Just doing what I said I would do.

Big Cheery Bloke replaces Fat Miserable Bloke

After two weeks Fat Miserable Bloke is looking a bit more like Big Cheery Bloke. It's been hard work and it's not going to stop being hard work for quite some time. I'm grateful for some of the things I've learnt in recent years that have helped with the challenge.

Ten years ago I took a number of self-development courses. My earnings were high at the time, and I could write off all these activities against tax (- well, that’s what I did, and they never checked!) I attended several advanced courses and I helped to run courses in South Africa, California, Scotland, and Tennessee as well as all over England, and it was a rich and fulfilling experience. The courses had a common element which centred on being true to yourself, of doing what you said you were going to do just because you owed that much to yourself. After all, if you couldn’t trust yourself, who could you trust? The basic course used an exercise that involved accepting and committing to a set of personal disciplines. Some were obviously appropriate – not talking during sessions, others helpful – raising your hand if you couldn’t hear, some seemingly petty – an absolute adherence to timings. The point was that these were not rules laid down by another authority; they were personal disciplines that you accepted and took on as your own.

It’s a concept that has held me in good stead on many occasions, and it is highly appropriate at this time in Kerala, where the programme is not imposed nor even strictly enforced, it relies on guests exercising their own personal discipline. Nobody checks if you rise at six in the morning – there are no alarm calls, and nobody checks if you do actually take that brisk early-morning walk. Nobody challenges you if you insist on getting the kitchen to bring you different food from the menu that the doctors have prescribed for you, and nobody checks if you take your medicines. Well, why would they? We’re all adults aren’t we?

But that’s not the way some people seem to see things. I don’t believe in cherry-picking an experience like this. I want to get the most out of it, so I’ll follow the doctors’ instructions as near to the letter as I can. Variations like going to the village for a sticky cake, or getting the kitchen to make me coffee seem to defeat the purpose of entering into this sort of rigorous regime in the first place. But the whingeing and whining goes on every mealtime, people who can’t eat this or don’t like that, and who choose to customise their days to suit their own preferences rather than accept what has been meticulously constructed to deliver a balanced and – above all – effective programme.

As the days go by I find that I accept and even enjoy some of the physical exertion, the early mornings and early nights, the daily rituals, the simple diet. I am confident that some of this will create new habits, and will be absorbed into my lifestyle when I go home. The whole purpose of Panchakarma is to change one’s lifestyle, not in terms of going home to sit cross-legged on the floor eating curried vegetables with my fingers, but in terms of living my Italian life in a different way. There is a deep sense of peace and acceptance, and I don’t think I could have achieved this if I had chosen to fight the system, ignored the activities and demanded different food.

I paid a fair sum of money and, even more significantly, I committed a substantial period of time and I want to get the best possible return on my investment. I just don’t understand people who do all that and then try to wheedle a way around the system. If you do that, then the only promise you break is the one you made to yourself.

All of this sounds very self-righteous, but there’s a big piece missing in my jig-saw. If I can be so smart about disciplines that other people find so easy to break, why do I have such a problem with disciplines that other people find perfectly acceptable? Why have I eaten too much and drunk too much for so long, and why do I find it so difficult to break that pattern? This is where my new course of treatment takes over – working on the mind and getting through to the emotions.

It gets to the point when life and all the emotions look and feel like an impenetrable jungle

I thought I would love the next therapy in my programme, as I have on previous visits to Kerala, but this time it’s proving a major struggle. More of that tomorrow.