Before reading: breathe in. Breathe out.
Notice the clothing on your body. It is not nourishing you.
Grieve, but not to excess.
Release into your pants.
Now more than ever before, the problems of leisure present grueling challenges for the superbly wealthy.
You’ve recognized that life in the higher echelons of society is a zero-sum game reserved exclusively for apex predators. The competition to remain at the top of the social food-chain is greater than ever before. It has been decades since one could rely on eugenics, provenance, superior breeding, conspicuous luxury consumption and private education to retain one’s place in the super-elite.
In 2012, when strength became the new beauty, Lululemon became the new Prada, and the half-marathon became the new Birkin bag, it was no longer enough to be dragged up Mount Everest by protégés of Tenzing Norgay — only becoming athletic enough to actually survive Everest yourself would secure your front row seat at Paris fashion week.
But you wasted no time outclassing your peers by finding your inner warrior, custom-blinging your $1850 Body Rock ‘Trenta’ vegan fur sports-bra to read “SPIRITUAL BITCH” in Swarovski crystals, and Soul Cycling yourself unto rolling ketosis. You maintained couture size 2 through expert hunger-artistry, recognizing the violence inherent in chewing, and eschewing it.
Guided by guru (prounounced GOO-doo) Gwyneth’s GOOP, you have dutifully competed with your fellow Ladies Who Haven’t Actually Eaten Lunch Since 1992 to see who could hold down the pulpiest, most bilgelike pressed mushroom, groat, and micro-lentil juices whilst juggling jade eggs in your steamed, Brazilled, Kegel-ripped and labially-reduced yonis.
You’ve embraced every dietary masochism from nano-veganism, pranic gauze-nourishment and Conscious Non-Digestion to advanced Giardia cleanses and mindful rock-sucking.
Lately, like many “woke” persons of means, you have realized that weight gain, general fatigue and loss of skin-elasticity — previously assumed to be the result of aging — are actually progressive illnesses going criminally unrecognized by Western healthcare professionals, who gallingly persist in maintaining the view that human organs somehow magically detoxify themselves.
Flexing the accessory muscles of your top-shelf mind toward the aggressive pursuit of Olympic-level wellness, you read endless internet articles, and became acutely hyper-sensitive of your being constantly attacked by environmental contaminants. You learned to diagnose and treat your own mystery viruses, unnamed auto-immune deficiencies, sub-microscopic parasites, and deadly somatic ailments such as pelvic mottling, chronic hair fatigue, ovarian dysplasia, phantom Plantar’s lupus, and restless mouth syndrome (as well as recently-debunked embarrassments like rapid-cycling mons eczema, or ‘Spinners’ rash.’
Despite daily thyroid drainings in your custom-fitted spleen meridian compression-shroud, your compromised immune, endocrine, and central nervous systems demanded alternative therapies. You bravely volunteered for live Ayurvedic bee inhalation; the elimination of all mucus through proteolytic breast-shouting; multiple courses of intestinal Pine Sol irrigation. Your moxibustion cupping was so regular and vigilant, you were erroneously treated for measles, impetigo, and vandalism. You had to heat the walls of your panic-room and line it with pink Himalayan salt after your Ayahuasca healing mishap in Iquitos made your aura resemble a Jimi Hendrix black-light poster… but at least you were months ahead of Hilaria Baldwin in pouring your beach residence an all-turmeric driveway.
Yet still, it is not enough.
As if chemtrails, fluoride, glycosides, and the ongoing atrocity of wheat weren’t already depleting what remains of your precious bodily fluids -
now your innermost being has turned against you, demanding yet another vigorously energetic, exhaustively dedicated fine-tuning of your resources, attentions, hyper-monitered emotions….and requiring yet another complete overhaul of your wardrobe.
While we once afforded the luxury of being patrons of shamans, healers and suicide cult leaders, we are now compelled not to follow, but to become our own ascended spiritual masters. For the rigors of proactive enlightenment and hardcore divinity, our pathogenic closets will require complete physical and energetic transformation. Fortunately, fashion is rising to the task of outfitting the multitasking ascetic masochism and aggressive chakra rebalancing that is the new look of “athletoshaman resortwear” — and not a moment too soon.
Just as all food is now medicinal, finding chakra-laundering, holistic wellness-couture built to accommodate the speed of advanced metaphysical transformation is yet another cross to bear in your onus of privilege (as if your Self-flagellation branch hadn’t already been beaten barkless and free of thorns.)
Finding signature fashion pieces that can transition seamlessly from your weekly prison riot-workouts to the boardroom to your isolation pyramid can feel as challenging as sustaining a discrete and loyal blood-boy. Fortunately, there are some quick-fix holdover solutions.
Home furnishings for the chic penitent such as handmade colloidal silver memory-nail fakir beds can occasionally be sourced on Etsy; users have reported distinct improvement in their intuitive abilities to perform both isometric cobra-handling and remote neighbor surveillance.
Shoe-exorcists are now commonplace in any neighborhood where you can find a decent eyebrow rebirthing clinic.
Many destination torture retreats, such as the almost-too-popular Child-Soldier Bootcamps in Chad, will provide you with their own uniforms.
A handful of luxury sportswear designers will introduce ‘mortification-chic’ lines, featuring cutting-edge technological fabrics designed for the demands of extreme holiness in sub-arctic temperatures. Hair-shirts will finally be available for vegan sin-absolvers in copperized kelp.
Fleece cassocks in infrared wolf placenta will be paired with outwear in embryonic dove, eagle and hummingbird nano-downs (prescribed according to spirit-animal) for the most transcendental apres-ski/post-Cryolipolysis looks. A breathable, antibacterial Kevlar Gethsemane tunic is durable enough for numerous incarnations; claw-repellant enough for threats in both deserts and permafrost, it will hold up to the easy-wash demands of sandalwood plank face-hitting and your live French clay burials (it also holds a drapy goddess-silhouette that would look equally appropriate at a Connecticut key-party or hurling a virgin into a volcano.)
The research and development phases of these spare-no-expense, divinity-enhancing superfibers will certainly be passed-on in dramatic mark-ups paid by early adopters, but thankfully, there are trailblazing icons for the discriminating fanatics, the wisdom of whom may offset these costs.
Celebrity lifestyle guru and empyrean wellness-magnate Amanda Chantal Bacon, founder of Moon Juice, is rumored to have a personal electromagnetic frequency and celestial angstrom-weight that can bend spoons, scramble most i-Phones, and is forbidden by the FAA to come within fifteen miles of most federal and private airfields.
Ms. Bacon’s diet is so exhaustively refined toward maximizing cellular oxygen and personal luminescence — ram-packed with rare ancient roots, unpronounceable herbs, and powdered fungi-supplements — that Molly Young for New York Times magazine estimated the cost of her dietary practice at over $700 a week.
However: Ms. Bacon’s fecal-matter is more nutritionally saturated, mineral-rich and vitamin-ultracharged than home-cooked meals an average middle-class family consumes in over sixteen weeks.
Just as the finest available coffee beans are refined through the digestive enzymes of the the civet cat, your personal water closet is now not just your personal sanctuary, but a business opportunity (should you have the means and warrior-spirit to embrace it.)
Given a few household modifications: vitreous porcelian bowls, filled with distilled, ion-reversed water - your Moon Juice-inspired dietary disciplines are primed to have fecal extraction and transplant specialists waiting, cash-in-hand, by your bathroom door. In short: in terms of contributions to ongoing demands of the Wellness community: you are literally shitting gold.
Should you be comfortable enough in your means to decline earthly reward, you may regard your waste as a supremely selfless act of generosity (for the good of yourself and all sentient beings) and donate your “gifts” to a public school lunch program.
Enlightenment: if you have to ask, you may not be able to wear it. But you might be energetically able to turn “void” into valuable “matter.” Perhaps not at the speed of relativity, but at least twice a day.
Namaste.
Contact me for script doctoring, book-coaching, proofreading, hand-holding - all your editing needs. CintraW@gmail.com
Artwork: “Swami,” oil on linen by Cintra Wilson, 2022
EAT PRAY SUFFER: THE AGONY OF WELLNESS-CHIC