Cohen - Lush: a memoir

The Sivananda Ashram Yoga Retreat is situated on Paradise Island, across the bay from Nassau. This is an island lousy with monstrosities for hotelshuge peach-colored castles just down the beach, including the famously extravagant Atlantis. As visitors arrive by boat, wooden signs reassure them that Sivananda is an oasis of tranquility amid the touristy chaos. The retreat is inside a mass of coconut palm trees and bougainvillea and hibiscus, and the foliage is broken up here and there by the small buildings that make up the ashram. There are platforms for yoga classes, a dining area, an open-air temple for satsang , a small bookstore with a full library of yogic teachings, and various accommodations for guests, for people staying for karmic residencies, and for people like me, who are here trying to dry out after years of too much drinking.

Its late morning on my first day here, and Im eating a brunch of freshly made bread, peanut butter, and yogurt and chatting with two women who are karma yogis. Theyre living in tents at the ashram for three months and helping with operations, one in reception and one in the kitchen.

I get up and say, Im going to get more tea.

A martini? one of the women asks.

More tea, I repeat. I dont think they serve martinis here.

Maybe not, she says, but you can find one five minutes down the beach.

Noted, I say, and I laugh.

Im exhausted from traveling, but after brunch, I decide to power through and attend the afternoon yoga class. I end up at the wrong yoga platform and wait long enough to realize Ive screwed up. Its too late to join the class, wherever it is, so I walk to the beach and swim in the ocean. The waters of the Caribbean are always a surprise to those of us who live on the West Coasta turquoise, crystalline blue so thin and sun-shimmering that you can see all the way to the bottom.

I am not unhappy to be missing the yoga class. Its been a decade since Ive done yoga, and I am uncomfortably aware of my body. My belly is fat. My arms and shoulders are weak. I dont even want to look at my thighs. Imagine a forty-five-year-old woman who has spent the last five or six years drinking too much wine, smoking cigarettes, and getting little exercise other than sex. My work as a therapist and a writer require me to literally just sit there. That is exactly what I look like. Still, its not my size that bothers me. Its the fact that Ive gone so long without caring for myself in any way. The shame I feel is not about my appearance but about the fact that Ive become a drunken lush.

I figure class has let out when I see a few women wandering down to the beach. None are bigger than a size four. There is no mystery about their size, because theyre all wearing bikinis. Their skin literally glistens in the sun. I wish I were kidding. Even their posture makes me envious. Despite the research Ive conducted about the increase in heavy drinking among middle-aged women, I see little evidence of that trend here. Unless these women metabolize alcohol much differently than I do, they are not drunken lushes.

In Sanskrit, satsang means to be in the company of truth. At Sivananda, satsang is when we come together at sunrise and sunset each day, for meditation, chanting, and learning. Doesnt that sound lovely? Even hopeful? But I sit in the wrong place, dont know how to hold my hand during a pranayama breathing exercise, and I cant find the right page to follow along with the chanting, known here as kirtan . I leave before the final prayer, giving up on the day.

I sprawl in the narrow, hard bed in my tent, the sounds of the party boats from Nassau blaring from the bay. Why have I come here? There are cocktails down the beach at Atlantis, but drinking sounds unappealing for the first time in I cant remember how long. My lack of interest is more upsetting than encouraging, and I wonder if Ill ever find a way to free myself from the daily discomforts of life. This isnt going the way Id imagined, and if I werent so bone-tired from frolicking in the Caribbean Sea, I might feel sorry for myself.

I can guess what youre thinking: most people trying to clean up their act dont have the luxury of doing it at some fancy, self-designed rehab in the middle of paradise. So yes, I am an asshole for even thinking this isnt going as well as Id hoped. But a little more than three years ago, I thought I had everything I wanted, and almost nothing turned out as Id hoped, and thats why Im at this ashram in the first place.

When you drink too much, suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, after a lifetime of little or no drinking, and when you decide one day to finally do something about it after too long not doing anything about it, after wrecking your life in slow, insipid ways you werent even noticing, you do not want to find that joy is still elusive. You do not want to glamp in the warm, Caribbean air only to find that youre still the asshole who cant feel happy. That was the thing, of course: I couldnt feel happy. Thats why I had started drinking too much. Being numb and sloppy was easier than sitting with all the ways my life wasnt what Id hoped it would have become at this point.

I dont have a story of how I spiraled into alcoholism and then got sober. This is not about how I dropped deep into the darkness of addiction and then saw the light. Instead, I have an unremarkable story, one that many women share but not enough people talk about. Its a story about how I reached midlife, looked around, and thought, Really? This is how things turned out? Hit with the reality that so little of what I had imagined would come to beas a mother, a wife, a womanI started to drink, and then I started to drink way too much.