Premenstrual Mindfulness

I need to meditate, like right NOW. Meditating in my house is called ‘hiding from the family’. They’re like sniffer dogs, they always find me. Sitting in the garden and having a smoke used to work well in the past but now I have two building sites on either side of my house - the plants are covered in plaster dust and the citrus trees are covered in stink bugs. So the garden is out.

I need a new place to mediate… I’ve been fantastising about a cave, or a bunker... a special Meditation Bunker bored into the sandstone where I can escape to defrag my brain. It would also come in handy for the zombie apocalypse, or for when global warming melts the ice caps and the oceans turn acidic and the supermarket shelves are suddenly empty like they are in Russia and hungry people start hunting possums…

I don’t have a bunker yet so instead I just went to bed really early. I turned the light out and hoped that I’d wake up early before my family when the house is dark and silent. I had lots of dreams, one where I was in an elevator that kept getting smaller and I didn’t know how to get out of it, and then another where I was kissing my husband for a long time until I woke up gasping for air because the doona was over my face.

But as soon as I was awake all this shit started piling into my head - bits of broken ‘to do’ lists and things coming up in the calendar that I hadn’t written down yet, my brain started saying I should do yoga or walk the dogs to clear my head, then I started feeling guilty about not walking the dogs... Then I remembered I hadn’t bought soy milk so I’d have to use cow’s milk and maybe that was better for the environment anyway because cow’s milk doesn’t come in tetra packs which are supposed to be really bad for the environment, but worse for the cow of course…

And then I PANICKED because I remembered my period was 6 DAYS LATE!! Did that mean the unthinkable… and that I was going to be taught a lesson for always secretly believing that people who said they were using condoms when they fell pregnant were liars, or did that mean that I was approaching menopause which was also shit because then I’d have to worry about my hair thinning and bones turning into sawdust like in those Egyptian mummy movies…

And then I told myself I was thinking too much and that I was really just a bag of hormones and all my problems - the crazy dreams and overthinking and the feeling like I wanted to punch through sheets of Gyprock karate style - just boiled down to PMT. And that maybe when the sun came up I’d go to the park and just lie down in the middle of the grass and think about all the living creatures underneath and around me and the magic of the plants capturing the sun’s energy with chlorophyll in a way that human’s were nowhere near doing yet and how tiny and insignificant I really am, just a minuscule multi-celled creature no better than bacteria in a blip of time space lying on the face of a huge rock spinning around a star.


Do you have a Meditation Bunker or secret place you go to escape?