Lessons on Poo

A long read on ancestral shame alchemy in the astral

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Recently, I had a sequence of dreams about going to the toilet that changed my life.

I have had these dreams a lot throughout my life.

My mum used to have dreams of not being able to find a toilet because all of them were full of shit or flooding, or there was no door on the cubicle.

I used to have dreams like that too. Until I didn’t anymore, and the reason why I stopped having those dreams is a big deal.

Some years ago, during a three day ceremony with Iboga, I spent the first part of it having vivid and unrelenting visions of poo. Tons of it. Of every colour and consistency.

Excrement passed through the projector screen behind my eyelids for hours.

I don’t quite remember exactly what was said, but a while a go my mum shared with me that growing up, there was an obsession with sterility in her household. And a lot of shame and disdain for genitals and the various fluids that come out of them.

I struggled to go to the toilet as a little kid. It wasn’t a major health problem but I would get blocked up a lot and I remember a particular occasion where I was extremely frightened and in a lot of pain trying to shit.

I never did know how to let go.

And in more ways than just the one, I grew accustomed to being full of stuff that needed to be released.

I took on everything as though it were my own. It was like other people’s emotions entered through the pores in my skin.

And to cope with the experience, I locked myself out of my body and lived inside my mind, a place that grew more and more cluttered and claustrophobic to live inside of, until it became utterly inhospitable in there.

The thing about living inside your head, is that you can suspend yourself just above the point of feeling something, for a long, long time. You can stay there for years and years and I guess, lifetimes and lifetimes. But eventually it will become unbearable.

I realise that the great majority of people who get in front of me in my work, have been in that situation, where it became untenable to stay suspended.

Where the reality of potentially never having truly relaxed, into the body, becomes unavoidable. And the incessant wittering of a mind employed to avoid feeling, becomes unliveable.

And at that point, you have no choice but to begin learning how to let go. How to expel.

How to shit.

Things started to shift in a meaningful way when I started to wake up inside the dreams.

Dreams of needing to go but being faced with grim scenes of toilet bowls filled to the actual brim with diarrhea, blood and soggy tissue.

Of needing to get somewhere but walking into some hell dungeon. Faced, very suddenly, with the back up of everything I had yet to expel.

I lucid dream really often. I’d love to be able to stay awake inside dreams longer than I do. Bit I have come to realise that it is the simple act of becoming aware inside the dream that changes everything.

Just seeing a toilet started to trigger lucidity, and I started saying stuff like there’s something here for me, show me.

I set the intention to awaken inside the dreams, and I did.

And that few seconds of curiosity in the astral seemed to do something. Seemed to run alongside a new-found capacity to feel shame and let it run through me without unhinging myself from reality in an attempt to avoid it.

The same location that I’d been getting knocked clean unconscious in for a long time, opened a crack, and I found myself woozy, but ultimately awake inside it. I found myself with the impetus to stay with myself.

And then the dreams started to change more rapidly.

I started walking into clean toilets.

In one dream, a toilet flooded after I flushed it and I panicked. A dream character said to me don’t worry, that isn’t your problem and then an ghost rose out of the toilet with a hilarious oh fuck you got me expression.

A man rushed to my aid to banish it.

In another dream, I gave up on trying to lock a toilet that wouldn’t close and took a piss with the door open. Someone walked in and I just casually told them that I couldn’t close the door, soz not soz.

I noticed there was a soaked period pad on the floor to the one side of me and again, unfazed, I said: That’s not mine.

In another dream I spilt pee on the floor. So I wiped it up. End of story. Whereas in previous experiences, every attempt I made to clean up mess resulted in the mess tripling before my eyes.

The shifting dream theme came to a crescendo with me in a big, dark room, on a giant black toilet. And I remember feeling that I had all the space in the entire universe to take care of my business. Like I was sitting on the fucking universe. I remember feeling a sense of completion.

And do you know what I distinctly remember alongside that? That despite knowing that I was finally in a safe and even luxurious place - that my surroundings had shifted wildly from the poverty stricken hovels I kept stumbling into - there was this tiny inkling that I might still be in danger.

That I didn’t know what was underneath me in that toilet bowl. That something might jump up and bite my arse.

That I couldn’t quite fully relax, even then.

Relaxation is an existential issue.

I started writing this piece weeks and weeks ago and it’s so funny that I came back to it at the time that I did with everything that has transpired and moved within me since then, so that I could write that sentence:

Relaxation is an existential issue.

One night recently, my husband and I were chilling on the settee and he announces that he is gonna go for a shit.

And for some reason, I found that to be the opportune time to say:

You know, I’ve never said this out loud before. But maybe if I say it, it’ll help. But even though I feel pretty relaxed right now, something inside me is looping. It’s not a thought, it’s like something is checking. Checking I am doing it right. That I am existing correctly. It’s like something keeps switching on. It switches on and off and on and off. And it used to be really bad, it came fully up a few years ago, and I was like ‘fuck, this has always been there and it has been really bad’ and since then it has gone down a lot. But sometimes it comes on again. And I realise all this time I have seemed to be here like everything is fine but in the background something is scanning. Like something isn’t quite right and I need to do something about it but I don’t know what it is.

He looks at me for what feels like a long time. There is recognition in his face. He reaches his hand out and squeezes my ankle. And then after a moment, he smiles and says:

Can I poo now?

Relaxation is an existential issue.

At least for me.
At least for the women I work with.
And the women I know.
And perhaps, the women, period.

And at the bottom of every spiral I have been down, I have heard the muffled cry:

I don’t know how to be.

Being felt mysterious and inaccessible because at the root of my being was a high security surveillance system.

My husband and I have both been prolific mental spirallers and we have a practice of speaking them out loud with one another.

But I had struggled for a long time to even give words to that one. The one that does not have thought, but is rather a compulsive, internal checking motion, that if given a voice, would say:

Am I alright? Am I doing alright? Something is not alright. Something feels wrong.

It has felt like a stuck record inside my head, like the needle catching and releasing and catching and releasing and catching again.

I realise how instantly I have fused with it. How instant the identification has been, and how subtly it has run.

My highly attuned perception and sensitivity lends itself well to my work and creative life.

But like many kids who come into the world with their third eye and crown centres blown open a little too wide, my unusually high sensitivity wasn’t met with consistent attunement or containment.

So my body learned:

If I don’t stay alert, something will go wrong.

And it is kind of insane to reflect on just how much of my personality and way of being in the world had been governed by that.

The recurring dreams have all but stopped now.

And it was shortly after that moment on the sofa that a clear separation formed between who I truly am and the thing inside me that scans and checks and flickers and fidgets.

It does not run me anymore.

It doesn’t inform my core identity.

It’s just an old mechanism in a machine that will eventually go defunct through lack of use.

And the space left by this receding pattern is filled by more of who I really am.

A frame of goodness, rightness and wholeness, that holds fast and true through the hurricane of energy that passes through me on a daily basis.

I am a tuning fork.

Sensitised but sovereign.

Porous and yet contained.