Meditation is Poopy. Or So I Thought,...

I’ll admit it. I’m a natural skeptic. I trust science and logic and reason. So although I know that meditation can be calming, I never engaged in meditation to any degree. I have a breathing pattern supported by a mantra I use to help me sleep when I have troubles. I do yoga periodically, but, in my mind, that has been more to stretch my muscles, tendons, and ligaments when my exercise routine causes tightness and pain and not for the mindfulness benefits.

And then I went to a resilience workshop / yoga retreat at Kripalu in the Berkshires this past fall where we did mindfulness and meditation multiple times per day including at the beginning of each session which happened to be after most meals. I blogged about the session and what I learned in this post.

What I missed is that all that meditation to help people be more resilient, also completely solved my gastrointestinal issues. OK, you might need some background to understand that. I’ll say it. I have a perpetual loose poop problem. I’ve had it for years. I have talked to doctors, I had tests done by a nutritionist, and I changed my diet. I also take a fiber supplement. I had mild results. For months, I attempted to eliminate alliums (onions and garlic mostly) from my diet as that seemed to have the biggest negative and almost immediate impact. You have no idea how hard it is to avoid alliums at restaurants and in day-to-day cooking. Virtually impossible. The benefit was inconsistent, the food was less interesting, and I was becoming a pain in the butt (no pun intended) to my friends and family at restaurants.

Upon my return from the resilience workshop I noticed that, despite eating onions by accident at the workshop, my stools were picture-perfect while I was there and starting to degrade upon my return.

I’m a natural pattern finder and I hypothesized that meditation was solving my problems. Then I happened upon some articles about how people can have ultra-sensitive guts and it overreacts when stimulated, sending too much water into the system. (Here is one such article) The result = diarrhea. And the solution is something called gut-directed hypnotherapy. By meditating, you calm the gut and prevent the overreaction. So I started testing the impact of doing a 2 minute deep breathing exercise after I ate and before bedtime. And I started eating alliums again. And voila, my problem is solved (mostly).

I still try to avoid onions when it doesn’t have an important place in a meal. I still have periodic bouts of loose stools, but far less frequently, and I am no longer a pain in the butt at restaurants and people’s homes.

You may be a skeptic too, but it can’t hurt to try it if you share in my gastrointestinal troubles. Through my work with Positive Intelligence and the RISE resilience workshop, I have also learned the benefits of meditation to manage and reduce stress. If it doesn’t work for you, you still gain by adding a bit of calm into your day.