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Preface

The Rolling Incident

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 future humiliations. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It all started when I was sixteen years old, during the fall of my senior year of high school. I remember being slumped on the couch, watching Laverne & Shirley reruns. Shirley was vacuuming, and I thought to myself, “How does she have the energy to do that? It looks so exhausting.”

I was in bad shape. But I had trouble telling anyone about my embarrassing symptoms, so it took a while for me to tell my family, and then a while for us to find the right doctor.

Eventually we found Dr. Brenner, a gastroenterologist, and he scheduled a battery of tests. At this point the true humiliation began. I was already lethargic and losing weight because my body was not digesting food properly — I weighed 142 pounds, which is not much at six-foot-two — and now I had to undergo colonoscopies. Colonoscopies are supposed to be reserved for seventy-two-year-old men and repeat alien abductees from North Dakota who expect this sort of violation. One time the doctor showed me how much rubber tubing had been involved in that particular day’s probe: a full three feet.

As if the basics of a colonoscopy are not bad enough, during such an exam, when the fiber-optic tube is deep up in there, the doctor has to be able to see the wall of the colon, so he pumps in gas. One time I had trouble relieving the gas, and that’s what led to the rolling incident.

After the tests, Dr. Brenner diagnosed me with ulcerative colitis.

I had colitis because I was a stressed-out kid — I was a straight-A student, the champion debater of New Jersey, and president of the Spanish Club.

Spanish Club might sound quaint, and it was. As president my one responsibility was to coordinate our monthly Spanish dinner. The dinner entailed, basically, getting together in the home ec room to heat up nachos, cook arroz con pollo, and convince Sra. Moran that there was no drinking age in the United Sates. But for some reason the mirth of all this was lost on me, and every month I was a wreck, like Adrian Monk planning a presidential state dinner.

After the diagnosis, Dr. Brenner started me on some meds. They took a while to kick in, but by the summer I was better. And the timing was excellent, because in the fall I was to attend Georgetown University.

After that first ten-month battle with colitis, I vowed never to take a healthy bowel movement for granted, and I’m proud to say that for twenty years I have succeeded valiantly in this department. Still today, in fact, I often find myself down on my hands and knees examining the evidence with the gratitude, wonder, and delight of The Last Emperor’s court physician.

During my first two years at Georgetown, I was blessedly colitis-free. But even so, I realized how deeply stressed I was, and that though I knew how to get As, I knew little about how to be comfortable, relaxed, and happy. I wanted desperately to feel more at ease. I wanted to feel more loving and more free-spirited. So I started doing experiments to learn how to live.

In one experiment I decided to follow my urges and whims exclusively. I imagined that if I studied when I felt like studying, I’d be most productive at those times, and that if I felt like hanging out with friends or working out, I should do those things then, when my intention was strongest.

I think there’s really something to this. And I see now that this has always been my foundational practice: trusting in the intelligence of true desire, authentic intuition, and flowing energy. This practice has influenced my biggest decisions, has informed my professional life, and eventually led me to Kripalu yoga.

But unfortunately, that particular experiment failed … quite miserably. After three weeks, I awoke one morning (severely behind on reading and writing for my classes), wearing the same clothes that I had been in for several days, with vomit on my shirt where a woman had puked on me the night before, and with a sprained ankle from earlier that same night when she and I had jumped a fence so we could hook up on the fifty-yard line of the Georgetown football field.

I needed some discipline and some honing of my intuition before I could completely release to the flow.

For the decade following that project, I explored, I traveled, I trained, and I experimented. I searched for ways to feel comfortable and happy. I consulted psychics, scientists, yogis, swamis, Ayurvedic physicians, life coaches, and even (accidentally, I assure you) a prostitute. I tried meditation, herbs, flower essences, psychotherapy, and shouting out my angst. I almost tried sesame oil enemas, walking on hot coals, and urine therapy (the daily practice of drinking one’s own midstream morning urine).

And I learned a lot.

From yoga, I learned how to stand and how to breathe.

From yoga’s sister science, Ayurveda, I learned how to eat, how to poop, and how to sleep.

From meditation and Kripalu yoga, I learned to awaken my feelings and my intuition.

And from Jerry Garcia, Misha the yogi, and a scary shaman named Genevieve, I learned to emote, to connect, and to love.

During this journey, I found eight Keys to Happiness, eight rules to live by for health and vitality. Eight principles, each powerful in its own right, but the first seven trumped by the final and eighth key.

And with these keys, I healed my colitis, calmed my ADD, ignited my intuition, and opened my heart. And, luckily for me, without a single sesame oil enema, without walking on hot coals, and without sipping even one Dixie cup of my own morning urine, I learned how to feel more comfortable, more authentic, more relaxed, and happier.

But, again, I’m getting ahead of myself. So let’s take it back two decades to begin our tale in the time of Bill Clinton; the Beastie Boys; Beverly Hills, 90210; and the United Colors of Benetton …