Big Swiss

but it was also sweet enough to suck on, to sleep with in your mouth.

“I have to wait until all your thoughts pass, until you’re not able to think of anything but my tongue, until your entire body feels like it’s inside my mouth.”

The secret is to make contact and then break it, over and over and over, and then kiss it deeply, resting my mouth on it while drawing letters with my tongue. I went through the entire alphabet. What works best on you? The letter I, lowercase, with an extra-long stem and a circled dot. And then, every thirty seconds or so, I let my tongue go slack and still. I wait for all the clouds to pass. I wait for the hard blue sky. It takes about twenty minutes.”

Greta could feel her finger looking around the ballroom. Then it swept the floor. Now it rose and fell, slowly and gracefully, in a Viennese waltz.

It was more like an antique keyhole. Big Swiss’s middle finger, a bent

Greta admitted that her mother had been an addict, too. Her drug of choice: terrible news

OM: Stop trying to silence her or pretend she’s not there. Remind her that she’s not a bad person, that she doesn’t need to feel ashamed for having or expressing feelings, positive or negative. You could start by giving her a name.
GW: [SNIFFS]
OM: What are you smelling—gas?
GW: My least favorite kind of therapy: inner-child healing.
OM: I prefer the term “reparenting.”
GW: I’m not ready to be a mom.
OM: I just want Big Greta to be nice to Little Greta.
GW: I’m not good with kids, Om. Can we not call her Little Greta?

You’re struggling to break free,” Om said. “It takes an enormous amount of energy—and courage—to free yourself, to follow the path of transformation without abandoning yourself, without fleeing from your pain and all the loss you’ve experienced. But you need to have more compassion for yourself. That’s what’s missing.

“But we see things through a lens, don’t we? The lens of our own experience?”

“Why not say that you made a choice, that you knew what you were doing was wrong, and that you did it anyway? Why continue coasting on your trauma? It’s not a good look at your age.”