Exquisite torture

The peace and calm of the Ganesha shrine and the river down below

After the Powder Massage, my next 5-day course of treatment was to be one that had been my absolute favourite on previous trips to Kerala: lying on the massage table while a thin stream of liquid flows gently to and fro across my forehead. I should have known that Ayurveda-Yoga-Villas would be more meticulous with this treatment – as they are with all – and that my body’s reaction might be different.

To begin with, the doctor had talked me through the objectives of the various treatments. The first treatments had been to clean me out, then the powder massage worked on breaking down the fat around my middle and back. This had all been very successful and had reduced my weight by 9kg in just 13 days...! But treating obesity is not about eliminating the symptoms; it’s about attacking the causes. Why did I overeat? One effect of my excesses had been to push up my blood pressure, which had been worryingly high at 190/110 when I had arrived. This meant that the circulatory system needed attention and, more importantly, the emotions that stimulate it, to try and establish where the problem lay. I was credulous that using a particular massage treatment could identify the emotional factors that had pushed up my blood pressure but, as I said, this was my all-time favourite treatment, so I had no fears when I stretched out on the massage table while the assistants put the equipment in place.

The apparatus used is a tall wooden gallows structure that serves to suspend a large bowl over the patient’s forehead. There’s a hole in the bowl which is partly blocked by a thick wick, so that the liquid in the bowl can flow out slowly and steadily. That much I was familiar with; the new variation for me was the 10cm-wide cylinder of something resembling Play-Dough that the assistant was moulding in his hands. Once I lay down, he positioned this cylinder on my left chest, over my heart, as if he were marking me up for target practice. While I unwound and relaxed, wondering what this was all about, he warmed some oil and then dribbled this into this Play-Dough ring on my chest, so that the oil warmed the skin above my heart, gently massaging the oil in as he did so.

Next he fixed a cloth across my eyebrows so that no liquid would run into my eyes, put cotton pads on my eyes and plugged my ears with more cotton wool. Then he massaged liquid into my scalp as if it was a shampoo. The liquid in this treatment varies from patient to patient, as does the temperature of the liquid and the decoction that they mix in with it. The liquid I am being treated with is buttermilk, sometimes icy cold, and sometimes hot and turned an unappetising grey colour from the medications that have been added to it.

So now, my hair wrung out by the muscular hands of my handsome young man, I lay and waited for the main treatment to begin. Then I felt the liquid hit the spot the gurus call the third eye, in the centre of the forehead, midway between the eyes. The assistant gently swung the bowl to and fro, from left to right, so that there was a constant sensation of the liquid caressing the brow. And so it continued for the best part of half an hour.

How marvellous! -you might think; how relaxing that must be! Indeed, I have tended to drift in and out of consciousness when I have had this treatment elsewhere in Kerala, but the consequences on this occasion were more sinister. The effect of the process as it is carried out here is to open up all sorts of emotions that have been buried over the years. Every night, my neighbour in the adjacent villa next-door has been dreaming a constant newsreel of incidents and relationships from years back; another guest here spent the afternoon after this treatment shut in the room and in floods of tears. My reaction was to walk out of the treatment room as if I was stoned out of my mind: dizzy, disoriented, confused and having difficulty standing straight or thinking straight.

Fortunately I went straight from the treatment to my daily doctor’s appointment. The doctor explained that the medication used in this treatment brings up issues from the past that patients have buried at the back of their minds, and he emphasised the importance of now taking time to sit quietly by the river and re-examine things that troubled me, and to write it all down so I could keep coming back and progressing my thinking.  We are so often encouraged to forget about the past and bury it, but I found that with my mind focused after the treatment, I was put in a position to re-evaluate certain things in my life, quietly and dispassionately, and to come to terms with issues that I had been unable to resolve.

It wasn’t easy – and this particular process is a 5-day journey – but with the support of the simple diet, the natural beauty of the environment and the daily yoga there is a natural sense of balance being restored. 

Yeah....? A bucket of milk over your head....?Yes... it’s crazy, isn’t it? But it works for me and it seems to work for others here too, and as far as I’m concerned that, and the concise academic reasoning of all three doctors, is enough for me. The scientifically-minded junior doctor was writing out my medication instructions for me the other day, and across the top of the paper she wrote the phrase that they write on all such notes. Roughly translated it means something along the lines of:

“This treatment in the name of the goddess of Ayurveda, all praise and honour be unto her.”

 Yeah.... superstitious bunch of cranks...?

Of course, or, well.....

.... meanwhile my blood pressure dropped to 130/68.