Sage advice

My hormones are in Gatorade.

I have become terribly susceptible to woo-woo. I talk about seasons—I say things like, “it’s just this season of life that I’m in.” I’ve gotten into yin yoga. My Google search history includes words like “chakras” and “alignment.” I started seeing a somatic therapist. I’m not sold on tapping, but I’ll fuck with it on occasion.

This is at odds with my old self-identity as a skeptic. I partly blame that cynicism (among other personality defects) on being raised Catholic. The priests and stained glass left me with a strong distaste for both communion wafers and the entire idea of spirituality.

But then I got older. I started unpacking my hang-ups instead of side-stepping them with little jokes. I got pregnant, grappled with early motherhood, and turned tender and mushy where I was once a peacocking little shit with an arsenal of dumb jokes. Which brings me here: Dabbling in chakra alignment, writing out my intentions, and purchasing a sage stick from the neighborhood co-op.

Sage is a motif in my life right now. I’m in the process of weaning the baby off breastfeeding, and I drink a tea called No More Milk chock full of sage that supposedly helps suppress the milk-making properties of my swollen tits. My husband picks sage from the garden and makes sage brown butter pasta—mostly because it tastes good, but I also hope it’ll work like a magical foraged NSAID for my chest. And I buy that tight little bundle of sage from the co-op in order to finally shoo out some iffy energy from our house. I’ve been meaning to do this since I discovered that the owner of a toxic gym I once belonged to grew up here (a story for another day).

I post a lot about my boobs lately, but not in a fun, hot, thirst-trap way. I wish I had fun, hot, thirst-trap boobs. I’m sure I do by someone’s standards—who am I to yuck your yum?—but my own experience of my body has felt sexless and decrepit lately. The hormone dump of weaning must land somewhere between PMS and menopause on the hormonal Richter scale. It’s making me feel insane. I’ve been going whole hog on these things that the old Lauren would have scoffed at—the sage, the chanting when the kids are at daycare to open up my throat chakra (?), etc.

I did have a pang of guilt about buying the sage stick after a cursory five minutes of research. The ethics of non-Indigenous people using sage in this manner are… questionable. I’m not trying to turn a profit or appropriate another culture by using herbs that are maybe in low supply. I am, however, craving a sense of ritual, a clearing, a doing of something. So much of discomfort requires just sitting around, waiting for it to dissipate. Sitting around is difficult. If I’m going to sit around, I’d like to do it with a little more intention. In the past month, this has involved visualizing a red light at my root chakra and making the living room smell like burnt herbs.

My somatic therapist is to blame for the chakra stuff, in particular. I started seeing her earlier this year after a local group (shoutout to Moms Mental Health Initiative) helped me find her. For months I had been hunched over my tig old milk bitties with knots in my shoulders and a clenched jaw radiating pain into my ears and temples. The early postpartum period wreaked havoc on my body, but it was never just about that. I’ve been ill at ease in my body for as long as I’ve had one. Two pregnancies forced me to start getting more in touch with my physical self—a natural precursor to my swerve into the “mind-body connection” brand of woo-woo.

My therapist is lovely. Her techniques are helpful to me. She has helped me embrace visualization and meditation for the first time in my life, instead of just grinding my teeth and silently stewing about how pointless and boring it is. I’ve learned to imagine a difficult emotion as a big abstract blob sitting next to me on a bench. I enjoy the act of removing that feeling from my self—extracting it from my identity—and seeing it as a separate thing that doesn’t have to dominate me. It doesn’t have to live in my body. I can wave a little smoldering stick at it, figuratively, and smoke it off the premises (in a friendly way).

But even with these techniques and an open-armed embrace of woo, I’m stuck sitting through a lot of mental/emotional/physical discomfort. Hard lumpy boobs—nature’s worst implant job! A precipitous drop in prolactin and oxytocin—undoing all my Lexapro’s hard work! And now I’m learning that mercury is in retrograde for the rest of the month. I couldn’t tell you what that means, but I’m sure it’s not helping my case.

My hormones will inevitably level out. My boobs will shrink. Apparently the cells start to eat themselves, which is upsetting, but it tracks with my previous experience weaning—if lactating is nature’s shoddy boob job, then weaning is nature’s unlicensed breast reduction performed in a sketchy clinic that advertises Botox specials ($5 per unit) on a billboard over the highway.

The only way out is through, they say. Annoyingly, they are correct. But the sage tea, the sage stick (ugh, I’m sorry), the sage pasta—it seems like an okay distraction as I go through. A healthier coping mechanism than buying a vape pen or starting online gambling. Maybe my impromptu sage ceremony helped usher the ghost of my old boxing coach out of my house. Maybe the tea is helping slow down my body’s milk assembly line. Maybe the sage isn’t doing a goddamn thing and it just tastes good sauteed in butter and tossed over penne. That would be fine!

Here is my only sage bit of wisdom: Sometimes, it can feel good to sit next to a big, messy blob of a feeling on a bench. To make a meme about it. To wave hi to it. To wave some sage in its face (or not? still not clear if I need to cancel myself for that). To drink some tea next to it. To let it rage and sob and eventually fall asleep like a toddler. Maybe you want to rage and sob and fall asleep, too. When you wake up, chances are, the blob will have wandered off. It doesn’t live inside of you anymore. It never did.