An Intro to Ayurvedic Panchakarma
I was sitting in the hotel Ishan restaurant, doing everything I could to coax a video to upload for the yoga membership with sporadic internet that is going on right now everywhere in our neighborhood.
I was feeling very much a kind of futility that went past my inability to provide materials to my members to due internet fall out.
I was feeling like I'm not doing anything here.
Purposeless.
Aside from the fun of making yoga videos and interviewing yoga masters for my website, there is nothing for me to do.
I didn't feel like sitting around the house all day. All the shopping and shops here are old news and there is only so much chai drinking and day dreaming you can do in riverside cafes.
I was feeling rather useless.
So, I was talking to my mom who is in the process of doing panchakarma (more on this later). She was on day 5 and feeling amazing, 10 years younger she said, her strength and mobility returning.
At 68 years old. this is amazing and so inspiring, so suddenly, spontaneously I thought, maybe I should do it too!
This is a pic of my mama, probably napping, inside the steam box in the panchakarma room.
So I grabbed all my stuff and ran up the hill to catch a rickshaw downtown to try to catch the Dr. before he left the clinic for the day.
Panchakarma is the 5 cleansing techniques in Ayurveda.
Ayurveda is the sister science of yoga and is the ancient process of learning to live in harmony and balance with nature for optimum health and good living.
What panchakarma does is effectively restore your body to a state of balance and harmony so that it can regain homeostasis.
To do it properly, it must be done under the supervision of a qualified Ayurvedic dr.
First, he or she does a consultation and pulse diagnosis where they can read what health issues are pressing and prescribe the appropriate ayurvedic treatments.
So if you have pain, pain is reduced, you have digestive issues, they heal.
Mental, emotional or psychosomatic issues? They can resolve.
It works to help in many areas.
For me, it is because since perimenopause just recently set in for me, I seem to have anxiety that I never had before, my nervous system is off, my metabolism too.
With the hormonal changes, I feel lately like I can't find my feet.
My yoga practice helps immensely, and would probably help more if I was more consistent with it, but full disclosure, I am not getting to my mat every day lately. I goes in fits and spurts (as is common). I will go weeks of daily practice, then more sporadically for a period.
The panchakarma lends support to all our bodies systems so that they can naturally rebalance and restore.
I am doing a ten day program. Mom is doing 15. She started 5 days before me, so we will both finish on the same day (January 23rd). One the second day, her hip pain completely disappeared.
It involves full body ayurvedic massage with oil, steam (both in the steam box and with a localized wand, herbed warm oil enema, and different bastis (this is where they build a sort of "well" of plastacene on a part of the body, like your low back or your navel and they fill this well with hot oil, as hot as you can stand it, and it pulls the toxins out.
It feels wonderful, it is very relaxing and nourishing.
They also sometimes will do oiling of the ears, eyes and nose which helps to rejuvenate the senses.
We arrive there at 8:30 in the morning each day, the Dr. has a little consultation with us to see how we are feeling, takes our pulse and prescribes the treatments for the day, then we go into our treatments rooms and each have an attendant assigned to us for the whole program who administers all our treatments.
This is a pic of a pic of our doctor doing pulse diagnosis with a patient.
So I am going to journal a chronicles of what goes on over the next ten days.
I have moved in temporarily to my mom's hotel room which is near the clinic as it is simply too far to travel every day from my husband's house by rickshaw.
So that's it in a nutshell, the panchakarma intro.
Tune in daily for my reports from the treatment room.
It is truly an adventure.
It is NOT a spa, it is a clinic and an Indian clinic to boot, so there is no expecting fluffy white towels and squeakly clean floors by American standards.
But the proof is in the pudding. We have found that panchakarma WORKS! So one has to put up with a bit of a different standard of cleanliness to get the medical benefit that is the result.
See you soon!
