menstrual mantra

i've started yoga. three times a week, a woman comes to our flat and trains me for an hour in traditional yoga. it's slow, methodical stretching, involving just as much mental energy as it does physical. it's not the fitnessy-weight loss-inducing yoga i'm used to - but it's nice, it feels good, i'm sore afterward, and i'm already feeling more flexible and able to fall sleep easier than i was when i started nearly a month ago. so i'm happy with it.

my teacher is an indian who grew up in australia. she spent the past 6 years living in an ashram in northern india. the 5 years previous to that were also spent in an ashram, off and on. she knows what she's doing. she tells me all these crazy stories about people who've cured their cancer through traditional yoga and meditation, just like what she's teaching me. i usually just smile when she says things like this. i WANT to believe that if something horrible health-wise happens to me (knock on wood) that i'll be able to get rid of it by doing what i'm learning, but i'm also a firm believer in science, medicine, and doctors - which tend to have a pretty great success record in curing diseases, as well. and so much of that is luck anyway, right?

anyway - she thinks of herself as a sort of little healer, and whatever - why not?!

so today we were going through my routine and she noticed i wasn't doing so well. i told her that i'd just started my "charms" (as it's called here in india), and i had dreadfully painful cramps. she yelled at me for not telling her in the first place, and then changed my routine to help deal with the pain.

the end of the routine is normally spent laying on my back, focusing on relaxing and meditating. it's a somewhat brain-intensive sort of concentration on relaxing and whatnot, as she talks and tells me what to think about. today she focused on my problem. she told me to put my hands on my lower abdomen, to focus all of my energy there, and to repeat what she called my menstrual mantra, "my uterus is relaxed. my uterus is relaxed. my cervix is relaxed. my cervix is relaxed. my vagina is relaxed. my vagina is relaxed." repeat, repeat, repeat.

i was up until that point feeling quite relaxed, the pain in my girly parts had actually subsided. that was not to last. i burst out laughing, she got annoyed, and my lower abdomen knotted up in cramps again.

oh well. i'll try again next month.

missing package mystery solved

way back around thanksgiving, my mom sent me a package. i had asked her for licorice, emergen-c packets, and crossword books. it never came. m said it was because i had never tipped our postman. i say that's rubbish, and he shouldn't be expecting a tip - he gets paid to do his job! and besides ... that postman was always super rude. i was upset over never getting the package, but chalked it up to good ol' india and part of the whole experience. yesterday, i got this email from my mom:

Hi, guess what I got in the mail today? The package I mailed to you way back when of licorice, vitamin powders, and a crossword book! It had a stamp on it that said "examined" and I peeked inside, it was gross, and the licorice bag was there but empty. It had something black in the bottom, I didn't dare look any deeper into it! It was like sewn shut and taped on the other end and so dirty! Let me know if you get the postcard I send to you from the beach. Lots of love, mom

INDIAAAAA!!

(i think my favorite part of the email is my mom's use of the word LIKE in this sentence: "It was like sewn shut and taped on the other end and so dirty!" ... it's like cute.)