Halfway through

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When Feist sang “one, two, three, four..tell me that you love me more” on the alarm, I crawled out of bed at too early of a dawn.  It was Day 7 of the Ayurveda Panchakarma and time to check in half a day into the clinic.  Already six days of abhyanga massage and really, not difficult at all to get used to daily massages that leave the skin and hair gleaming more each day.  However, Day 7 is quite like the peak in a Bell’s curve.  A highlight, perhaps.

I would wish medicine one day can taste like chocolate cake or sweet mashed potatoes but they remained quite a drama to take, probably as a reminder to us that health is in our hands – you abuse it, you ‘suffer’ for it.   Not that ‘suffer’ is the right way to describe it.  5 seconds of gulping half a cup of thick, pasty and bitter medicine is much less suffering than many other matters.  Within the next hour, the medicine made its way down through the esophagus, into the stomach, moving on to the small intestines to be absorbed and finally to the colon.  I don’t wish to continue, but you can probably guess where it will end up next – yes, out of my body.

As my energy waned by the minute from the regular visits to the loo and loss of water, the morning began with  pleasurably readings of Rupert Sheldrake’s brilliant and still very relevant book, Rebirthing of Nature but as the sun rose, I could barely read another sentence.  So I laid in bed, resting and letting the detoxification process take over my body.  Seeing my therapist at the door lifted the spirits up several hours later and of course, when the other half came to accompany me.  The passionate cook, who I could hear the entire morning clanking away to prepare delicious Ayurveda platters and the scent of all that,  served a bowl of plain porridge and spice yogurt soup, signifying it was over and I could go home.

The rest of the day I was floating in and out naps, my voice was soft and I was craving to eat a cake, drink coffee and a decadent meal.  But I persisted with rice porridge and some boiled vegetables.  For dinner, the same except some luxurious boiled white asparagus just landed from Deutschland.

The process of detoxification doesn’t seem like a pleasant one, however in these last week I learned again the importance of eating well and living well.  In these days I respected and listened to my own body’s needs plus recognised the battering it had gone through in these last years through the mere act of living – from those I truly enjoy like working, eating, traveling to others unavoidable things like stress, over-indulgence, late nights and bad habits.

Today is Day 8 and I woke up feeling as though my digestive organs are almost innocently brand new like a baby’s.  My mood has significantly lifted, my viscera feels extremely clean and my energy level is climbing steadily.  And there is still six more days of rice rubs and more abhanya.  They say, everyone comes out of their Panchakarma beaming of health and I have also seen that myself in those who had just completed theirs.  I feel that I am halfway there and that feels really good. With gratitude, to the healing herbs that nature presents to us and the knowledge of the science of life from almost 1000 years. It is all really, rather simple.

*It is recommended to do the Panchakarma annually. If you have access to an Ayurveda physician and trained therapists, I truly recommend this process.