Habits birth easy
This is what I needed, Veena thought between happy inhales and exhales filled with the human exhaust of negativity and carbon dioxide. Yesterday’s depression about the placid roll of inertia she called her life began to metabolise with all that well-portioned oxygen. A slow breaking down and a slow breaking into smile.”This is so good. Why didn’t I try yoga before?” She smiled her way through the padmasanas and the laboured downward dogs. The smile became a little bit of a grimace at the Suryanamaskar. But what’s a little pain for a whole lot of gain.
For the next few weeks, yoga took over her life like how a new toy does a five year old. She spent hours on Youtube watching videos. She spent a chunk of her salary on yoga pants. She had them in every colour. Blue. Black. Grey. Hot Pink. Fiery Red. If they made her butt look big, she didn’t care. She was on a diet of positive vibes and hot infatuation. At work, she raved breathlessly about breathing right like she had invented the stuff and lectured Neha about her misaligned chakras and migraine.
Slowly the yoga pants began to wrap their lycra coils tighter. And the diet began to feel like a prison.The saccharine positivity was nauseating and the Pranayama just didn’t cut it. The midriff conquered new territory and the yoga mat inched further away into a corner of the room to accommodate the sudden need for real estate. Sugar was once reinstated as lord king and it continued its autocratic rule in true “once-scorned emperor” style. With supercharged malice and shipping no mercy. With the sugar, came the spikes. And with the spikes, came the inverted spikes - the lows. With the lows came more eating. With more eating, came the gradual but steadily growing stronger resemblance to a depressed whale, wearing bad-quality, non waterproof mascara.
First the sadness came just for tea. Then it stayed on for dinner. Then it stayed the night. Then it never got out of its pyjamas. It took over her favourite chair and sat watching the home shopping channel.
It was the home shopping channel that inspired the cooking phase. She ordered the easy chopper, the easy grinder, the easy spatula and the easy pan. Sauces poured and juices flowed. Pies came out golden and cakes moist. Choppers chopped and grinders ground. Vegetables diced, squared and mashed. Bread smells wrapped her in a fragrant, reassuring embrace. The cheese told her to smile for once. The healthy breakfasts were fulfilment incarnate. She smiled widely once again. And so did the waistbands. Rolls of kneaded dough made shapes against her tee shirts. And a weighing scale waved to her from the home shopping channel. Just like that, heartache thickened her gravies and left her kitchen counter greasy. She clutched at catchphrases like gluten, sugar-addiction, MUFA and transfats. She tried giving them up, but her brain had spoilt-child ideas about the carbohydrates cutdown. It sulked and moped and pined. And then she began stress-eating. What was once sheer pleasure, was coated and dripping with an extra portion of guilt. The calories held her together like stuffing. The loathing came in secretly. it always walked in with kitten feet. The yoga mat sent out weak signals. She ignored them. She needed something more “cardio” in nature. Wake up earlier. Get out of the house. Get some new shoes. Oh yeah, she needed new shoes. The new shoes were perfect. And she got matching socks. And new running teeshirts and running capris and a high-impact sports bra. They all had a great time, when they went out the only time they went out. Then they were shoved into the corner with the yoga mat for company.
She needed something more than just what sweatily generated endorphins could produce. The life of a sex-deprived woman was hard in ways that would make society shudder like the want that resided between her soft, chaffing humungous thighs. But society had very strong opinions on her sex life. Opinions her brain took very seriously. So she remained chaste and her need grew more grotesque and needy. Some days she woke up with its full weight sitting on her chest, making it beyond difficult to get out of bed.
Let’s take a course, her mind whispered. Let’s learn ikebana. Or French? Or maybe let’s do a cleanse.
“Of the mind?”, She asked warily, remembering with a shudder the forgotten royal blue yoga mat in the corner and the contorting it brought with it.
“Eventually the mind, yes! But for now, it’s just juices and smoothies. Purely physiological - you know? Fresh salads and maybe the odd enema. A naturopathy camp. Try it and tell me if you aren’t a new person by the end of it.
“Stop, stop!”, She said,”You had me at camp!”
The next week she left for camp. She felt like she had arrived at her bliss. Her body responded lovingly to the diets and the broths and completely embraced the enema. Her skin glowed and a couple of kilos even decided to part ways with her. She was a fresh, new white linen skirt through the rest of the camp. Crisp, airy, light and a little impractical. Her new glow was the subject of family get-togethers. They touched her face and tugged at the loose folds on her kurti, where once lumps of fat surfaced and held taut. The white linen skirt held good for three months. And then it began to act like a not-so-new white linen skirt. Crumpled, dowdy and downright sloppy. The emptiness within her was an exhumed corpse - bloated and heavy and crawling with maggots. The loose folds on her kurti grew taut again.
The tears came easy. The mood swings crashed against each other in the storm of her feelings. She shared her feelings. With her mother and her sister. With her father and her brother. With the maid and the neighbour. She told the people at work about her crushedness and also to her friends on Facebook. She put not-so-cryptic status messages and cried loudly for help. And an long-forgotten friend heard her. She told her about the clique of goodness. Where you joined people with clogged happy systems and together, forged ways to unstoppability. Access the alpha matter in you and help you break some confident wind. She was coached, lectured and preached and shoved into a mindspace of changinglifeness. People barked “You can do it” until she believed it. But did what? Who knew! They convinced her that this is where she broke things off with suffering. This is the point of transformation. She was lost but now she was found. She had made that first step. But first, cough up ten grand. For ten grand, she could unlock the doors to possibility, potential and passionate living. For another ten grand, she could make peace and maybe even, friends with her past. For another ten grand, another door of richer living would be opened up. And yet another and another. Her career had been unfulfilling and she found no guilt in quitting. More time to find herself and her potential. There were levels. Levels that tapered towards the top. Each one harder than the other. Each one more expensive than the other. But you can put a price on self worth, can you?
She had finally found her life’s calling. These little pills of positivity. Meditative Mondays. Breakthrough Tuesdays. Courageous contemplation on Wednesday. Naturopathy Thursdays. Payback Fridays. Brunch on Saturdays and Sundays - organic, of course.
Workshops became her all. Her purpose. Her panacea. She glowed at the very sound of the word. And sometimes, when life caught up with her as it tends to, she went through deep withdrawals and phases of brooding. She longed for the positivity-charged air conditioned rooms. The rah-rah of self-cheering. The rush of a combined sense of purposelessness, slowly becoming adrenaline of a zillion possibilities. The baptism and born-againness of this godless salvation. She got so obsessed with learning how to live a more fulfilling life, that she just didn’t have the time to apply those lessons.
