Letting It All Go, Parasites Too (If Only It Were That Easy)
Perhaps we're all walking around with things eating us up from the inside. After eating copious amounts of raw tuna, I discovered, much to my dismay, that I had parasites!
How did I discover the parasite? I met a woman in her seventies who gives people colonics in her house. I want to begin by saying, this is not for everyone: not just the tube-up-the-ass business, but going to a random lady's house for it. During the session, she exclaimed, “Oh my God, that's the biggest parasite I've ever seen!”
I was astounded, but not embarrassed. Anyone who eats sushi knows there's a risk: raw or undercooked fish can carry parasites. Still, I had no way to tell from that moment what, exactly, she had seen. A proper diagnosis takes more than a startling announcement in somebody's house.
She had a host of herbal remedies for parasites. I chose one blindly and bought the 30-day cleanse she was selling. Then the unloading began, punctuated by desperate stops in unacceptable places. My dreams at night grew vivid. Within days, I started to forget grievances I'd carried for decades. Something I never thought possible.
I don't truly understand the relationship between the gut, emotions, and memory. I'm astonished that all that upset began to recede, making space for something else.
Please do your own research...
In Chinese medicine, energy must flow. We get stuck because things don't go our way and we resist. That's the frustration that makes you shout at another driver. Or the anger and irritability that arrive with PMS. We call it Liver Qi stagnation. A simple Four Gates acupuncture treatment is one way we work with that feeling of being stuck. Easy peasy!
The words that stick because someone said them when we were young: You're not good enough. Smart enough. Pretty enough. What does that do to our energy flow?
For hidden or entrenched issues, the Five Element school of Chinese medicine talks about “clearing possession.” This is not possession of the vomiting-pea-soup variety in The Exorcist. It's about a person or circumstance that derailed your life and made it hard to move on. Somebody did this to me. Or: Everything was fine until I lost my job, Grandma died, and a tree fell on the house. We get so caught up in what happened that we can't move on. Rubbernecking our own car crash.
Often our stuck feelings get wrapped up in neck muscles that feel like tight cords, painful jaw muscles, headaches, perhaps even low back pain. For many of us, it settles somewhere around the middle. The digestive tract.
Let's move south, to the large intestine and constipation. There's a whole aisle at CVS dedicated to osmotic laxatives, stool softeners, and bulking agents. Let's be honest: not everybody's doing colonoscopy prep. As a culture, we have a lot we're unwilling to let go of!
But let's get back to my new BFF, the parasite.
One of the most esteemed states in Buddhism is called emptiness. And just like it sounds, instead of being chock-full of too much, our mind, spirit, and perhaps body, too, are open and receptive to the possibilities of new things to come.
That excitement arrived at my house on Monday night, all six of them. My oldest kids were visiting with their angel hipster friends from Brooklyn: jewelry designers, fashion people, filmmakers. Thirty-somethings cooking and laughing until way past my bedtime. They made an unprecedented Vietnamese feast from scratch. There was room in my home for many world-weary thirty-year-olds. And room in my belly for the feast.
The fish for the Vietnamese stew came from the same hallowed shop I suspect supplied my unwelcome guest. It's the best in the state. This time the fish was cooked. :)
Better to be a host to fun kids than parasites.
Photograph courtesy of Dr. Catherine Wellness.