The Galactic Guide to Curing Constipation (#2 is Our Favourite)

Every morning your body files a report, and most of us throw it away without reading it.

We've been trained to treat constipation as a plumbing problem: not enough fibre, not enough water, not enough magnesium, maybe a cleanse. But plumbing isn't what your gut is. Your gut is the oldest organ you have, and for half a billion years it has run the exact same four-step routine on everything that reaches it: take it in, move it along, break it down, and extract from it to make something new. In, through, change, build — that's the entire original repertoire of a living body. And here's the part that changes everything: every other tissue you have — your skin, your muscles, even the brain tissue running your relationships and your self-worth — is a specialized version of that same original gut. The bowel isn't the crude basement of the body. It's the original text everything else is commentary on.

Which is why a stuck bowel is never really about bowels.

A morsel is a real, physical thing — food, water, air, even a baby to the tissue we call the uterus. When there's a genuine physical problem with a physical morsel, your body runs an ordinary biological program: more acid, more movement, vomiting, diarrhea. Straightforward.

But the experience of a morsel is a different layer entirely — the wanting, the not-getting, the meaning you make of it. That layer is where almost all of our constipation actually lives. You're not failing to process fibre. You're failing to finish an experience: a decision, a piece of news, something someone said, something you're still turning over.

Here's the reframe Germanic New Medicine offers, and it's not the one either conventional or alternative medicine reaches for: letting go of something is not the same as getting rid of it. Getting rid of something is a fight — you're expelling it, and the whole time it still defines you, you as its victim. Letting go is what happens after an experience has actually been received, digested, and used. No combat. It's just complete. A good, easy bowel movement is your body physically enacting that completion. Constipation is the opposite: proof that some experience is still open, still being held, because you haven't finished with it yet.

Why do we hold on? There are really only three flavours. Starvation — you can't get an experience you need, so your upper digestive tract (and its relatives: lungs, ears, eyes) locks down until you do. Indigestible anger — you desperately want an experience gone, so your lower tract does the same in reverse. And in between, at the duodenum, there's deprivation: both at once, the small intestine's specialty, where you keep re-chewing the same experience because you don't trust you've actually understood it yet.

The same overload shows up in a completely different system: the one running between your ears. Your conscious attention — the "context window" you're working in right now — can only hold about 40 bits of information a second, while the rest of you, your subconscious, is running at roughly 11 million bits a second in the background. Pile too much unresolved experience onto that small working desk and refuse to close anything, and the system doesn't quietly degrade the way a computer would. It runs what Germanic New Medicine calls a DHS — not a shock that happened to you, but an overload event inside your own meaning-making, one that rewrites your long-term memory going forward.

So the fix was never a cleanse. It's deciding, concisely, what you actually want to walk away with, bringing only what's relevant to that one desk, and — this is the hard part — closing the window once you're most of the way there. Summarize. Let it be finished. Then put your attention on the next thing you actually want.

Curious what that sounds like applied to a real case — including the afternoon a discount store nearly gave Lishui a DHS in real time? Listen to the full episode below.