Colonic Hydrotherapy and the Need for Variety

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A few years ago, I was invited by Tony Robbins to his resort in Fiji to discuss the job market. I had a good time and spent about a week there. The only thing I did not like about the resort, however, was the quality of the gym. Tony had a personal gym that was absolutely fantastic and had all this space-age equipment (like some machine that gives every muscle in your body a workout with radio waves). The gym for guests of the resort was something entirely different. At the time there were a few pieces of old weight equipment, a mid-1980s stepping machine, and that was it. Because I like to exercise each day, I made the decision to run outside every day instead of trying to work out in the gym.

One day, when I finished my run through the resort, I found myself in front of a building that seemed a little odd. It was a small building and did not have any markings on it. I walked into the building and a very heavyset Fijian woman with a large Afro was sitting reading a magazine.

“What’s this place?” I asked her.

“It’s where we do colonic hydrotherapy for all of our guests,” she told me.

At this point in time, I did not have a lot of history with colonics—but they seemed to be following me around. A few years previously, I had been attending a wedding in a very small town in Utah and stayed in a bed-and-breakfast. My wife and I stayed in a room next to “the colonic” room.

“What’s this place?” I had asked the woman who showed us to our room.

“It’s where we do colonic hydrotherapy for all of our guests,” she, too, told me.

“You do this business to all of your guests at the hotel?” I asked. I was absolutely amazed.

“Of course.  You’ve never stayed somewhere that does colonics?” she started looking at me as if I were crazy.  I had scarcely even heard of a colonic–much less stayed in a b-and-b that does them.

“Why of course I have!” I told her.  I will never forget the look on my wife’s face when she heard me say that.

For the next few days, I passed the colonic room with a profound sense of curiosity and fear. Sometimes a little “in session” sign would be hanging from the door handle and I knew this could only mean one thing. I looked suspiciously at other guests in the hotel wondering if they had taken part in this strange anal ritual. I was a little apprehensive about eating the food as well. I wondered if it was safe to touch.

The bed-and-breakfast hotel was almost directly across the street from a major Mormon temple. In fact, most of the guests of the hotel were there to see the temple.  Clean-cut, happy looking people, they seemed so wholesome. I had a hard time believing they were participating in this colonic nonsense. This seemed like the sort of thing that belonged in a bad New York City neighborhood–or Las Vegas (more on that latter).

The bed-and-breakfast did not serve any beverages containing caffeine, much less alcohol. Nevertheless, they did have a gorgeous 25-year-old girl, with huge breasts, whose only job was to take men, women, and children into a room and stick a hose up their rear ends, move the hose around, and suck out whatever was inside. I do not know how to say this … but this seems to me something that is very risqué.  I am the first to enjoy a variety of experiences, but this seemed positively off the charts.

On my last day in the b-and-b, I asked the woman in charge of the colonic hydrotherapy if she could show me her machine. Inside her little office she had a small Japanese fountain that trickled water lightly and seemed to symbolize whatever it was she did in the office. To my surprise, the office did not smell badly at all.

“It’s very sanitary,” she told me after I remarked how it did not smell. The woman was so gorgeous that I could not imagine that her job involved violating men, women, and children. It was an odd meeting. I seriously wondered to myself how this was legal—it seemed like some perverted form of prostitution for people with strange sex issues. And it only cost $40!

I left the hotel in Utah with the image of that machine scarred on my mind. Yet I had largely forgotten about this ritual until I was standing there in the colonic building on Tony Robbins’s resort.

“Come on in, you can have your colonic right now. It’s great to do after a run,” she told me.

There had to have been at least five rooms dedicated to giving colonics. This was a large operation. I wondered how many colonics the place did. It seemed very odd since the resort was relatively small.

“Why’s it great after a run?” I asked her.

“Because your system is going fast,” she said.

“Does Tony do this?” I asked her.

“Of course!” she told me.

The woman then started lecturing me about the machine they used. Something called a Libbe Colonic Machine. It is apparently the best machine you can buy for this sort of job and costs close to $20,000! The contraption operated by the beautiful girl in Utah was no larger than a suitcase. This Libbe was a giant machine whose complexity simply defied the imagination. It probably weighed a couple thousand pounds. I looked at it with utter awe.

I excused myself and returned to my room wondering about this colonic stuff, even more curious than after the b-and-b. Throughout the day I ran into numerous other people who were visiting Tony. There was a woman who had just appeared on Oprah with her book and several other people who were there taking a seminar. I reiterated my story about discovering this strange colonic building to a few people. I expected each person to share my amazement.

“I just had one this morning,” one person said.

“I try and do it every other day,” said another.

“I just wish they had machines this good where I am from in Canada,” said another.

After getting similar reactions from so many people, I decided that all of the people at this hotel—too—hooked themselves up to colonic machines. These were very achievement-oriented and impressive people and–like the people in Utah—these were the last people I would expect to be undergoing colonic hydrotherapy.

Although I was not visiting Tony Robbins for any sort of self-help, this colonic hydrotherapy stuff was really forcing me to question many of my assumptions about life. It was as if there was an entire underworld of people undergoing this anal procedure.

Shortly after getting back from Fiji, I moved to Las Vegas to set up a business there. I moved into a condominium and was enjoying being in the new city. It was fun walking down the strip at night with my wife and daughter and being part of all the action. I felt very fortunate to be in the mix.

Each day, I would find various flyers for local businesses in my mailbox and left in front of my door. There were lots of places to order food from and it was almost like living in New York. One day I received a flyer from a place called the Las Vegas Colon Hydrotherapy School. I do not remember what the flyer said specifically; however, the school was right around the corner from my condominium. The fact that this place existed was so unusual that I decided I had to check it out. Within a few minutes, I was walking into the school.

The school was located in a strip mall. I walked in and asked about the service. The girl who was working the front desk started telling me how they had these Libbe machines like the ones in Fiji. I would lie on the machine for an hour with my legs in stirrups with a tube up my rear end pumping water up there and alternatively going to the bathroom in a hole beneath the machine. The water would be body temperature and while this was all occurring, the girl would massage my feet.

Wait, did she say she would massage my feet?

“Excuse me, you massage my feet while this is all going on?” I asked.

“Yes, I do. It stimulates the acupressure points and helps your colon relax,” she said very naturally.

I paused for a moment, a little shocked at what I was hearing. I would be lying on my back, with my feet in stirrups, going to the bathroom–for an hour—and she would be right there massaging my feet?

“It seems odd that you would be rubbing my feet while I go to the bathroom and all as this is going on,” I said.

“I am used to it. I like giving foot massages,” she said.

With that, I had decided that I had heard it all.

I like to talk about my experiences, but this particular experience at the school was just too much. I worried about telling people about it because it was so off the wall I did not want to be associated with it. In fact, I did not even tell my wife about it. You are the first to hear about it now. I walked out of that Colonic College with a new mind.

Around six months after my experience in the college, I was back in Los Angeles rushing my wife to a hospital in Santa Monica to give birth to our second child. After around eight hours of her being in labor, we had a beautiful baby girl. I went out to the car to go pick up my three-year-old daughter from my in-laws’ home so she could come see her new sister.

When I got out onto the street where my car was parked, to my astonishment directly across the street was a minivan being driven by the woman in the picture below.  The writing on the minivan was very clear: THE BEST COLONICS.

While the birth of my new daughter was lovely, I had not taken a ton of photos.  This, however, was something that I needed to capture. I took out my camera and started taking pictures of this strange mobile colonic car and to my surprise the woman started running toward me.

“You think that’s funny! You’re a sick pervert!!!” she screamed at me.

A couple of people walking down the street looked up at us.

“No, I am just taking pictures of it so I can get a colonic if I need one!” I told her.

“Pervert!!” she snapped at me as she huffed away.

I had to compose myself for a moment and decide how to react. I was a little taken back by her reaction—but then I gave it some thought. Why was I the pervert? I was not the one who was driving around in a van that says “THE BEST COLONICS!” on it. Talk about perverted. I could not believe someone would be driving around in a car announcing that they would stick a tube up your rear end if you paid them.

As I thought about it I realized she must think that there is something perverted about giving people colonics. Yes, she was the perverted one. Just like the religious people visiting the temple, just the like self-improvement people, just like the girl who wanted to give me a foot massage while I went to the bathroom.

I had figured this entire thing out. The colonic was about being perverted. In fact, I have decided that the colonic is the most perverse thing in the world! It is right up there with the most sexually deviant behavior imaginable. And it is legal!

• It is legal for God-fearing Mormons!
• It is legal for self-improvement people!
• It is even legal to have colleges teaching it!

We have taken the most perverted possible behavior in our society and legalized it under the guise of “detoxing” (or something along those lines).

I do not know whether a colonic does all it is supposed to. I do not even know if it does anything for our bodies at all. What I do know, though, is that these have apparently grown very popular. I do not think there is anything wrong with this. What I think must be going on is that people are seeking new experiences.

Many people say they want to be at peace. I have heard people talk about and refer to how much they want to be at peace for most of my life. In order to find this peace, people do things like meditate, go to church, do yoga, exercise, stay at home in front of the television, read books, choose friends who are easy to get along with, and more.

However, the truth is most people do not want peace. They equate peace with being stagnant. Instead of peace, they seek variety and new experiences.

• When they are at peace in a relationship, they get bored.
• When they are at peace in their job, they get bored.

How do people seek variety? They look for new experiences and they expose themselves to situations where they are likely to feel tension. People watch sports because they do not know what is going to happen and get variety every time. People watch movies because they do not know what is going to happen. People sabotage relationships because they like the variety. In fact, most people are constantly seeking variety in their lives and doing this in many ways.

• Some people take art classes.
• Some people travel.
• Some people use drugs.
• Some people have affairs.
• Some people pick fights with their boyfriend or girlfriend.
• Some people use colonic hydrotherapy.

You may be asking yourself what relevance any of this has to you. The point is, we all have a fundamental need for variety in our lives. There are healthy ways to achieve this and there are unhealthy ways, and there are some ways that can’t be classified–like colonic hydrotherapy. But for most people to be happy, they have to satisfy this need.

What I believe I have learned from my encounters with the colonic hydrotherapists and the people who frequent them is that everyone wants different experiences and variety in their lives—even the people you would least expect.  Therefore, one of the most important things you can do in your life is to give yourself healthy variety. If you can have healthy variety in your relationships and in your career, you will not get bored and stagnated. In fact, you will grow.

THE LESSON

Although many people claim to seek a state of peace, all people fundamentally seek variety in their lives and pursue it in different ways. People must satisfy this need for variety in order to be happy, and seek out new experiences and situations in which they face tension. Maintaining a healthy variety in your own life, therefore, is key to your happiness and success; doing so will replace boredom and stagnation with growth.