that the kitchen drain was overflowing. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, as I’d cleaned the grease trap the day before. So how could it possibly be blocked?
I went to have a look. The grease trap was full of water, but when I disconnected it, the water drained out, so that wasn’t the problem. I unscrewed the next connection, where the washing machine drain also joins, but the water just flowed out of there too, along with a jelly-like, stinking sludge. So it was blocked the other way round.
I fetched the garden hose, and luckily we were still in the middle of a heatwave, so nice hot water came out. With enough pressure, I began, with a bit of patience, to flush the whole thing through.
The end of the pipe was hidden somewhere under the plants. I couldn’t find it at first, until I heard the water bubbling as it tried to escape. I pushed the grass aside and there it was: a huge pile of slimy, stinking muck, right at the pipe’s outlet. A year or more of slow build-up, all coming out at once.
Oh my… that much? And at the same time: ah, that explains a lot.
Because despite the grease trap, and despite everything on the surface seeming to work fine, something that didn’t belong had built up deeper in the system. Slowly, invisibly, until at some point it simply couldn’t get through any more.
Of the way accumulation works in the body. The bad breath, the sluggish digestion, the sweat that leaves yellow stains on your shirt, the coating on your tongue in the morning. The body trying to tell you that something is building up, that things aren’t flowing properly anymore.
And of course we can’t use a garden hose to flush our bodies out quite so aggressively, but there is plenty we can do to prevent that build-up and gradually break it down.
Scraping your tongue in the morning, taking a warm shower, going to the toilet when you feel the urge – that’s a bit like cleaning the grease trap, regularly and in small doses.
Drinking boiled water throughout the day and eating what your body can actually digest at that moment works more like the hose but very gently; it helps loosen things up and flush them through, so that less remains to get stuck.
It doesn’t have to be complicated. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of keeping track of what else is building
up.
Do you ever wonder what you look like on the inside?
much love,
Rianne
