We all need a friend who cracks us up when we are anxious. I called mine last night and confessed that I’ve been constipated.
“How long has it been?” she asked. “A week?”
“About 20 hours. Maybe more,” I told her.
As soon as I heard her cackle roll into a guffaw I realized what I was doing.
Women who have been raised to chase perfection often are quick to apply that game to Ayurveda. This is especially true if we learn it from books or the web. Without a real, live teacher — ideally one whose voice carries the softness of one in a state of constant self-forgiveness — we learn the rules without the guidance toward the intuition needed to apply them.
(Anyone who has ever traveled to India knows that traffic laws are merely suggestions that are expected to be broken based on the bizarre ways life presents itself. You must have your intuition sharpened to make it out of your car alive. I believe there has to be some connection to that tendency and the fluid understanding of the body that was borne of the same culture.)
So even though Ayurveda sets a gold standard for pooping and offers a million ways to get there (#askmehow, seriously, I’ve got a list) sometimes we don’t do our business as much as the ideal. Sometimes we have just moved to Canada and are in winter after four years of a beach vacation. Sometimes our bodies are busy catching up and need to hold on to something stable.
What’s the answer? Let it go. Open palms, open heart, open colon. It’s all connected.
