Wellmania

by Brigid Delaney

  This is all good progress, and more than worth the price of admission, but I can’t help but feel a little jealous of those who get the special effects – the fire and the visions and the chorus line of Hindu gods.

  Meditation retreats can work – they allow you to dip out of your regular patterns for a bit and see your life as a stranger might see it. They’re an evaluation vacation. After that first retreat with Aruna I’m hooked. The experience is a lot less confronting than going to New Norcia, and more immersive than the urban retreat I did in London. But life doesn’t suddenly change or get better after one week away meditating. I return to Melbourne and my future is still uncertain, money tight, and I have a bunch of Centrelink and job centre appointments to attend. Samsara’s a bitch, dude – or as Bowie would have it, we’re always crashing the same car – and often, after the retreat, I find myself making the same mistakes or poor decisions time and time again. Aruna had said that ‘there are always patterns from the past that are unresolved’. If you turn inwards and ‘just be’ with these patterns, eventually a resolution will come. But when? When do these resolutions occur? I want serenity now!

  It’s approaching the middle of the year and I still don’t have a job – not a job-job, a proper job – not since I left that office with my broken box and fat tears. I’m teaching journalism at Monash University for around six hours a week, getting bits of freelance work and planning an escape to New York. I’ve found an apartment on the Upper West Side, a journalists’ visa and some leads on work. I can’t make it in Melbourne but I just might make it in New York. All that autumn I sing in the shower of my share house, ‘If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere, except probably for Melbourne, yeah, yeah, yeah.’

  In the months before I leave for America I go to Bikram yoga most days and spend the rest of my time in the writing studio at the Nicholas, marking essays. I’m poor and life is fairly quiet and boring.

  So when a travel-writing opportunity comes up for a flying visit to a high-end, state-of-the-art wellness facility in the Philippines, I jump at it.

  This place leads the world in raw food cuisine, but is even more popular for its no food cuisine, as evidenced by the number of people lying by the pool drinking juices and shakes in lieu of meals. The facility takes a scientific approach, testing and analysing your blood on the first day. They promise serenity via daily yoga and meditation sessions, as well as an amazing day spa.

  Despite the deprivations that await, the Farm, a spa and integrated health resort (meaning there is a medical clinic onsite) is supposed to be out-of-this-world gorgeous. Villas, some with their own swimming pools, are placed at decent intervals on a huge, manicured estate. There are coconut groves, swimming pools, yoga pavilions, a restaurant and meditation huts. Peacocks wander past the sun lounges and there are approximately four staff per guest. Like so many luxurious health retreats, the spell only works if you don’t think too much about where you are – if you pretend you don’t have your own swimming pool and personal trainer in one of the poorest countries in the world.

  Manila is a ninety-minute bus ride from the airport. On and on, as far as the eye can see, there is a muddy brown line of cardboard houses and people sleeping or sitting out the front on their makeshift stoops. I have never seen a slum before – and for that I need to thank the person pulling out the numbers in life’s lottery. But now, in the taxi, I recognise it straightaway. It looks like all the pictures on the television news and in newspapers, the same visuals from Rio to Jo’burg to Haiti to Lagos: people in makeshift, temporary housing that is, of course, not temporary because it’s not like anyone is going anywhere. The shelters are made of cardboard and look like they might at any moment slide into the muck (a river, a creek, a sewerage outlet?) that runs past their homes.

  In Manila I stay with my friend Jackie, another former UN worker, now employed at one of the big Asian development banks. She and her friends Justin and Nat have just been to the crucifixions that happen outside Manila each Easter. They are actual crucifixions. We flick through photos on Justin’s phone. There are real nails being driven through real hands. Justin’s pants are flecked with blood from standing too close while a guy was getting nailed to the cross.

  It’s a visceral trip – Justin and Nat are also going to the Farm and the first thing they want to know is if I’m going to do a colonic. The place is famous for them. Euuughhh … colonics! I shudder at the word, having a strong poo taboo. But colonics have a long history – they were performed in Egyptian times, with hollow reeds and river water. And in the time of Queen Victoria upper-class children received weekly colonics from a governess. Known as the ‘Victorian enema’, it sometimes coincided with weekly whippings and punishments, and the practice therefore left a sexual legacy on a generation of children. According to a sexual fetish forum I stumble across (one doesn’t visit fetish forums, they are always stumbled across), ‘So many boys and girls became sexually oriented to whipping and flagellation that it became known in Europe as the “English vice”.’

  During a colon cleanse, large amounts of water, sometimes with added extras such as herbs or coffee, are flushed through the colon using a tube inserted into the rectum. In some cases, smaller amounts of water are used and are left to sit in the colon before being removed.

  This is another variation on the detox theme: our organs become worn-out over time, and need to be cleaned like a sewer system that is clogged from overuse. Old lumps of meat putrefy and become impacted on the internal wall of the colon. They stay there for years, rotting. This disgusting coating creates sluggish digestion and lack of blood flow, and contains parasites or pathogenic gut flora that cause poor health. This condition is known as autointoxication, and our large and small intestines need to be flushed out by throwing a heap of water through them.

  But there is no science behind it. In 1919 a Journal of the American Medical Association paper debunked autointoxication, and according to Christopher Wanjek, author of the books Bad Medicine and Food at Work, ‘Still to this day, direct observations of the colon through surgery and autopsy find no hardening of faecal matter along the intestinal walls.’

  Yet colonics continue to be popular. In the late 1990s the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology noted that colonics were making a comeback, publishing a paper entitled ‘Colonic irrigation and the theory of autointoxication: a triumph of ignorance over science’.

  In the wellness world, to be clean – to eat clean and to be clean on the inside – is next to, or even ahead of Godliness.

  *

  On Easter Saturday, the day I am due to go to the wellness facility, I wake up at 5am, somewhere in Manila’s diplomatic district, beside a swimming pool and an empty bottle of champagne. It is still dark, warm and quiet. I am grateful that in my sleep I haven’t rolled into the pool and drowned. The ambassador is away and his adult children had a party the night before. Yesterday at lunch – in a formal dining room at a long, long table where everyone was seated at least a metre apart – I consumed an entree of salami, two helpings of lamb, and, as the afternoon wore on, a lot of prosecco.

  Later, waist-deep in the pool, drunker than I wanted to be, I was passed something strong that had been packed into a pipe. It felt like inhaling bitumen. It was a good Good Friday. Midnight ticked over. More cigarettes were sent for. A bottle of gin was opened. I stayed in the water for hours, turning into a warm prune. People came and went. We played Marco Polo and listened to Simon and Garfunkel. The night was close, like being in a comfortable old sock, and it felt okay to sleep outside, not even under a towel.

  In a few hours a car is coming to take me to the spa, where I’ll be staying for a week, consuming raw vegan food, doing yoga and maybe even trying a colonic in an attempt to cleanse myself. Serenity, something like the empty feeling I had on Aruna’s retreat, will follow – I hope.

  I roll away from the swimming pool, disgusted with myself. Here I am again, on this cycle that I despise but can’t seem to escape – swinging betwe
en wellness and hedonism.

  *

  The Farm is lousy with staff, many walking around in lab coats. You can’t move without a person offering you a refreshing chilled face towel, and every time a palm frond drops to the ground one of the worker guys in a bright jumpsuit springs onto the path and sweeps it away with a large broom.

  Some of the guests take a ‘wellness’ package, which includes meals, an exercise regime with personal training, and spa treatments such as massage. All the food at the Farm is raw vegan – tiny portions of granola with nut milk, raw vegetables on skewers, cashew mousse – and, despite my initial hesitation, it’s totally delicious, except for the corn cakes, which taste like dough and stick to the roof of your mouth.

  But people mainly go there to detox, refraining from eating anything except for a few weird-looking shakes that are served at intervals throughout the day. The detoxers lie by the pool in the midday sun, glazed and still. It is oppressively humid, and sweat just courses from and off you like the plumbing in your body has gone badly awry. You don’t just sweat in the Philippines, you leak. But sometimes a breeze passes across the grounds, rippling the surface of the swimming pool, stirring the pages of the fasters’ magazines. The fasters are drowsy and don’t even notice the pages turning. It’s all a bit like a David Hockney painting.

  Twice a day the people by the pool are escorted by a nurse down the long grove of palms for their colonics, their waste pumped from them through clear plastic tubing and deposited God knows where.

  ‘I’ve lost inches from my waist,’ one faster tells me in the clinic waiting room on my first day. She’s nursing a heat pack against her abdomen and swallows a hefty pill to replace good bacteria in the colon after it has been flushed out. The whites of her eyes are brilliant, her frame gaunt. I wonder if she has cancer or if she has just been fasting for a long time. She tells me this is her thirteenth day in a row of colonics.

  I see a doctor for an assessment soon after arriving. I have a hangover and my back has kinks in it from sleeping on the ground near the swimming pool. My blood is taken and analysed, and the results aren’t good.

  Have I by any chance been exposed to heavy metal? Second-hand smoke? Building sites?

  I watch my cells drifting across the monitor.

  ‘See that?’ says the doctor. ‘You have sputniks in your platelets.’

  That, apparently, is not a good thing. I feel that emotion you never want to feel in a doctor’s surgery: fear.

  My profile, she tells me, is that of a ‘lifelong meat eater’. A colonic is recommended as the first step in cleaning out my body.

  ‘No way, Jose,’ I tell her.

  In the restaurant Justin and Nat debate whether or not to have a colonic. Nat has always been curious. ‘Princess Diana used to have them,’ he says. He’s seen a nurse at the Farm who explained the two types of procedures: the colonic, which works on the lower intestine and involves coffee being pumped into your butt, and the colema, which is more intense, and cleanses both the upper and lower intestines with a ‘machine’.

  ‘I think I’m going to have a treatment,’ says Nat, using the term we have all decided is more palatable than saying the word ‘colonic’ out loud. ‘May as well while I’m here.’

  ‘I’ll have a treatment if you have one,’ Justin says to me.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll have one.’

  The next day we meet again.

  ‘Have you had your treatment?’ I ask Nat anxiously.

  ‘Yes, it was fine. I feel much lighter.’

  Nat is skipping lunch as he is having another treatment in the afternoon. He looks serene, not at all disturbed or freaked out.

  ‘Your eyes look clearer,’ Justin says to Nat. We look into Nat’s eyes, bright and white – not cloudy like mine usually are.

  ‘Mmm, I suppose they are,’ says Nat, almost absently. He is spacing out before our eyes.

  ‘You’re turning into that luminous, gaunt, fasting woman,’ I tell him.

  Over the next few days, he reports that his waste has taken on the texture and colour of what he has just eaten: ‘Orange poos after eating those carrots for lunch,’ he says, and we hang on every word – fascinated and grossed out.

  While holding out on having a treatment, I do other things at the Farm that make me feel, at least superficially, very serene. I eat only vegan, raw food, go to bed at 8pm and wake refreshed without an alarm at 6am. I swim in the waterfall pool, go on a morning power walk with the Farm’s personal trainer, do yoga in an outdoor pavilion and loll on a sun lounge by the pool. I have an ‘under the stars’ massage, a 290-minute epic that takes place outside – under the stars – and involves being coated in a chocolate scrub, then soaking in a tub of warm coconut milk, then having a Filipino massage.

  But still the spectre of the treatment hangs over my stay.

  Using the toilet in private is how I have generally done it all my life. The door is always shut. The exception being, of course, before I was toilet trained and had to be coaxed and cleaned by a parent.

  And so it is again at the Farm when I finally relent (I am worried about my negative blood work). Grace is ‘doing me’, and staff promise me she is very experienced as they lead me down the path to where she is waiting, smiling, reassuring in her starched white uniform. She stands outside the door of the Colonics Room. It is immaculately clean. I don’t know what I was expecting – a charnel-house? Excrement on the walls? But it is sparkling and, even more surprising, odourless.

  ‘I’ve never done this before and I’m kind of scared,’ I tell Grace. She says all the right things and is very soothing. I get changed into a hospital gown and she tells me to lie on my back and then slide down this bench thing and raise my knees. By this stage I am perspiring and my breathing is uneven. I’m not just ‘kind of scared’ – I’m terrified. I am not sure why this procedure scares me so much. Is it having a stranger there? The thought of my bowel perforating and being reliant on a colostomy bag for the rest of my life? Or the horror at seeing my shit being pumped out of me?

  ‘Keep breathing,’ Grace tells me. The urge to hold her hand is strong.

  Here’s what happens. You lie on a long bench with your legs either side of a sort of potty-shaped hole with a bowl underneath it. The nurse gloves up and sticks a lubed finger, then a tube, up your bum, then runs coffee through your lower intestines via the tube. The muck, as well as the coffee, ends up in the bowl. The nurse massages your stomach while the water filters through and you push it out. Maybe it’s because I’m whimpering slightly and the nurse is so soothing, but I really do feel like a helpless baby.

  I find the treatment more bearable if she keeps me distracted. I conduct what is effectively a potty-side interview to keep her talking. ‘What sorts of people do this? Can you do this if you have colon cancer? How many times should one have this procedure?’ She says people who have regular colonics are mainly business people who travel a lot for work and their internal systems are disrupted by all the different time zones. It’s recommended as a preventative measure for colon cancer but they don’t recommend it for people with colon cancer, and ‘you should have this once a year’ as a sort of maintenance exercise.

  The treatment is in no way painful but the idea of it breaches some pretty entrenched psychological barriers. There are big taboos about shitting in front of other people – even in the medicalised, white-coat, highly hygienic setting of a health farm. It’s impossible just to discard decades of private privyings. Yet here I am – in thirty (strange) minutes I have crossed the Rubicon.

  Back in reception I nurse a heat pack against my stomach and take a big pill meant to replace lost gut flora.

  Colonic irrigation can disrupt the gut’s natural flora, and flooding the colon with water can lead to loss of electrolytes and other balancing agents in the body. If done roughly or not under supervision, there is a risk the bowel could tear. Of course the Farm is anything but rough, and I suffer no ill effects. But, apart from feeling ‘emptier�
��, it doesn’t seem to do much. That said, I don’t suffer from gut issues or any of the digestion problems that drive people to the procedure in the first place. So I cross colonic irrigation off my wellness bucket list and never really think about it again. I am certainly not making it part of any health regime back home.

  The interesting thing is not so much the colonics themselves – which are gross – but why they have found a place in the modern wellness industry. One colonic irrigator interviewed by the Straight Dope website explains, ‘You can watch everything come out and see what you’re really made of or what you’ve been holding on to for days, months, or years! You can let go into a completely enclosed system – no smell – no mess.’

  The market for colonics – particularly in upmarket health spas – is as much driven by deeper psychological needs as health concerns. You lie down, breathe, and just … let go. It all comes out – the things that were making you stuck, the things that were making you sick, the things you were holding on to for years and years and years. You watch the toxic stuff that was stuck inside you disappear down the tube. It’s gone forever. The feeling of lightness descends.

  Could this be the key to serenity? Could it be as simple as releasing your shit? Let it go, let it go …

  If only it were really so easy.

  After three months in New York I am close to making it. Almost, almost, almost. I’m down to the final round for a job with a global human rights campaign group. I’m all about Syria and injury compensation for illegal Mexican workers on the construction sites of Texas, and worker safety in factories in China. At night I prep by reading about all the troubles in the world and drafting possible solutions. In my ground-floor apartment in Park Slope, I’m a one-woman UN. You got a human rights problem, yo, I’ll solve it. The interviews – I’ve done around eight so far – are weird, more like intense, non-sexual dates where I’ll meet members of the organisation in semi-social situations and we’ll talk about all the troubles in the world, and – OMG, where did you get those great shoes?!