Hearing the BBC newsreader, announcing in his best BBC accent that we should ‘check our poo’ made me snigger like a 7 year old. It felt so incongruous. This great British institution saying the word ‘poo’, when we all know they should be using the term 'number twos' instead.
I had never heard of Deborah James who recently died from bowl cancer. She was a deputy head teacher in Chertsey and later in Staines. But once she was diagnosed, she worked as a journalist/ columnist / podcaster detailing her cancer journey. It seems she was open about the graphic details of her cancer. She did everything she could to bring public awareness to this issue from dressing up as a poo emoji to setting up Bowel Babe Fund raising £7million.
It made stop and think two things:
Would I have the courage to turn my slow demise into something for the good of others?
How silly we are with our taboos.
Exploring taboos
Thankfully, I am healthy and don’t have to put my altruism to the test. But I can explore about taboos…
I want to say they are all pointless, but I can’t quite agree with that. Maybe I want to say that we should be able to at least talk about them openly, but then they're not much of a taboo, are they?
Freud wrote that for most people there is “nothing they would like more than to violate [taboos], but they are afraid to do so; they are afraid precisely because they would like to, and the fear is stronger than the desire.” Do you agree with that?
There are taboos and there are TABOOS -it depends on context. Body parts and bodily functions are dripping in taboo. Even as I write this, I am wondering how far can I push this subject before you unsubscribe.
We have so much to contend with in life as it is, why can’t we just move on? But even today, as opposed to let's say Victorian times, if someone farts, there will be someone laughing, someone blushing and someone desperately pretending it never happened.
A farting interlude
• The world's oldest recorded joke was from 1900 BCE about a woman who may or may not have tooted in her husband’s lap.
• Adults fart about 14 times a day. Typically, adults produce about 2 pints of gas.
• Literature is full of fart jokes. In Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors, Dromio of Ephesus says “A man may break a word with you, sir; and words are but wind; Ay, and break it in your face, so he break it not behind.” Geoffrey Chaucer too had a character “let fly a fart as loud as it had been a thunder-clap” in The Canterbury Tales. Joyce penned some pretty raunchy missives to his wife and muse. “I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere,” Joyce wrote. “I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.” He described it as a “rather girlish noise.”
• Farting can be a fetish a proclivity known as “eproctophilia.”
• Gerald Ford the 38th President of the United States, would let one rip, and regularly blamed it on one of his Secret Service agents, very loudly saying things like “Jesus, was that you? Show some class!”
• It’s thought that octopuses don’t toot. Nor do soft-shell clams, sea anemones, or birds. Sloths don’t fart either—and they very well may be the only mammal that does not.
• There's a pill that claims to make stinky bottom burps smell sweet, options include chocolate, rose, violet, ginger, and lily of the valley too.
• The term ‘Professional Fart Smellers’ is used in China to refer to the bold men and women who smell farts to diagnose illness. The ‘fart smellers’ make up to $50,000
• Smelling fart can reduce the risk of cancer, dementia and arthritis as said by the University of Exter. This happens because of tiny amounts of hydrogen sulfide, which prevent damage to mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell.
Taboo Yoga practices
Yogis seem to have lots of interesting things that can be done which probably push the taboo boat. The Gheranda Samhita text describes Vatsara Dhauti. You perform this by breathing in slowly through the mouth in Kaki mudra (similar to pursing the lips to make a crow’s beak) and then swallowing the air into the stomach while expanding the abdomen. Assume an inverted posture and pass the air out through the anus.
There's Moola Shodhana. This is done by inserting the middle finger into the rectum and rotating it clockwise and then anticlockwise. The use of a turmeric root is recommended.
Then there is also Bahiskrita Dhauti which is very difficult unless you are an extremely advanced hatha yoga practitioner. This involves standing navel-deep in clean water, pushing the rectum out of the body and washing it in the hands.
“It is not easily available, even to the gods” (Gheranda Samhita 1:23)
All these practices and others are said to clean the entire digestive tract and respiratory tract, removing excess old bile, mucus, toxins and restoring natural balance pf the body’s chemical composition. The results are a reduction of excess fatty tissue and relief from flatulence, constipation, poor digestion and loss of appetite.
I could go on sharing…. Basti (yogic enema) or Vajroli (blowing air with effort into a tube which is inserted into the urethra of the penis), but I feel as though I am stepping close to the mark of discomfort.
It would be easy to dismiss all these practices as crazy, but I wonder if it isn’t a tad unfair. In modern times we still want the desired outcome (e.g. less excess fatty tissue, relief from flatulence, constipation etc), but have changed how we get there. Most of the time it involves taking a pill and trusting it is doing what it says on the packet. This is great, but it does also separate us from those body parts and their workings, creating more distance and perhaps even increasing the taboo.
Don’t worry, I am not about to incorporate any of these practices into my classes. Nor am I going to suggest that we all let rip whilst in down dog, but I do think that finding ways to reduce some of the taboos surrounding our body can only be a good thing. It helps us to understand better what is going on and if anything is going wrong. So hopefully we don’t need a 40year old ex-deputy headmistress to dress up as a poo emoji and tell us check our bowel movements.
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