cleanliness is next to?
on personal hygiene and the ocean
This week we are exploring śauca शौच which is the first one of the Niyamas, the second limb of the Eight Limbs of Yoga.
The Niyamas are:
śauca - purity/cleanliness. Keeping our bodies, homes and minds clear.
Santosha - contentment, being content with life as it is rather than constantly seeking more
Tapas - heat/discipline. The effort it takes to maintain a regular practice, whether thats movement, meditation, art etc etc
Svadyaha - self study, the ability to know thyself. Also refers to studying yogic philosophy
Ishvarapranidhana - surrender to the Divine. Learning to ‘trust in god, but tie up your camel’.
So, śauca is all about cleaning. Yippppeee!
Let’s start with the bath debate.
I like the idea of having a bath.
It all seems so romantic. Soft lighting, incense smoke swirling with the steam, rose petals, magnesium salts, and a novel perfectly resting in the impossibly dry hands of the model on instagram.
I want to like baths. They seem to fit with my water-loving Piscean nature, but once I’m in I get restless. First it’s too hot. Then it’s too cold. Then no amount of hot water will get it back to hot enough. It’s been many years since I lived in a house with a bath and now we have one, a cast-iron beauty on legs that desperately needs resurfacing. I was very excited when I first saw this bath, and the ‘en-suite’. I’ve never had an en-suite before. I imagined myself spending lazy afternoons soaking with endless cups of tea, reading.
Since I moved in over a year ago I’ve had 2 baths. I get bored. I’ve tried reading but the book gets too wet. It just doesn’t work for me. Baths are out. Which is pretty lucky considering we’re on tank water and it hasn’t rained very much since January.
Which brings me to the shower debate.
The other day a friend of mine told me she likes to have 30 minute showers. I nearly fell off my chair.
‘What about the water I said? ‘I’m from the tropics where it always rains’ she said. ‘I would take even longer if I could. I even take phone calls and answer emails in the shower.’ How is that even possible I said, but she assures me it is.
I’m the opposite. I’m in and out. My showers are probably one to two minutes at the max.
Even when I lived in England where there is an abundance of water, I had very quick showers. I just dont really understand what people do in there. I hardly ever wash my hair so that’s probably part of it, but after a little rinse and a bit of soap under my armpits I’m done.
When I first had a shower at Rod’s he looked at me confused. ‘You finished already? That was about 30 seconds. Are you ok?’ He said. ‘What happened in there?
Nothing! I’m clean! I’m done. Lets go!
In terms of temperature I’m a cold shower girl in the mornings when I feel brave enough (definitely not in the middle of winter). In the evening I like a very very hot shower just before bed. I like it so hot my skin turns bright lobster red.
Maybe we all shower like we do life. I like the extremes. I also like to get shit done.
This often backfires and I’ve made a lot of costly mistakes by diving into things headfirst but I’ve also learnt a lot along the way and as they say, if you never try you never know.
As I get older I’m learning to take a pause and consider things a little more before I jump, but generally this ‘act first, think later’ approach serves me well. I wouldn’t be able to run my business by myself without it.
I have some questionable personal hygiene habits.
I bite my nails, both fingers AND toes which is one downside of having very open hips. I realise that this is totally disgusting, especially as I spend most of my life walking around barefoot and my toes are never clean BUT I hardly ever get sick and I like to attribute this to eating lots of dirt, therefore building a healthy gut biome (my Doctor friend agrees with my theory!). I sometimes forget that biting ones toenails isn’t accept behaviour. Years ago I was in the back seat of my friends boyfriends car.
He happened to glance back at me in the rearview. He then spun his head around in horror. ‘Anna!! Your friend is biting her toenails!! In my car!’
‘Oh yeah,’ she said, nonchalantly ‘Clare is the least hygienic person I’ve ever met’.
At my brother Robin’s house in Leeds last year we were sitting around having dinner. Rod was there meeting him and his wife Katy and my little nephew Kit for the first time. We’d had a lovely day cycling around the city, eating and drinking beers.
There were a few condiments on the table and I am the condiment queen. I picked up the mustard. I didn’t have a spoon so I used my finger to scoop it onto my plate. My brother, quite understandably, lost his shit.
‘Clare!!’ He shouted. ‘What are you doing?? You cant just come over to someone’s house and stick your finger in their jars!! Other people have to use that, that is gross!’ He was pretty mad for a hot second, and I was a bit shocked, but luckily my brother is very reasonable and isn’t one to hold a grudge so I apologised profusely and we all let it go.
I’d got so used to living by myself and eating everything with my fingers I’d forgotten the rules. Rod sat opposite me trying his best to not explode with laughter.
We now refer to this as ‘the mustard incident’. Never to be repeated.
I’ll also eat things off the floor, and eat things that are almost going off and I have swam in the dam at the bottom of our property which is essentially a large swamp, much to the horror of Kane who is messy, but ultra hygienic. He came up to me the day he found out about the dam swim, his eyes wide. ‘Clare.’ He said in a very serious voice. ‘Please dont swim in the dam. It’s not safe. You’ll get an infection. You could die’. I promised him I wouldn’t swim it again, not a hard thing to promise to be honest, but it was worth it for the story.
śauca is also related to cleaning our physical spaces.
Again, my cleaning style is efficient, imperfect and often rather frenzied. I like the little and often approach. I cant start work until I’ve swept the floor. I spend a lot of time sweeping the floor. I’m not very thorough or methodical. If you open my closet my clothes are never folded and are never going to be. Every now and then I’ll get sick of not being able to find anything and I’ll pull everything off the shelves and throw it on the floor. I’ll start picking things up and rolling them into neat-ish rolls (honestly how do people fold clothes) before getting bored and basically throwing everything back in. My general approach is to not accumulate too many clothes in the first place so there’s less to manage, but somehow I still end up with way more than I need.
Rod is the opposite sort of cleaner. He doesn’t mind too much (at all) about everyday mess. He’ll quite happily walk into the house in a what I would consider mess and think nothing of it. When he does clean he does it meticulously and thoroughly. His clothes are always folded perfectly. He laughs at my ‘slap-dash-ness’ and will often remind me to slow down before I break another plate or spill hot coffee all over myself again.
When I first moved in we cleared trailer loads of clutter from the house and gardens. I’m very conscious of the slippery slope. A few things lying around can turn into stuff everywhere, so when we decided to live together I set some firm boundaries around how I like the space to feel. I told Rod and Kane about MOOP, a Burning Man reference to ‘Matter out of place’. It stuck and sometimes he’ll warn me, ‘hey there’s some MOOP around but dont worry, I’ll clean it up, just ignore it’.
(disclaimer - I’ve never been to Burning Man but I’ve read about it which is almoooost the same thing)
What’s important in my space is windows open, fresh air, soft lighting and a lot of plants. If I’m inside for too long I feel energetically ‘impure’, as if there’s a sticky film resting on my skin. Going outside, walking in nature and swimming in the ocean are my ultimate cleansing practices.
Of all the things I’m impossibly grateful for in my life, being able to swim in the ocean every day is high on the list.
I grew up in the Midlands, in England which is about as far away from the ‘sea-side’ as you can get. Every year we’d go on camping holidays to the Welsh coast, places like Borth and aberystwyth. My favourite part of the journey was seeing the ocean for the first time on the horizon. this vast, mysterious expanse of water stretching out forever. ‘We can see the sea!!’ We’d all cry.
Ever the optimist I’d pack all my books and tanning oil and bikinis and every year it would rain or be so bitterly cold in the middle of Summer we’d need woolly jumpers and windbreakers to sit on the beach. We’d huddle in our tents playing Monopoly and Gin Rummy whilst the rain hammered down. Sometimes we’d give up and rent a caravan with an old gas fire that smelled a little bit like it might poison us all in our sleep.
I would complain and paint my nails all different colours and fight with my brother and talk about how boring everything was.
‘I was born in the wrong country’ I thought to myself.
I would pour over photos of tropical islands in The Maldives and Mauritius and sometimes even Australia. Why do we have to go to Wales all the time, cant we go somewhere tropical?
Besides the totally unrealistic expense of flying us all half way around the world, my parents weren’t keen on the ‘beach holiday’ idea. They didn’t want to ‘just lie there’. But that’s exactly what I wanted to do. Lie on a sun lounger. Read novels. Get a tan.
I wonder what 15 year old me would say if she could see me now. Living amongst the palm trees. Eating fresh mangoes every day in Summer. Swimming in turquoise waters every day. Of all the things I’m ridiculously grateful for, having daily access to the ocean is up there. The salt water calms me.
I’ll often call Rod in between classes. ‘Let’s go for a swim!’ When he’s not putting signs up or with customers he’ll pick me up and we’ll go to our ’secret’ spots, a few minutes from the studio. We’re essentially in the middle of Batemans Bay, but huge rock faces and headlands carve out tranquil coves that are always deserted, reserved for those who will brave the sharp rocks and rising tides.
We’ll swim and lie in the sun and cuddle and say over and over again, ‘we are so lucky!!’
🌊
Thank you for reading. I love you
