Urine Love by Stanley Young There comes a moment of decision in each of our lives when we hear that small voice within ask: "Shouldn't I be drinking my own urine?" The answer, according to a urine-drinkers support group I attended with a friend recently was definitely "Yes!" The setting was a modest two-story condo on a quiet street in Los Angeles. Rain had been falling ealier in the evening. It was cool, and the walkway to the front door now glistened with pools of water. Inside, it was warm and welcoming. About ten people in the living room stood in groups of twos and three, chatting and laughing. Classical music played in the background, and a pile of books and pamphlets lay scattered over the coffee table. I picked up 'The Miracles of Urine Therapy' (Water of Life Institute, 1987) and read the blurb on the back. "The therapy outlined in this book is an entirely drugless system of healing; the only ingredient is a substance manufactured by the body, rich in minerals, salts, hormones, and other vital substances, namely human urine." I put the book down and wandered over to the kitchen. On the table there I caught signt of a couple of slabs of cheese -- Cheddar and Brie -- a basket with a selection of crackers, some cookies, and two large bottles of fruit juice. One was apple. I cut a slice of cheddar cheese, grabbed a couple of crackers and, after only a slight hesitation, poured out a glass of apple juice and took a small sip. It was, gratefully, sweet and I returned to the living room where two men and a woman, all in their late thirtiesor mid forties, were engaged in animated conversation. "... and do you gargle with it?" asked the woman. "Absolutely," replied the stocky, balding man energetically. "And I hold my hand cupped like this and let jus a little slowly seep into my nose, too. It cures my asthma." "My filling came out yesterday," chimed in the second man, "and I can feel it curing my tooth already. There's a big hole there but I'm not feeling any pain at all." I returned to the kitchen for some more cheese and found Abby, the woman who had organized this get-together. She was wearing a fashionalbe knit outfit in autumn colors and had an open and friendly smile. She was holding a serving platter on which were four small carved glass goblets. Two were filled with an almost luminescent pale yellow liquid, a completely different color from the apple juice. "...and is that..." "Yes," she smiled, sensing my question. "It's my urine." She picked one of the filled goblets off the platter and took a long sip. "There's two more glasses here if anyone else wants to try,"she said, offering the empty glasses to a couple standing and talking by the kitchen door. "...if you get inspired later." Inspiration there was, in abundance. For most of those gathered at the apartment, urine was more than a bodily excretion. It was indeed the Water of Life, a miraculous elixir and a long neglected cure. They washed their faces with it. They rinsed out their eyes with it. They rubbed it into their hair. They warmed up 4-day old urine, scrubbed it all over their skin, and left it there to dry. And, of course, they drank it whenever they could. "It's the runoff from your blood," said Abby, kicking off the evening's presentation and discussion. "It's got everything you need to cure yourself. How many of yo here tonight have tried drinking your own urine?" she asked the room. Seven people raised their hands. "I've only tried it a few times," admitted one tall man in the front, smiling. "I'm not slugging it down yet or anything like that...." Abby smiled. Everyone has to start at their own pace, she informed us, and she had some sage advice for the new and would-be urine drinkers in the crowd. "The first urine in the morning is the best," she said, referring to its healing powers, not its taste. The other experienced drinkers agreed that the first morning's "catch" was, perhaps, a trifle too gamy for the uninititated. "I suggest for the first time that you drink a glass or two of pineapple juice, and then drink your urine afterwards," said one man. "It'll taste just like pineapples!" One man, an unemployed actor and self-admitted alcoholic inthe AA program, revealed that drinking urine cured him of shingles three months ago, and he hadn't missed a day since then. "Now I'm so into this," he bubbled. "I soak my feet in it. I put it in my eyes. Rub it into my hair." The man held up a 32-ounce juice bottle he carried around with him in a backpack. It was filled to the brim with a clear, pale yellow fluid. "This is about a day's catch," he said. "That's about what I drink a day. I call it Caribbean water - warm and just a little salty. Some say to age your morning catch, and that's what I do." With the enthusiasm of every new convert, he misses no opportunity now to spread the good word of urine-drinking to all he meets. "I've already lost two friends," he admitted. "They don't seem to understand." Perhaps his friends don't understand that, like the body, one's urine is constantly changing. The actor related how his urine had gone "from a salty taste, to, well, almost smoked oysters." "Sometimes it's exquisite," added a thin woman in the last row of folding chairs. "And if you fast on it - just urine and water - by 6 o'clock in the evening it's *fantastic*, delicious." Several of the experienced drinkers nodded in agreement. "It's an ancient therapy," the actor added. "It goes back to the pyramids, to the Vedas, to the Bible. It's holy...." He stopped for a moment, almost unable to contain himself. "If you're suffering from mental problems, it will realease that, too." "Jesus used urine therapy," said a man who had just arrived and was about to sit down on the stairs at the back of the room. He looked to be in his late twenties. "Forty days and forty nights in the desert - what else was there to drink? Ghandi used to do it in prison. He couldn't have made it otherwise." The young man then shifted into an explanation of Christ's "missing years." the twelve or thirteen years when Jesus of Nazareth had wandered through Tibet and into India where, among many other ancient Eastern practices the young seeker adopted, he started drinking his own urine. When he returned to the Middle East, he continued the practice. And, apparently, also taught it to his followers. "When they bastardized Christianity," the young man continued by way of explanation, "they took some stuff out, and part of that was urine therapy." How different the Eucharist might have been, I wondered. The young man's historical analysis was, perhaps, difficult to substantiate. Not so the words of the next man to stand and speak. He was a professional classical guitaritst, I was later told. His face was somewhat thin, but his skin had a natural and healthy glow to it, like the complexions you see among those who drink lots of wheatgrass or carrot juice. "George had AIDS," said Abby, by way of introduction, and, I thought, to prompt him to speak. George nodded. "I used to have Kaposi's sarcoma on my legs, my gums were rotting and I had recurring pneumonia." he said in a quiet voice. He lifted the cuff of his pants to show his leg. The skin there was clear. He had arrived at drinking urine as a last resort, he told us. All his other attempts at curing his symptoms, using drugs and Western medical treatments, simply weren't working. "I used to have gray back through here and here," he said, brushing his hand over the front and sides of his head, "and my hair was falling out." His hair that night was slightly unkempt, but nonetheless full, healthy and a uniform very dark brown, almost black. The same color as his untrimmed beard. George described how he had started the urine treatment all at once, drinking it, rubbing it in his hair, soaking his eyes in it and so forth. Within a year, his symptoms had disappeared and had never returned. In fact, the vision in one of his eyes had improved from 20 over 400 to 20 over 75, and he rarely wore glasses now. He thought about his experience a moment. "All my friends are dead who went the normal routes," he said. "It has your life-force in it." He looked up. "It's holy." The room was silent for a moment. One woman in a folding chair on the side of the room raised her hand. "But doesn't it contain.....I mean, isn't it what the body excretes? Isn't it waste products....?" "It's our mindset," answered one tall woman in the far corner of the room. "We think it's filthy," she said, emphasizing the last word forcefully. Several drinkers in the room had other answers at the ready. Urine, they explained, building up a mosaic of facts, is filtered blood, sterile, 96% water, and can contain your own antibodies and hormones, which help boost your immune system. Urine also contains a load of substances that the body needs, including urea, a chief component of urine. And for those of you who may have been wondering whether drinking urine might lead to harder stuff, we were informed that the bowel and the colon trap all material you're *not* supposed to reingest. "After you cross the psychological barrier," said the man beside the tall woman, "it feels harmonious. It's a real mild taste. Not at all like what it smells." It can fight off any pathogen on the planet," added George, the musician who had cured himself of AIDS. "They're curing leprosy, cancer, and the AMA is against it because it's free," said the man who had previously talked about the urine-Jesus connection. "I heard a story," said Abby, "about a barren couple who drank each other's urine. They even bathed their genitals in it. It was very sexual." "His sperm count rose," said a man across the room who had heard the same story. "....and she bore many children," added Abby. One woman who had arrived only five minutes before, stood up. She was a naturopathic healer, and was responsible for introducing five people in the room, all former patients of hers, to the world of urine-drinking. She herself had learned about the practice from a friend who came back from India raving about it. Shortly afterward, the naturopathic healer had root canal treatment. One night, with her mouth throbbing unbearably, she decided to drink her own urine as an attempt to get rid of the pain. "Everybody remembers their first time," she said, smiling, and all the other drinkers nodded and smiled in appreciation. She was amazed to discover that within ten minutes the pain subsided and subsequently disappeared. When, as an experiment, she stopped drinking her urine two days later, the pain returned. That was nine years ago. Today she does not drink all the urine here body produces like some of those in the room. She uses it to cure cuts and bruises, and occasionally as an eyewash, and drinks it whenever she feels her body needs it, especially when she travels. She had just returned from a nine-day visit to Australia, and had been drinking a lot of her urine while there. "All that traveling," she explained, "the change in time zones, that can weaken your immune system. Drinking your urine gives you that little bit of extra protection when you're weakened like that." There was also an added benefit to drinking your own urine abroad. "When I'm traveling it's a wonderful tool," she said. "You don't have to worry about drinking contaminated water." "For two weeks after the earthquake, people in Bel-Air and Brentwood had to boil their water," said one man in the back. "If they only knew......" "Urine." added the naturopath. "Why not? It's sterile, it's pure and it's filtered. It's better than bottled water. It's free." My friend, who had accompanied me to the meeting, was still thinking about what we had both heard and seen that night. "When I flushed my piss down the toilet the next morning," he told me later, "I just thought: What a waste."