Passionfruitcowgirl

When you’ve worn out your Havaianas traipsing from yoga to kirtan via every sideshow spruker selling ways to clean your aura, change your diet, flush your poo hole, pump your chakras, cure your cancer – or your sadness – and you’re still not feeling the luurve – it’s finally time… you’re ready my friend, for a holy moment with the lady they call…

the Shit Whisperer.

I don’t know what’s been wrong with me lately.

Here I am in Ubud, Bali – the world’s greatest mecca for all things Healing, Golden, Love-ish and Transformational. I’ve been carving off those American kilos at the most sumptuous buffet of yoga teachers anywhere in the world, swanning about the place on my sexy Scoopy motorbike draped in all manner of floaty garments for three full months now… and am still a bit of a bitch in the morning.

My path toward the radiance remains littered with doubt and shrouded in fog despite a routine of 8 yoga classes a week, massage, manicures, pedicures, green smoothies and chakra-activated cotton knickers.

I am nervous about the future – all our futures, actually. And about several other things, including being still not cool enough to hang with the beautiful tribe, increasingly suspicious of people with green smoothie stained mouths and anybody offering to help me activate my dream life.

My questions, as usual, are tiresomely serious. They inconveniently transcend most things tackled here, axing-away at issues like the failure for any actual unity to be achieved, Chinese expansion, the grinding down of indigenous peoples, rampant mining, disinformation, the cataclysmic shift in ocean PH, alienation of aging women, and the global epidemic of depression, confusion, sickness and class war that rages on despite all the crystal bowls quivering away in Ubud.

I am too fat to fuck in this slightly vain city… apparently. Thus unable to distract myself with that handy detour out of anxiety known as a fling. And actually just so bored stiff by the blogging/journalist/i’vegotalltheanswers crew that even writing has begun to feel like a deadset waste of all our time.

Underneath all this I have the feeling that I’ve swallowed something awkward. Was it the promise if the New Age movement? Was it one too many turmeric shots? Or indeed the whole myth of the ‘alternative dream’, that caused me to step out of the ‘real’ world and mess about for EIGHT YEARS STRAIGHT on a healing path leading directly to.. err…?

It’s true that I arrived in Ubud in a less than optimum state. I’d  lost my way completely, and various other things including proper work, love, quite a bit of currency, and confidence in the revolution. But who hasn’t?

I mean, if you’re even half sober in the world today you’ve got to be asking some hard questions about where this is all headed, at what price, and when did all these hippy weirdos get control of the conversation anyway?

Unless you’re here on Honeymoon, you’re in Ubud looking for something. Most everybody, everywhere wants to catch a breath after some sort of crunch – to get better, forgive, let go, get rich, amp up their cosmic magnetism and be the change we’ve been waiting for.

We’re ready for change, we want to know how. And we’ll rip out our fillings, pump out our gall bladders, let fish eat our impurities… if it will show us the way out of the mess we’re in.

But which way ahead? And who’s who in the revolution zoo?

It’s way too easy to get mean and cynical and superior about the yoga scene and its associated shop of horrors. It’s actually very 2012, I’m not taking that route.

Instead I’ve managed, occasionally, to just sit very still with this question since a Vipassana course and a heavenly week at Bali Silent Retreat, and come to confess that I’m just stuff-full of the bullshit. I feel like I’ve swallowed three books and about 27 elbows.

The books, under x-ray, would likely include Why Men Love Bitches, Fountainhead and Eat, Pray Love.

There are probably several of my own unborn novels in there too… but since I’m too bamboozled to write, and going blind anyway, I decided to avoid tackling the metaphorical crisis and go instead for the basics.

I’m sick of blaming others, bored of pointing out the scamsters and just basically keen to get my own attitude sorted without falling into that snotty trap of condescending the New Age fiasco.

Which is why I found myself dangling, tipsy, off the edge of my balcony last full moon screaming into the jungle…

“God! I’ve GOT to get this shit out of me!”

Which turned out to be true.

After the hangover I set out to shop the multitude of offerings to do just that here in Ubud – of which there is a stunning array.

Fruit-fasts, juice-fast, detox diets, music therapy, protein diets, shamanic colonics, mud wraps, clay pills, tuning fork exorcism, and pricey capsules of all manner of hocus pokery promising to get de bad out and deliver one to radiance abound. You can’t walk five minutes down any wonky street here without somebody offering to free you of negativity and flush you into the fifth dimension.

I was in the ass-end of the market – literally – for help, when some fair soul at Café Vespa said, “You need Lesley. She’ll sort your shit out. You can put your bottom dollar on it.”

I turned up to the Smiling Buddha Colonic Clinic bloated up like an egg on legs, two hours early because I’m just that way lately, and was pleased to see not a single feather, wind chime or singing bowl anywhere. The clinic was surprisingly down-to-earth for Ubud – for anywhere, actually.

When she appeared, the formidable Lesley – a vision of True Blue Aussie might and no-nonsensery, was adorned in not a single ounce of lycra.

She poked me about a bit and said, “Shit girl, you’ve got a bloody pile of crap stuck right here. And here. Bloody hell mate! Let’s sort that out, and see where we get to.”

Off with the panties then! And off we go… this is Colonic Hydrotherapy with Lesley White – the Duck’s Guts in sorting your stuff out, with no bullshit included.

Lesley makes it clear from the start. There’s no fairies about it. “What we‘re up to is basic common sense,” she says. “No glitter ponies here. You’ve got a blockage in the donut – here, around the belly button – that’s serious business. You’ll be feeling more cluttered than a box of bones carrying that lump around.”

“Yes, it’s the elbows,” I explain meekly. “It’s a shit-load more than that,” she said.

She calls herself a seductress, a colon-dancer.

The poo whisperer says, “It’s basic common sense.” as she expertly hooks me up to her little bottom laundry.

What does that feel like?

It feels exactly like what you’ve already seen on the face of your pet when they get the bottom thermometer at the vet.

Anyway… Lesley’s telling me more…

“Just like you brush your teeth and clean your body, the colon needs taking care of,” she says. “We tend to ignore cleansing our insides until some form of disease sends us a wake-up call. Constipation, parasites, IBS, gas, bloating, stomach pain, chronic fatigue, digestive problems, depression, back ache and foggy thinking can all be signs of a toxic colon.”

“We all learnt this in the day, when I trained to be a nurse in Sydney.” she says. “It was harsh back then. They toughened us up, but it made us fit to do our work, and there was no bullshit that went with it. We had to have the seams on our stockings perfectly straight, and our work immaculate.”

“You didn’t get to play games with people – you had to be exceptional. With everything. That was the business of serving health. It wasn’t perfect, but the fundamentals were in place – the nurses were dedicated and tough enough to turn up with the love and ferocity required … without making up a tonne of crap about it. In those days everybody admitted that a clean colon was the first thing to do for almost every issue.”

But is this yet another weird and self-indulgent ‘experience’ I’ve gotten mixed up with?

Actually, No. I looked into the history and found that birds do it, and in fact, Hippocrates, father of modern medicine, reminded his students that first, they should look at the spine and clean the colon. He’d adopted that from the Egyptians.

Flushing out the belly has got nada to do with this present addiction to being skinny. It’s about rinsing out the apparatus, rinsing the plumbing, getting all the working parts de-greased and humming. With bright and happy insides, you’ve got a better chance of bright and happy everything else – makes sense!

Lesley hooks me up to her closed system irrigation hose, and to an LCD screen on which we would watch the triumphs of our work together. I’m not totally mad about the hose, and less about the impending live TV show featuring – oh god…..

“You’re uptight. Just relax. What do you want, dolphins?”

There’s a little lesson on how it goes; her equipment, a clamp, how to let her know if I’m uncomfortable and how she’s going to ‘water the garden’ inside me, to let my system know it can relax. Then she’s going to gently ‘sing’ my colon into giving up its secrets. Riding little waves of gently lapping water she will deliver into me, easing her way into the cluttered up ocean inside,she’s going to seduce the shit into just letting itself go.

“Clean out the colon, and you’ve got the basis for sorting out everything else – illness, confusion, stress, depression… everything starts here in a backed up, swollen out, stressed and helpless gut. There’s no need for any ‘stuff’ to get this done, just a real understanding of how it works: no forcing, no paraphernalia,”  she tells me as my garden goes all Disneyland with watering.

It’s important you get this, because now that detoxing, fasting and colonics have hit the healing scene full-tilt, the usual circus has arrived with a million new offerings, sexy language, convincing research and no solid medical or actual experience to get your detox dollar. There is ‘help’ in every flavour as the industry explodes, unregulated –  so how do you know who to trust?

“You know what the secret is?” says Lesley. “Pick the people who are in service. The ones who are humble about it. Me, I do this because I swear to that Hippocratic Oath, I had it tattooed across my heart. I do what I’m good at because it serves others, and I make damn sure I know my shit so I never, ever do anybody harm – not with promises, not physically.”

As any sensible person knows – and you’ll find out fast if you’re dabbling in the New Age industry –  a full command of the basics is the foundation to genius… and the first thing to go when folks get too ‘cosmic’ about their trade.

“It’s basic. And it’s a skill. That was the truth we all knew before the pharmaceuticals put an end to colon baths in standard care because they can’t sell any fancy chemicals to do this work.” the colon whisperer tells me. “They killed it because it’s simple.  I’m here to say there’s an art to this – a medical art, and a loving one that’s got jack-shit to do with shamanism!”

Clear running water flows onto the screen, discreetly showing the contents of a clear plastic pipe carrying away the lavage.

I’m settled right in and delighted to see little blobs of poo swim merrily by. Then little gushes of black clouds, then water, then torrents of muddish-looking goop, then puddles of air – “that’s the gasses! Great work! We’re getting there,” she encourages.

It’s the most fascinating show I’ve watched since Baraka!

We discuss life, our work, pets, all those serious questions that surf my head like sharks, and our visions and lessons and those heroes of great wisdom we admire – courageous nurses, sensible people, Amazonian curranderoes as the poo flies.

Waves of fizzy sweat wash over me sometimes as the hour glides by, and Lesley gently churns my belly, releasing floods of happy poo, then a torrent of golden slime.

“There! There it all is,” she beams. “That’s the crap that’s hurting you – a big pond of it – great job!”

She fixes me in the eye, dead serious for a moment and says, “I cannot tell you how important it is that you got that out. Are you hearing me, Jade? That’s the shit that had to go – for a helluvalot more reasons than I’m going to pretend to know about.”

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Benefits of Colon Cleansing

A generally accepted benefit of colon cleansing is based on the theory that hardened mucus lining the intestinal wall greatly reduces one’s ability to absorb nutrition. Because you are not able to absorb proper nutrition this feeds the cycle of craving more food and stronger flavors. When in fact what your body really wants is better nutrition. Unless this cycle is broken, no amount of will power will successfully change one’s dietary habits in the long run.