On his family’s yearly trip to Manitoulin Island, Matthew detoxes from conspirituality influencer garbage, and returns with parts of a new plan.Show NotesWarmth by Daniel Sherrell: 9780143136538 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: BooksLiving at the End of Our World (w/ Daniel Sherrell & Dorothy Fortenberry) | Know Your EnemyLives Reclaimed — Mark RosemanWhat Conspiritualists and Anti-Vaxxers Get Right | by Matthew Remski | Aug, 2021 | Medium
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality podcast team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
You can support our work and have full access to bonus episodes and other premium content by subscribing for as little as $5 a month at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
Thanks for listening and your support, which keeps us ad-free and editorially independent.
Spirit Island, no garbage.
language.
So it's just over 10 days since our family returned from our yearly week on Manitoulin Island, which is Spirit Island in the Anishinaabe language.
My wife's people have been renting the same cottage there on the same week before Labor Day for decades.
It's a shady wooden cabin with a concrete floor and screened windows and back porch that opens onto a 200-yard winding forest path through to sand dunes and a beach on the crystal waters of Lake Huron.
So it's an 8-hour trip from Toronto, which is broken up by an hour and 45 minutes on an Ontario ferry's boat called the Chichimon, which translates to Big Canoe.
And about 10 minutes after the launch, the mobile signal starts to fade.
Along with my excuse for needing my phone on because I didn't really need Google Maps on the way up.
Not even to estimate the arrival time.
It's not like tracking the minutes changed the outcome.
This signal loss moment is something I wait for all year.
I know the signal will come back on the island itself because over the past few years they've installed towers there too, so it's not that I'm cut off from the news cycle cold turkey.
It's more like there's enough lake and wind and bright sky opening up onto September to remind me that time is both more vast and more immediate than I typically hold in my hand.
So for obvious reasons, I hate to use words like cleansing or detox these days, but that's what happens for me on these trips, starting with the gentle swells on Lake Huron.
It may actually start happening on the days before in bits and pieces, when I'm packing up the wetsuit and the sand toys, I'm paying a little less attention to the socials, my messages to Derek and Julian get a little shorter on Slack, Back when I was obsessed with yoga, I did formal cleansing practices I learned from a student of Babahari Das at Mount Badana, just south of San Jose.
This was back when I took a training in yoga therapy.
Babahari Das was an Indian monk with legitimate training, and he'd taken the vow of mauna in his youth.
Now that means no talking.
His vocal cords had shriveled up and he communicated by writing on a little chalkboard that hung from a rope around his neck.
The exercises I learned had been adapted from the medieval shatkarmas or six actions that are listed in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika.
So these are nasal irrigation with a neti pot and salt water, cleansing the upper digestive tract with a cloth.
I didn't do that one, but we did do salt water vomiting.
Then there was churning the lower digestive tract with muscular action, nauli, enemas or busty, breathing exercises, kapalabhati, and then trataka, gazing at a candle flame, for a really long time.
And the practices were folded into a sequence and the sequence unfolded over several days while we fasted and then started eating a simple diet of boiled mung beans with rice and a little ghee and salt.
So these were all pretty radical and kind of gross things to do.
They had a reasonable poetic rationale in a pre-modern sense, but at some point their status crossed over into the totally pseudoscientific, especially as, you know, people in this yoga therapy community that I was learning in were kind of leaning towards wanting scientific validation for what they were doing.
But the practices were effective in one important sense, which was that whatever you came to them with, the ritual really drove home the premise that the body is the common denominator of all experience.
And that if you were disquieted by intrusive thoughts or if you were depressed or anxious, that resolving those things on the level of language, let's say in therapy, wasn't going to be enough.
Now, of course, that's a narrow view of therapy that occludes the more important function of relationship modeling, but...
But that's what I used to hear from yoga people who dismissed therapy as being just talk.
It was in their interest to do so.
But it's also just about as reductive as saying that yoga postures are just stretching.
So I could feel these practices doing something.
Changing me?
I'm not so sure.
But I think the mechanism was a kind of body shock.
A discipline that forced you to pay a kind of claustrophobic attention to digestion and toileting and breathing.
These rude experiences.
And there was something existential about it.
By regressing your attention to gut and lung sensations, there was just less room for mental wandering.
It changed the channel.
Of course, the problem is that the motivation to do all of these intense things is rooted in at least two pretty heavy fallacies.
Firstly, that your body is full of toxins, and that removing them will accomplish a psychospiritual overhaul.
So it means that you have to believe in a very material form of your own disgustingness in order to justify going through with it all, because it's hard.
It hurts to do these things.
The promise that it will resolve issues becomes more attractive because of all of that work.
It has to work, you think, as you're doing it.
And as you recover, it's really tempting to think, this has to have worked.
I must be different now.
But, as the sunken cost rose up, so did this paradox that you're trying to provoke an embodied change in yourself, but because you have to make up a story to make it work, such as karma and ignorance are physical substances that can be removed through brave physical actions, the process can make you even more prone, I believe, to spiritual bypassing.
Sometimes it reminded me of the shortcut of confession when I was a Catholic boy.
I imagine that Yom Kippur could feel somewhat similar for the person who was disenchanted with its ritual context.
Anyway, that's a bit of a diversion to swing back around to.
I don't think that cleansing, as I first learned about it, is a good model for anything.
And at the same time, I'm sitting on that boat with a dead phone in my hand and I'm being scrubbed clean.
But of what?
Of all of this content which has poured into me?
Of my need to respond to it?
Of the technology that drives the pollution and outrage cycle?
