Arrested Digestion

Free Thinker, Tea Drinker...

Q: How much of the internet can you digest?

Me: Yes.

If only cute cats and butterflies made up 100% of my internet I’d be a lot less flight & fright and a lot more rest & digest

Healing in a frightening World

I’m currently eating one meal per day. This is because my belly needs time to heal.

My gut has been all over the place since a round of antibiotics and a whole heap of health-madness that’s plagued me for well over a year now. I’ll probably get into this at some point but for now, let’s just talk about digestion.

Digesting of food, digesting world events, digesting the hurricane that is my social media feed and just digesting my day-to-day reality of being a parent, a partner, and a person not quite at peace with this fractured, violent world.

So, in the morning, before I do virtually anything else, I massage my ‘empty’ tummy. Chiefly, this involves me laying over a large medicine ball whilst trying to relax. I’ll also use my hands if I’m feeling energetic.

*I massage in small and large circular motions around the belly button. You know for you guys I’d be happy to make a video of me doing this if you have your own gut health concerns going on; you only have to ask!

Needless to say, all of this movement and relaxation releases any trapped gas and stimulates my first bowel movement of the day. I’ve always been envious of the folks who seem to be able to go religiously first thing in the morning it just makes way more sense! Now I’m a fully paid-up member of the early-morning-bowel-time crew!

So that’s my formula for gut health right now; one small eating window followed by lots of digestive rest (when the sun goes down a human body goes into repair mode) and some loving massage on the daily.

From a technical point of view, I think we can all understand how massage works, but we often miss or dismiss what’s happening at a much more subtle but deeper level.

We could call it psychological or we could call it ‘energetic’, this business of rubbing the belly is bringing me closer to myself as a human.

Does that make sense? How literally getting in touch with the soft, vulnerable parts of myself gets me in touch with the soft underside of my own nature?

Let’s frame it another way…

I’m currently sitting typing in my living room in which there lays my whirlwind toddler’s pink trike. When I get up off this couch I’m going to shift the trike into the corner of the room to clear some floor space. Clearly, I wouldn’t think about how the trike feels about this. I wouldn’t wonder whether the bike would mind being put in the dark corner of the room. Whether it minds me touching it without asking or which way it would prefer to face. A trike is a machine, an object, feelings don’t come into it.

I could argue objects need loving too and when we’re more tender with objects they love us and soothe us in return but that’s a conversation for another day.

Photo by Alessandra Caretto on Unsplash

My contention would be that we treat objects without reverence and we often treat our bodies a lot like we treat our objects.

Sit under that fluorescent light for hours staring at a screen. Eat this highly processed impression of a food item. Drink that stimulant. Talk to that belligerent person. Listen to this terrifying podcast ostensibly about health. All without checking in with ourselves.

I’m reminded of the time my wife, Claire, went to an anxiety-awareness workshop. At one point the facilitator asked everyone in the room to blow up a balloon and place it between their teeth. Once inflated, the facilitator explained that they should close their eyes and she would come around the room with a pin to pop each balloon.

The whole premise of making people anxious on an anxiety-awareness-raising workshop is fucking insane, but what’s even crazier is that my wife was the only person who refused to do it! The only person to check in with their own body and think “Nah, not for me thanks!”

Claire has a very intuitive sense of what her body needs at any moment but I think for the rest of us it’s something we could probably do with nurturing.

Massaging our stomachs, the world of the solar plexus chakra and often where we hold our shame is a great place to start. Think of it as starting the conversation.

Think of it as working with your subconscious.

Think of it as time with a long-lost friend. Think of it as anything except a mechanical, dry, technical process. I promise it’s worth it.

Manos