Crap Generosity

"You've got to be more giving!" said Tracy.

I laid on the massage table, cradled to my left side in the fetal position. I turned my head over my shoulder to watch my own feces travel across a clear tube - no more than a few inches in diameter - behind a small clear pane. I felt like I should have waived good-bye as it passed by my window.

"You've got to be more generous!" Tracy loves poop, or more correctly the total elimination of it. She runs the M.A.R.C. Holistic Center on Spring Street.

"How many of these do you do per day?" I asked.

"Maybe ten."

"Seriously."

"Yes. It's very serious." Her voice had a subtle lilt to it of the Caribbean or some such balmy island. "I was studying medicine in college when a friend of mine died of constipation. The toxins built up and poisoned him from the inside. So I changed my focus and studied massage and colonic. People hold on to all this shit. If I can help them release all this crap that they hold on to, it can change their lives. It can lighten your mood, improve your skin, give you energy. You'll see."

She stood up and started to rub my belly very hard. Tracy is a bodacious lady. She used her full strength to loosen the inside of my colon from the outside.

"You're being stingy. Look. Do you see that? It's gas. You're full of hot air!" She made herself guffaw with that one.

I groaned. The pressure and pain indecipherable but total and overwhelming.

This first session (in my package of three) happened just before Christmas. Giving this year had become a task list rather than an act of kindness or love or appreciation. Maybe that was my own fault because I wasn't "giving." So preoccupied with myself, everything I was taking in was not entirely coming out, agitating my guts. As for Tracy, I didn't know how to give her was asking for. I didn't know how to trigger my body into releasing.

"Come on, come on. You can do it," she coaxed in a soft voice.

So I tried to stop doing anything physically. Thinking about "release" and "letting go" I suddenly felt the pressure drop out.

"Look. Now you're giving. I knew you had it in you!"