The Rolling Incident
Chapter 5. O’Malley’s Mushroom Caps
Chapter 8. Fearless, Honest, Relaxed
Chapter 12. The Yamas and Niyamas
Chapter 16. Belting Out the Bhagavad Gita
Chapter 18. Ayurveda Revisited
Chapter 23. What Would Joshua Do?
Chapter 26. Urine Therapy Virgin
Chapter 30. Becoming Most Real
Appendix 1. Sample Yoga Practice
Appendix 6. Ayurvedic Constitutional Survey
Appendix 7. Ayurvedic Recommendations
There’s surely an uneven power dynamic between one person sitting naked on the toilet and the other hovering above in a dark suit. This is especially and egregiously true if the person sitting is pushing to no avail.
Such was the case as I sat naked in Dr. Brenner’s special post-colonoscopy bathroom. He wanted to speak with me about the results and was already late for his next appointment, so he walked on in and started to chat while I was on the potty. At the end of our talk, he offhandedly said, “If you’re having trouble relieving the gas, we can roll you.”
I was game for anything.
So two nurses laid me out on the crinkly paper of an examining table and rolled me back and forth. Their goal was to move things around and let the gas out.
This worked marvelously, and I was both enormously relieved and atrociously humiliated — until I recognized one of the nurses as the mother of a girl I had a huge crush on in school, and then I was only atrociously humiliated.
Thankfully, though, a dedicated yoga practice, which has included wearing winter gloves and punching a mattress as I shout Sanskrit chants, has cured me of colitis and spared me
