It's never been just about doing a "technical piercing". There had the fundamental drive for getting it in the first place. If it's a stupid human trick, I'll leave that to Letterman. I was driven to have the uvula because it reflected the mind. When you put a pair of forceps on a uvula, it feels like you've grabbed the center of the mass of the inside of your head -- If you cough up a piece of rice and it sits in the back of your sinus passage, you understand that spot. Psychologically it feels like you're getting the center of your head pierced. That is so live, so real, and the risk inherant only added to the psychological imperative, and I was just driven to have it. Again, not a rational action, but that's not the point. The technical aspects were just a neccesity, but of course I tweaked and got into that. But it was never the motivation. It was never enough. Do you need it? Is it supposed to be there? Yes, then we're going for it.

People see my Om neck brand and they understand they aren't dealing with something from their world, in the sense that when an Indian woman walks into a deli with a large nose ring and a bindi, most Americans aren't going to walk up to them and say "didn't that hurt? what's your mother think?" Intuitively they know that she is not from around here. We are not cut from the same cloth.

What if we all knew there was no point in selling your soul and working for twenty years, that there's no pention plan because the Earth's polarity is going to flip and we'll all be under water?

Body building is extremely dramatic -- It changes your entire structure and must be maintained dilligently or you will lose all that. It's an enormous commitment. A body builder will move 10,000 pounds of weight in one work-out and do it again the next day, year after year. That's an amazing amount. Those people that are that large have problems moving through their own range of motion. They have to have special clothes. Is that any better or worse than a woman so corseted she can't bend over? There's a certain amount of grace to someone corseted or in high heels or with long nails -- to be that fragile and carry it with such poise and power, that is the truly sexiest thing about the modification, not even the aesthetic.

Wrestling was also my first contact with absence of self, which has proven to be the biggest spiritual facet of my life, and for millions of years before, to many others. For the entire time we've been walking upright, every single living being has had to listen to what you could call conscience -- the voice inside.

Western culture has made it so that in order to get ahead, it's screw unto others, or let us prey, and that's P-R-E-Y. What's wrong? You get gray hair, you trade in, and you get your Volvo. Men haven't been like that until the past two hundred years. We spent the previous years being mysticism and faith based and listening to that, because if not we'd be eaten in the wild, we'd get lost, any number of things. Instead of the house payment, the Volvo payment, the nine to five job, we spent a lot more time being creative, dancing, sharing, communicating.

I do need to be at work, but I've chosen to be where I am and I'm not trading myself in. I help people find themselves, decorate themselves, and embrace the one thing you get in a culture where you are what you do -- the body. And people don't even realize you can do that any more, and that's a very natural human thing -- to decorate and cherish. You are your own medium and it's the only thing you're going to get to take with you.

There is a security possible. You invest in happiness and you invest in people. All other things will crumble in time.

Civilization does create some radical circles of insanity.

In piercing it's not the navel I'm doing that keeps me there. Obviously that got old a long time ago. It's that I get thirty minutes with people from all walks of life to possiblely learn something and definitely to teach something. They're awake -- they're afraid, it's a moment where their physical body is jeopardised in a culture where everything is soft and all you have to do is trade in your soul. When we come to grips with pain, that's a new thing for a Westerner. Our rites of passage are getting drunk, going to college, getting laid... But this is a moment where you really do have to earn it. This is going to hurt. Why am I doing this? And get to maybe help you see that you aren't what you do, and maybe it is alright that you want something for yourself, and maybe it would be OK to tell work to stick it this time, and if it doesn't work out I'll find a job where I can be me. So many people are starting to touch on that because we've set our world up to fail and I've got a chance to let them know what else can be. I've had a woman trade in a $50,000 job over her labret. It was symbolic of the bigger picture -- as soon as she did it, she cried, and realized that she only needed $50,000 a year because $40,000 of it was paying for her huge house and her Jaguar that all she did was look at and cruise around in... and now she may be walking down the beach and eating oranges that cost a couple bucks a day. You want to tell me who's having the better time? She's living as a human, as part of the Earth, and not as an alien on it.

I have no third eye so to speak -- I don't see pictures when I dream. It's more emotions, feelings, smells, flashes of images yet no specifics -- It's irrelevant. I don't wear the work that I want, I wear the work that is supposed to be on me. And consequently it's taken me years and years to get pieces because it has to be revealed to me by myself, through my mind so to speak. I don't feel tattooing or piercing or scarification or any modification is a beautification for me so much as a trading in of me.