Many years ago, I stayed for 6 weeks in an Ayurvedic ashram in India so I could perform panchakarma.
Panchakarma is an ancient Ayurvedic cleansing, healing, and rebuilding program that uses five main therapies to help a person arrive into their optimal state of well being, body, mind and spirit.
One of the therapies that was the most difficult for me was drinking medicated ghee. For many days in a row, the doctor would wake me up at the crack of dawn, sit me in a chair in the central courtyard facing the sacred banyan tree, and mutter a prayer to the small statue of Dhanvantari, the Hindu goddess of health, probably because he knew what he was going to make me do and knew I’d need divine intervention to get through it.
He’d hand me a tall cup of a thick brownish-black oil—clarified butter—“enhanced” with more herbs, bark bits, and other medicines than Dhanvantari could probably hold in all of her 4 arms, and which tasted like someone had swept the floor and put it in a vat of rancid nut oil. He’d hand me the cup and told me to drink it.
Each day the amount would get larger and each day I’d turned more and more green with each gulp.
After the 5th or 6th day of this I took down about half of an impossibly large cup of ghee before my stomach violently churned and at the risk of offending Dhanvantari, (to hell with the doctor) I sprang up from my chair and sprinted to kneel before the porcelain altar and made an offering of all that oil to the toilet.
Apparently, that was the moment the doctor was looking for. I was now ready for the rest of the therapies.
Even the enema therapies, with intermittent smacks on the ass, didn’t seem all that bad after drinking an oil tanker worth of ghee.
But not all the therapies were tortuous. In fact, many of them were enormously enjoyable.
Among my favorite therapies was abhyanga, an hour-long full-body oil massage which I’d get almost every day. The doctor had me put on a loincloth and I’d lay down on a table, one massive slab of hardwood with gutters on the sides for the oil to drip down to be collected and reused during my massage. There was usually a team of 3–4 people administering this massage which would include massaging oil into every part of my body not covered by my loincloth, including hair, nostrils, and ears.
After, I’d get to sit in a sauna.
Because I was “convalescing” I was required to do absolutely no work at all which meant I was not allowed to bathe myself. I was assigned a cheery assistant, Ramachandra, to bathe me which was really the process of sitting me on a stool and slowly drowning me with about 1000 buckets of soapy water, scrubbing EVERY (I pause for effect) part of my body.
“So, uh … Rama, you, um … like cricket?”
But after all this abhyanga massage, I eventually came back home absolutely glowing. I mean I had women stopping me and asking me what my secret was to make my skin and hair look so lustrous. More than skin and hair, though, my digestion was awesome, I was sleeping like a champ, and my nervous system was more calm and collected than the Buddha. Many years later, I have happily abandoned the medicated ghee. To this day I can’t even taste too much plain olive oil without having a gag reflex.
But one thing I still practice regularly is Abhyanga, especially in the winter time when the dry air makes my skin dry and crack.