There are a lot of good words relating to the gastrointestinal system. Motility. Peristalsis. Tubular. Bladder. Duodenum. Jejunum. (Not you ileum). Pylorus. Omentum. Peritoneum. All these words have a very…soft and warm feeling to them, though maybe because they are by definition related to guts. But I think there’s also something about the rhythm and sound of these words that give them a kind of relaxed quality.
Yesterday morning, I went outside to meditate as I have been doing. Part of my meditation routine includes a body scan, so I was just going head to toe noticing how different parts of my body were feeling. When I got to my throat I noticed that I was feeling a little dehydrated and I had that classic lump in throat feeling. From there I decided to do the rest of the body scan tracking internally along the GI tract, which I thought could double as pseudo-studying for my upcoming exam. I began to imagine myself as a bolus traveling through my own GI tract. Something about the idea of being fully enveloped and slowly propelled through the soft tissue of the gastrointestinal system is honestly quite relaxing. First gently, but deliberately making my way down the esophagus, being undulated and massaged by the walls the stomach, and then molecularly deconstructed in the small intestine as tiny villi and microvilli brush across…or rather through my contents. Then, nearing the end of my journey being squeezed and compacted by the colon, and finally, release as I graduate into the world as a freshly born stool.
Ah, to be a bolus.
nANIMOv 