body had lost all the joy of being alive.

At her question, I cried harder.

Everybody always says that.

In my youth, I talked fast and endlessly. It didn’t take long for strangers to learn all about my career in therapy as a patient, my professional eating disorder, my failure to live up to my enormous potential, my grief over the prince of the month or the year—my therapist, the Generic Married Man, the Star of My Life’s Most Beautiful Blogging Fairy Tale, my ex-ex-boyfriend Simon the Hermit who jumped off a building on January 4, 2015. Following my turbulent rambles, people would often ask, “Do you meditate?” As though this held the cure to my long-winded angst.

In my youth, I meditated. It began as part of an Olympic Yoga Routine, the kind where you show up with an empty stomach at the ass crack of every dawn, ready to bend and twist all the folds and crevices of your body into some blissful state. Leg behind the head. Twenty-two thousand different ways of going upside down. At the end of every practice, my charismatic middle-aged guru-like teacher would help me fold my spine in half and bring my hands to my ankles and some days, my knees. It seemed as though living up to your enormous potential meant getting your face as close to your crotch as possible. For optimal results, don’t eat too much.

In my youth, I did not eat too much. Or, sometimes I did, but then I would throw up—in my mouth, or else in the toilet, or else a little bit of both. Before I “graduated” to puking, I inhaled packages of Ex-lax, snuck into my shopping cart at the grocery store between the chocolate chips and all-purpose flour, ingredients for my teenage baking project and imminent binge.

I always felt there was something disastrous about my eating disorder and sought help early on. First the guidance counsellor, then the psych ward. At seventeen years old and my second hospitalization, my medical team recommended I attend day treatment. Five days a week, I’d eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks with other hungry teenagers. As we digested, we would sit on green couches and talk about our feelings, or so I imagined. I was horrified and tried to refuse.

“I’ll be fine,” I told Dr. Feder, the head of the program. “I’m gonna learn how to meditate. And stand on my head.” I was convinced this would fix everything.

“And do school,” said Dr. Feder, his doubtful eyes bright yet firm. “And swimming. And write in the paper.” And be a lifeguard. And play the trombone in the band. And coach three swim team groups. Plus, one-on-one sessions with two swimmers who had disabilities. Plus, take care of my foster brother with cerebral palsy on the weekends. I may also have been dabbling in violin. Also dabbling in being a Christian.

“Maybe God could help,” I suggested.

Dr. Feder was not convinced. “God’s busy,” he said. His pressed shirt and tamed curly hair meant all business.

“It sounds like you are clinging to your superficial activities,” he said. “But if you don’t do the work on the deeper stuff, you might not accomplish what you really want to achieve.” Worse than that, “You might not make it.” This was long before the life coaches on Instagram were calling out to all of us to follow them and “do the work” and “manifest the life of our wildest dreams.”

What I’m wondering is, what exactly is “doing the work”? Who gets to flaunt that they’ve done it and that they’re worth listening to, and finally, where do I get the badge that my work is all done?

At the hospital, a fellow overachieving friend had lent me “The Power of Now,” by Eckart Tolle. From the first page, I gathered that I was not my mind, that I was supposed to be able to transcend my destructive thoughts and negativity.

“Seems like a lot of work,” I wrote in my journal. “I am extremely constipated.” I bailed on page two and switched to Margaret Atwood. Cat’s Eye, I think it was.

At the eating disorder program, I learned how to ingest 2750 calories which included 1125 mL of 2% milk to fill my empty geriatric bones. I did not learn how to stop puking in my mouth. Two-way digestion prevailed. For years, between episodes of full-on starving and purging, I had this obscure condition called Rumination Syndrome. Like the symptom itself, it is tedious and embarrassing to explain. How it worked was, for the better part of a decade, after every meal and snack I would puke in my mouth and reswallow. Over and over again until whatever I was eating—toast and peanut butter, veggie paté, low-fat vanilla frozen yogurt—would become bitter and abhorrent. Kind of makes you want to throw up in your mouth.

In any case, at age 21, within about a week of daily, religious yoga, the puke in my mouth suddenly vanished. I’d traded it in for temporary sexual gratification with a fellow yoga enthusiast I would later call the Vegan Life Coach. I had also swapped out cooked food and animal products with “clean eating.” This entailed a great deal of smoothies and salads. Eight months in, and I was starving. You can see where this might end.

Was I meditating? Yes, every day.

My middle-aged yoga teacher—not the Vegan Life Coach—the one who helped me fold my spine in half, recommended that I meditate on a different chakra every month. In case you don’t know what chakras are, they are colourful, otherworldly balls of energy that are spaced out vertically along your spine. The red one sits at the base of your spine at your coccyx and on the crown of your head. There’s a purple one at the crown of your head and all the way up your spine, the other chakras are the other colours of the rainbow. When they spin at an optimal speed and vibration, they make your organs and body parts and life feel fabulous and it’s a great deal. But when we got to the throat chakra month, the wheel of energy around my trachea was burning with noxious acid. I did not feel fabulous. I could not transcend the burning or the self-disgust. And so, I quit.

All the chakras, Red-to-Purple.

Years later, I was 23 going on 24. Fresh out of university, I was desperate to be a rich and famous writer, and then maybe translate and teach yoga on the side. Instead, I was a lifeguard at a tiny, empty, glass-bottomed pool at the Westin Hotel. I was dying to quit puking in my mouth. It felt like quit or bust. And so, I meditated—staring at the glistening water that looked over the valets directing fancy cars in the parking lot. I sat straight on the deck, my sit bones and feet pressing into the cold tiles. My ankles and shins went numb. 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes. I wanted my soul and my cells transformed. Customers would trickle in with their towels and I’d be pissed they were interrupting my path to serenity.

How did the path to serenity go? My last day of puking in my mouth was March 17, 2011. I’m sure meditation helped, but there was also a great deal of knuckle grinding involved. I did a stint in amateur binge drinking and messy sex with my ex-ex-boyfriend Simon the Hermit. And then I was off to Halifax to join the Star of My Life’s Most Beautiful Blogging Fairy Tale where I lived happily ever after for three-and-a-half years. During that time, my favourite kind of meditating was during my breaks at the Montessori school where I taught children how to wash their hands and push in their chairs in French. I used to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to get my Olympic Yoga Routine in before running after preschoolers all day. The school was at a church and after lunch—washed down by four square inches of dark chocolate—I would go to the sanctuary and sit on the red carpet with a hymn book balanced on my head. For 28 minutes, I’d fall fast asleep sitting up, the children’s needy faces disappearing, the chocolate seizing my fragile enamel.

If my memoirs-turned-novel ever get published and you read them, you’ll find countless references to me meditating while balancing the only hardcover book I owned—Women Who Run with the Wolves—on my head. My twelfth therapist, who is struck by my newfound “allergy” to mindfulness, wonders what purpose the book served. I think I was just trying not to slouch.

During the balancing-a-book-on-my-head stage, I overdosed on Prozac by accident. As I came down from low-grade mania, meditation left me twitchy, angsty, and sometimes even suicidal. There’s probably some Buddhist technique or Eckart Tolle advice to remedy this. I never looked into it. Eventually, my nervous system calmed down, and meditation went from being rageful to just a little boring. A frustrating reminder of my busy mind and the fact that I’d rather be doing something else. So, I decided to do something else. Until one Monday morning, in the throes of this endless, bleak winter, day 95 of the 29th COVID wave, I woke up weary from a massive explosion within a complicated friendship. Funny what suffering can lead you to do. I set my timer for 11 minutes and 11 seconds and proceeded to stare out the window.

“I can be joyful, just by being alive.” Back at the Million-Dollar Chiropractor’s, she was trying to convince my body that being alive was a gift. “Oh, it looks like that sends you into shock.” Oops. She meant well.

Do you meditate?

Anytime somebody asks me this I want to tell them, yes, I do meditate. And I walk one-to-three hours per day. I’m religious about bedtime and vacuuming and laundry. I eat sensibly. I never go a day without leaving the house. Or giving myself one-to-four orgasms. I see close friends on a regular basis. I turn off my phone and the Internet between 10 and 7 a.m. I write morning pages. I made the switch to decaf. I file my taxes on time. I contribute to RRSPs. And charity. I go to therapy. I do a moderate version of high-intensity interval training. I play the ukulele. I declutter. I stretch.

This is my best shot at doing the work. At the life of my wildest dreams. Some days this goes really great. And other times, it looks like me, crying my face off, not living up to my enormous potential, not infused with the joy of being alive. But you have no idea how hard I am trying. So please don’t ask me if I meditate.  

(Written in April, 2022)