At 8am, I arrived (hungry for some sausage and eggs) for my Clear Center Cleanse orientation with Tricia Barrett and Lita Collins. Tricia presented us with our coolers full of green goodies, saying, “I give you life.” Loosely translated, that means freshly juiced wheat grass, just-shorn green sprout juice, homemade herbal detoxifying tea, fresh seaweed mineral broth, spicy cayenne lemonade, sun chlorella pills, systemic enzyme supplements, a scary looking brackish chlorophyll implant, along with an enema bag (yup, an enema bag) and a bulb suction that looks just like what we use to suck the mucus from a newborn infant’s nostrils right after the mother gives birth.

First, we opened our bell jar of fresh wheat grass juice and toasted to our health. (It was such a California moment!) Two ounces of wheat grass, a superfood that heals the body, contains as many nutrients as two pounds of green, leafy veggies (without the Caesar dressing). Not bad for a few grass shavings. And our bags contained five jars of Tricia’s signature green sprout juice, which contains sunflower, snow pea and fenugreek sprouts, parsley, cucumber, kale, ginger, and celery. Although it looks remarkably like pond scum, it tastes like sunshine, and I love it (really, I’m serious).

Spicy lemonade, made with cayenne pepper, flushes and cleans the arteries and heart, while acting as a natural blood thinner. The herbs in the detoxifying tea change daily- each one supporting different organs. The mineral potassium broth contains seaweed and lots of other goodies, and the sun chlorella, a blue-green algae superfood , keeps our blood sugar stable, while nourishing our bodies. Systemic enzymes assist in digestion and detoxification, and a warm vegan soup fills our tummies to get us through the night.

Finally, our coolers contained a jar of brackish-looking green-black chlorophyll, which we were supposed to insert into our bums after we cleaned ourselves out with two enemas. This is the part that got me squeamish. I knew it was coming- Tricia had warned me. But when I stared down at that jar of green liquid, I couldn’t help thinking I had made a mistake. I have prescribed hundreds of enemas over the course of my career, but I have never actually done one. I’ve never even inserted one into a patient- that always got turfed to the nursing staff. So I had no idea what to expect from the little enema bag.

I couldn’t quite imagine how this was going to go. I guess I’m lucky that I’ve never in my life been constipated and have never had to undergo this particular brand of humiliation in the past. I’m sure it’s good for me, as a doctor, to experience some of the indignities I’ve prescribed over the course of my career. It’s karmic payback, I’m sure. But I was admittedly having second thoughts.

Then I thought about the new growth- the green sprouts in the Big Sur ash and the fresh growth in my life recently. I thought about my new home, my new town, my new job and how I wanted to clean out all the junk from my old life, while keeping the good parts and supporting them with healthy habits and positive change, and I realized that an enema is probably a very literal experience for what I need to do on a grander scale. It’s time to get rid of all the shit.

The rest of the day went without a hitch. I green-juiced and brothed and didn’t feel the least bit deprived. Aside from needing to pee every 30 minutes, cleanse day one was a breeze. Until I got to the enema. I had been avoiding it all day. My only poo of the day was bright green before I even managed to get around to the enema, so I figured my digestion was going smoothly. Green juice in, green juice out. But I had put off the enemas long enough. It was time. In preparation, I lit an aromatherapy candle in the bathroom. I figured I needed to romance my bum a little before raping it with a plastic tube. I stripped naked, put a white towel on the marble tile floor and curled up in a fetal position with my bum facing the water-filled enema bag, which hung from a coat hangar on the doorknob. Lita had warned us that the first inflow of water would make us grab for the clamp that shuts off the water. Which is exactly what I did. After all, it’s been an exit-only kind of place for my entire life. (Or so I thought. My mother just informed me that my infant bum went through this very experience many a time in my past baby life, but my grown-up brain seems to have blocked it.) After a rough start, I made it through the two bags of water without too much problem. Rather disappointingly uneventful, really.

The chlorophyll implant, however, was another story. After spilling inky green liquid in the process of trying to pour chlorophyll into the narrow opening of the bulb syringe, I got the brilliant idea to just pour the green stuff into the enema bag and let gravity do the work for me. As an enema bag veteran, I guess I was feeling empowered and wanted to embrace my new skill. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Which is the phrase we learned in family therapy when one of my family members was having a rough time. Periodically, one of us would be inclined to ask our troubled loved one, “But why would you do something like that?” The standard answer, we learned, was this: It seemed like a good idea at the time. It seemed to cover every base, and sure enough, it even covers putting putrid green stuff into an enema bag as a means of getting it into your bum so it can heal your liver.

The insertion went just fine. Green stuff in- check. But the problem came when I went to take out the catheter. I guess I hadn’t noticed that water leaks out when you remove the enema from your bum. Sure, the white towel was a little wet, but I suppose I didn’t notice. But when I took out the chlorophyll tube, green gook went all over my white towel (and didn’t come back out again). I quickly clamped off the last of the liquid but not before flinging the enema tubing across the bathroom, spraying my sink and everything on it (including my toothbrush, my husband’s toothbrush, my face soap, the open tube of toothpaste). Anyway, you get the picture. By this point, there was green stuff in the toilet, green stuff on the towel and the floor, green stuff all over the sink and its contents. And that little aromatherapy candle was flickering away, lending the most romantic light to the apocalyptic scene. I guess it could have been worse. It could have been brown.

After brushing my dry skin with a brush to remove the toxins and soaking for twenty minutes in a ginger Epsom salt bath, it’s now bedtime, and I’ve made it through Day one of my cleanse. Mission accomplished, I say. More power to me. I actually feel a strange sense of courage and strength. If I can muster up the will to say no to the meals I cooked all day for Siena and find the determination to make it through the bum stuff, what else might I be able to tackle? I feel a bit fearless right now, like I’m wrapped up in green superpowers and I can save the world, one shot of wheatgrass at a time.