January 17-30, Vaidygrama, an Ayurvedic campus outside the city of Coimbatore.

A goat is bleating somewhere, a baby goat. The sound is drowned out as my ears are filled with green oil, plugged with cotton. I recede into the ringing of my ears, the confusing sensation of four hands covering me with oil. Now I am quietly pummeled with hot, herbed, rice-flour sacks. The number of hands and the confusion of it make me feel small. I am suddenly a baby, immobilized, senses blocked, trusting and helpless. I think of how lucky I am that my parents loved me and held me when I was small. Isn’t some part of us always small and needing to be held?

After the treatment, a Keralan girl a head shorter than me washes my body with a paste made of ground mung beans and a little water. Hot water is drawn from a large metal drum under the tap and poured over me from a stainless pitcher with a large, looping handle. This removes excess oil and makes a mess of my hair. For my time here, I begin constantly in a mung-dusted state. The weight of it begins to give me a headache and I opt for shampoo after 5 days. The towels are Khadi: hand-loomed cotton, loosely woven, and not at all plush. To remove the oil from the towels, they are boiled with soapnut powder.

Four days later it is red rice and hot milk in the sacks. The experience of heat and dry herbs is replaced by an unctuous starch-and-milk paste that makes puddles on the table a half-inch thick. I am being submerged in sweet soup. The sound of it is the most striking, and the sensation of cold that comes as I wait for the next round of hot milk to be rubbed over me. The girls dip the cheesecloth sacks into hot milk over and over again until the milk is gone- on my body or the table. “This for face,” she says, gently laying a layer over my cheeks and forehead. “Then you beauty.” My thought is: what I’m not beauty already? But I know she doesn’t mean that. My skin has been pretty wonderful here with nothing but the sesame oil and mung bean treatment.

Beauty is, like with the yoga, a side effect of the treatment, and a natural result of good health. These treatments are to stimulate, purify, and later nourish the tissue layers that lie just beneath the skin: lymph, blood and muscle. This particular process is gentle and rejuvenating, which seems to be the protocol for me.

My 2-week stay is short, compared to the 3-6 week requirement for complete treatment. Ayurveda is slow, specific, and very effective. The doctor said last night the process is complete when the paradigm of diet, lifestyle, and activity shifts in the mind. Speaking from experience, this can take some time and may well require more than one visit. As I’ve learned it, any small changes in habits are paradigm shifts. Being open and committed to the process helps.

I’ve stopped putting anything anywhere, or taking any supplements besides what they give me, which is a lot. A bitter, oily thing in the morning that makes me gag, herbal wine after each meal with hing in it, and another bitter tonic in the evening that makes me hungry. The weight of the 3-month medicine package when we leave is 12 kilos. I am opting to pick up as much of it as I can in Mysore, but still will have to carry an extra bag on the bus.

Today we are learning how to make ghee from yogurt. The qualities of this kind are lighter than ghee made from butter. They use it in most of the items on the afternoon lunch plate, which is usually a large serving of whole grain red rice, native to this area, and 5 small cups of soups and cooked vegetables. Nothing is raw, except a few cubes of papaya in the afternoon every other day. The food is great, like what I eat at home with more variety and some milk right from the cow. Between this and the lack of exercise, I may even gain a pound or two. We are discouraged from moving around too much as this causes the body’s energy to come away from cleansing and rejuvenation. I do short bits of yoga most days, because I know for me this helps to move the energies about and helps me to understand the process I am going through a little bit. I sure do get stagnant though, lying around all day. If they weren’t oiling and pummeling me, I might just sink as a permanent fixture into the soil.

The mind, however, dances around like always. The first few days it is busier than usual due to the lack of stimulation and the lack of information about what the heck is going on here. Someone is always poking in at my door with tea, medicine, treatment time, or some check in. I find this exhausting in the beginning until I realize there is a slight rhythm to it, give or take an hour. Knowing what to expect is such a part of our experience as Westerners. Many of you know, in India, there’s no such thing. Time is stretchable and events are governed by the cosmos, not by human schedules. I am doing my best to surrender to not being in control of my days, my food, or my health program.