Colonics are so wonderfully un-cool!

Yep, that's me on the colonic equipment!

People can’t have their cool on when they have a tube in their ass.  For me, this is a great thing.  Sometimes I am alarmed at how we walk around the world showing so little of our insides on the out.  Sure sure, we might look cute, dress great, have good style, but who are you people really? And most importantly, why do you only show the world that you have it all together?

My boys!

As many of you know, my lovely husband, Eric, is one of the most creative and talented musicians in this town.  He leads an ensemble called Vagabond Opera.  They are cool.  I mean really super uber cool;  They wear fancy fun costumes and make-up;  They have hula-hoopers, fire, and belly dancers;  Eric plays the accordion;  Someone plays the musical saw;  And on top of all that, they make really good music and they sing opera.  (If you need to be awed and delighted, you should definitely see them.) 

Vagabond Opera, looking cool!

But as I said before, they are really cool.  As if living in Portland, Oregon wasn’t hipsterville enough, this Burning man, Country Fair community is in my proverbial backyard.  I often feel surrounded by the coolest, flashiest, good-looking-est people on the planet!  


Now I’m all for sparkly spectacular goodness.  I love to be delighted visually, but I am a girl who wants it all.  I want to go deep and know the nitty gritty of this and your existence. 

This is yet another reason that being a colon hydrotherapist is the greatest job on earth.  Because when you come to see me, you are vulnerable.  It feels a little funky to have water go up your butt.  Sometimes you feel crampy.  And for the love of god there is loads and loads of poop coming out of you and someone is seeing it.  This is definitely not a place you could or should hold it all together.  (As mentioned in the last blog, having a colonic is all about letting go, physically and otherwise.)  And luckily that means you can’t have your cool on!   

We are so much more than what our culture tells us we should look, show, and act like.  And yet there are so few places that welcome us to let our guard down.  At All's Well That Ends Well, I am proud to say that we delight in the emotional and spiritual dump that you may need to have as much as the physical one.  And believe it or not, showing yourself is liberating. 

Now I’m not proposing that you immediately run home and invite the neighbors over to watch you poop, but I do propose this:  Showing your shit is a very very good thing.  Who you are in the midst of all of your delights and upsets matters.  And personally, you being real is a huge relief.  I like hearing stories about your struggles, passions, and desires.   I like that there is something real to hold onto in the world beyond the facade.  And how can we possibly know what we have to let go of when we are holding ourselves so tightly together?

The messed up part is that we have all been horribly shamed about what our precious bodies do.  Our poop stinks.  We fart.  We drool.  Our bodies secrete all sorts of fluids inconveniently.  Colon hydrotherapy is not magic.  A colonic will not take away a bad childhood, suffering, years of shame and humiliation, but it is a place that you have to be real.  And to that I say, “Hooray!”

"The BIg C" (Constipation) and What to do About it!

Remember that first week you joined Facebook and your brain miraculously saw life through the lenses of posts?  Jill Simons is eating her breakfast.  Jill Simons is watching her son get dressed.  Jill Simons is going to the market.  Jill Simons is riding her bike.  Jill Simons is thinking about what to say on her Facebook post.  Seriously, in my head, my life was one big Jill Simons is dot dot dot!

That being said, you can only imagine my full-on delight in considering that I no longer have to conjure up the synopsis of my life into a wee teeny tiny post.  Looks like the blog IS  the answer to all the evil of the world.  

So what do I have to tell you today?  Today I want to talk to you about the complicated subject of stress.  And how does that connect at all with the beauty of colonics?  Hold onto your eyeballs because I’m gonna tell you...

People choose to have colonics for a billion different reasons (candida, low energy, cleansing, diet changes, skin issues, heavy metal chelation, etc.), but one of the most common reasons people come to All’s Well That Ends Well is because of The Big C.  I’m not talking about Cancer here, although we do have our fair share of clients with cancer. (Check out the awesome work they are doing at Project Quest where we donate 2 free colonics per week!)  I’m talking about CONSTIPATION.

Constipation is an affliction that is more common than you might think.  Millions upon millions of people in this country suffer with the inability to eliminate daily and completely making the laxative/fiber industry a booming one.  And while a lack of pooping in the short term doesn't do harm (don't worry about that weekend camping trip you took), it is those folks who have months and years of chronic constipation, who find themselves in trouble.  Chronic constipation is serious business!  It can be the instigator of all sorts of ailments such as skin problems, gas, bloating, exhaustion, and quite frankly, makes people feel downright cranky and irritable!

You might find this hard to believe, but  not everyone is filled with excitement and delight at the prospect of getting a colonic.  We have a population of clients who walk through our doors only because they are desperate and at the end of their rope.  These are often people with chronic constipation who have tried everything, and I do mean everything under the sun, to poop better on their own, but it just aint' happenin'.  They have tried diet changes, laxatives, teas, massage, GI doctors-all to no avail.   A colonic is their last resort!

One of our cozy treatment rooms!

What lucky people!  We at  All's Well That Ends Well have watched oodles and oodles of people turn a lifetime of constipation around with just a few sessions!  Now from here I could profess to you the amazing benefits of colon hydrotherapy and all it has to offer but instead I’m gonna take you on a trip through my brain.  Because after watching thousands of people have colonics for 12 years, I am struck with the question, why does this happen?  Why do our bodies defy what is supposed to be a natural rhythm?

I have lots of theories but no answer because we humans are complicated like that.  But this is what I want you to know:  We humans are out of sync.  Not on purpose, but by accident, our world has evolved faster than our bodies can keep up.  

There are of course many obvious reasons some people can’t poop every day and many things that get us out of sync:  bad food, not enough water, lack of exercise, past antibiotic use, parasitic infection, caffeine, alcohol, drugs, nerve damage, traumas (childhood and adult ones),etc.  But in my mind it all comes down to this:  stress!  

Now if you are like me then you might be saying to yourself, “I’m not stressed.  I feel fine!” but the truth of it is that we are not meant to be moving at such a fast pace, eating non-food as food, working long hours, having interrupted sleep or sleeping less than 8 hours, breathing in environmental pollutants at a horrifying rate.  Studies have shown that the mere act of watching tv can be a stress to our bodies and that is what many of us call relaxation.  Add in noise pollution, mercury fillings, and unclean water.  Put a little pressure on at work, stress about money, worry about our children or relationships, dissatisfaction with our bodies.  It is a wonder we function at all!  

I have a great example of stress for you.  Just a few months ago, I had the brilliant idea that what I really could use in my life was more centered time carved out only for myself.  I decided that I would take a yoga immersion at The Yoga Shala near my house.  The class was awesome.  The teacher great.  But the sad bitter truth of it is that I found myself completely stressed out.  The class started at 6 am and I couldn’t sleep my normal rhythm.  I woke up in the night in fear that I was sleeping through my alarm.  I couldn’t have my typical morning snuggle with my son.  I was exercising before pooping.  The opposite of what I was hoping would happen happened.  My push to relax became an added stress.

So what do you have to do to get your body in sync and free of stress?  Again the answers are complicated.  The obvious things are to do the opposites of what you did to get yourself in stress:  drink lots of clean water, eat nourishing whole foods, work a rational amount, sleep 8 hours a night, get in nature, move your body, reinoculate your gut with good bacteria, give yourself media breaks, remove the toxins from your body, supplement deficiencies through food or herbs.  For many people just doing a portion of those things brings on huge delightful change.    

But de-stressing our lives is easier in theory than in reality.  De-stressing your life means paying attention to your internal self:  something that we are not taught how to do.  In fact the world tells us not to do it. We live in a very external world where most of us would rather take a pill than sit with ourselves quietly.

There are many reasons I think colonics are the perfect springboard for this.  One is that  you are taking charge of your life by deciding to give your body support.   Two you are giving yourself an entire hour to be present with your body:  revolutionary!  Three is that when you clear out the crap, you feel more energized which in turn gives you more attention to think about what you are putting in your body.  And when you are being thoughtful about food, you get even more energy to do things like exercise.  It is the impetus for a plethora of goodness.  One good thing leads to another and another and another and another.  And here’s the beauty:  you can make huge changes in your life without stressing yourself out about it.  

The most awesome career in the world!

"How did you EVER become a colon hydrotherapist?"  It’s a common question that I get asked at least once a week from clients and others.  Perhaps it’s because only a small percentage of the population can fathom what sticking a tube in your butt and pooping for an hour with a stranger can do for you.  Or perhaps it’s because we don’t really talk about pooping in this culture, let alone make it our livelihood or passion.  Let’s face it: being a colon hydrotherapist is an odd career. Well, it is true that as I was growing up, spending my tender years in Memphis Tennessee surrounded by my imaginary world of stuffed animals who had come to life, I wasn't dreaming that one day I would clean people’s asses out for a living.  I grew up in a household where we didn’t even call our body parts by their actual names.  My vagina was my poo poo (well that’s confusing!) and my butt was called my tush. I had only vaguely heard of the word vagina and since I was in the south, I was quite confused that Virginia, the state, and my private parts were the same thing. Yes that's me in 1978!   Oh, the trials and tribulations of being an odd-ball, short, dark curly-headed Jewish girl from east coast parents living in the South!  To call me different, even as a child, was an understatement.  But as odd as I was, colon hydrotherapy was nowhere on my radar as a potential passion, pastime or future! What was a lifelong aspiration was that I just wanted to be good in the world.  To love and to be loved.  So naturally I wanted to become a veterinarian.  What could be greater in the world than helping out the most helpless beings?  Sick cute animals completely dependent upon us to save them.  But like so many others, the reality that the sight of blood makes me want to vomit set in.  What didn’t change was my desire to help and to love and be loved.  This was the perfect set-up for a lot of crap romantic love relationships in my 20s, but career wise, I had my head on.  I channeled that love and passion into becoming a teacher for 3 years before becoming an advocate and counselor in the domestic violence movement. Paddy 2010 And then there was fate.  The gods must have been smiling down upon me when I was 21 and moved to the awesome funky town of Portland,Oregon and found myself living next door to one of the most fantastic people on the planet:  Paddy Lazar.  Paddy Lazar:  a radical, East coast Jewish lesbian in her early 40s with kick-ass politics and a heart wide open.  Loud, Out there.  A voice of reason, compassion, and social justice. I was in love. Not romantically, but spiritually.  I had never met anyone quite so spectacular!  Paddy not only loved animals but topped me with her complete obsession over her dog.  Hence the daily ritual of walking our dogs together and becoming deep close friends. There are many things that happened in the 6 years between moving to Portland and starting  a colon hydrotherapy practice.  Here’s what you need to know:  Paddy, neighbor and friend extraordinaire turned into co-worker.  We worked at a radical agency that helped support women in getting out of the brutal life of prostitution; Paddy was a counselor for adult women and I was a counselor for the children of these moms. And then there was Ariel Policano, a dear friend of mine who was a walking, talking billboard of colon hydrotherapy.  She, herself, was a colon hydrotherapist, who was very extremely passionate about its benefits.  She all but begged me to come in for my first colonic, which by the way took me an entire year to convince myself to do.  I had never had constipation or digestive issues and couldn't grasp what a colonic would do besides get my friend to shut up...which was seriously a big motivation. That first colonic was a life changer.  I'm not going to lie to you.  I didn't enjoy the feeling of having the actual colonic, but I couldn't deny the difference of how I felt afterwards:  energized, lighter, and clearer!  It inspired me to eat better, exercise more and take better care of myself.  Well, it wasn't long before I convinced Paddy to try it.  She, too, found it life-changing, helping to cure her of a lifelong struggle with constipation.  We loved it and finally understood why Ariel loved it too.  When the agency that Paddy and I worked for went under and we found ourselves jobless, there wasn't much of a question of what we wanted to do. Can I just say this?  Shit is shit-- emotional, physical, energetic.  The form doesn’t particularly matter.  What matters most is that we have to excrete things out of our bodies and lives that aren’t serving us well.  Perhaps you were abused or neglected as a child and you are carrying around the shit of that.  Maybe that’s the reason you grab that soft drink, eat that fast food, or drink yourself silly every night.  We all have traumas, some smaller or bigger than others.  We cope. We deal in the best ways we know.   There is shit to be cleaned and cleared and we all know it. So being a colon hydrotherapist is not a big leap from being a counselor.  As a colon hydrotherapist, I am your counselor and cheerleader asking you what it is that you need to move out of your life so you can be happier, freer and more yourself. I tell clients all the time:  you have no idea of how good you can feel in this world.  Our bodies are brilliant machines that can live off of Twinkies and Fritos if need be.  When you figure out what needs to move  and move it you will feel better than you have ever felt in your life.   And then let the cheering begin. Paddy and I in 1998 when All's Well was born!

Confessions to and from a colon hydrotherapist

People say the darndest things to their colon hydrotherapist...and I'm not just talking about poop stories.  I’m talking about the things that you would only say to your deepest loved ones or your therapist.  

You know how it goes.  You are going to the salon for a simple hair cut and as soon as the stylist (or hair artist as mine likes to be called) touches your scalp, you are telling not just anything but all...Well folks, the same thing is true when the other end is stimulated.  Hence "The Bottom Line"-a blog to share some of those very interesting confessions and then some.*

This was really my friend Thomas’s idea. Thomas is a fashion designer extraordinaire and an all around fabulous, fun human being.  We have shared a love of many things through the years:  gardening, low budget fashion, bike rides, being nerds, food, and most importantly good bum cleanings.  So as you can imagine, many a colonic has been had followed by bike rides, carrot juice and good chats.  And I, as the colon hydrotherapist, find myself talking on and on about the fascinating things that can happen in one (yes, just one) colon hydrotherapy session!** Thomas, being the designer he is, suggested the coffee table book: Confessions To a Colon Hydrotherapist.

And while this is no coffee table book, it is much much more:  The best of 12 years of confessions to and many more from a colon hydrotherapist.  I am positive you will be deeply moved, charmed, and inspired!  Colonics, food, lives, people, bikes, nerds, cooking, low budget fashion, and if you are lucky a story or two about my son...


* Just a little disclaimer here:  colon hydrotherapy sessions are completely confidential.  This blog will share revelations, general topics of health, and overall interesting stories that will be sure to delight and inspire you without divulging any client's name or personal information.
**Again, colon hydrotherapy sessions are completely confidential!