Pancha Karma is an ancient method of deep cleansing and rejuvenation practiced in ayurvedic medicine. According to Dr. Bhapat, an ayurvedic doctor whose practice is based in Miami, Florida,

“Whenever you want to do sadhana, you are using your body and mind. In ayurveda, a periodic cleansing on a yearly basis, it really helps for our spiritual evolution. It helps us become fit and balanced.”

Niika Quistgard, who leads pancha karma retreats in India, says,

“Letting go of ego, letting go of control when you undergo pancha karma, one allows grace to enter. Ama can be undigested spiritual and emotional trauma. It tends to come up and get released as well as physical trauma. In pancha karma it allows you to release control and people really feel reborn. The ego has to let go. When that is released, it is scary for people.”

I have been interested in ayurveda for many years and this summer I had considered going on pancha karma to India.  Dr. Bhapat says,

“Western purification techniques are not really looking at the personal requirements of the patient.  Pancha karma has a different approach in purification. We start with cleansing of the ama through herb teas and khechari. Then we do massage and steam for 10 days. Then we do purgation. We follow with medicated enemas. This is put it together in sequence.” 

I really wanted to experience this deep form of cleansing. However, for some reason I kept changing my mind.  According to one of my spiritual teachers, it is best to do one’s spiritual practices at home rather than going on pilgrimage. In the late 1990s, I had cared for my mother during a terminal illness. At a deep level, I was seeing this trip as a pilgrimage to discover a more compassionate form of health care than the one we have in the United States.

The other main reason I did not want to travel to India was the question of increasing my carbon footprint. It seemed so selfish to travel halfway around the world to improve my health when there are so many people who have less than I do. Besides, I really couldn’t afford the trip right now so it didn’t make sense.

As I contemplated the goals of pancha karma, I realized that there was still much that I could do at home. Pancha Karma therapy is aimed at ‘shodhana’, the eradication of the cause of the disease. I had a sense that I had not fully explored this idea within my own life and that I needed to do that before asking others for help.

So instead, I decided to stay home. My condominium was looking very shabby. It needed a good painting. It seemed to me that cleaning my body through pancha karma would have little effect on my life as a whole if I did not have a clean and orderly home to return to. To that end, I repainted all the rooms in my home, let go of unnecessary furniture, went through all my closets and back files and re-organized them.

Then I applied the principles of feng-shui to each room in my home to enhance my experience of chi, life force energy in all the aspects of my life. Learning about the bagua was liberating, making it possible for me to organize my life goals in new ways and express this understanding in my environment.  The doorway to one’s home is considered very important in feng-shui and it was definitely time for a new door. I also put several large plants in appropriate corners in each room to attract abundance and good relationships. Now that I have finished, I find that the experience of being at home really has shifted. I feel more alert and aware of the choices I am making with my thoughts and actions.

When this process of several weeks was completed, it was time to take a vacation. Since the process had been inspired by a sincere desire to experience the deep form of cleansing represented by pancha karma, I chose to visit a nearby spiritual retreat site that I had never been to. Less than three hours from my home, the Himalayan Institute is a beautiful campus on the grounds of a former Jesuit monastery. The Himalayan Institute offers pancha karma through its center of Health and Healing, as well as a broad array of experience and training programs. These include yoga teacher trainings, introductory workshops and courses on asana, pranayama, organic gardening, self-transformation and ayurveda.

Instead of experiencing the ayurvedic treatments, I decided to adopt an asana I feel more comfortable with, that of the student of yoga. In the Sutra Yoga workshop I attended, I learned about many deeply cleansing practices as they are practiced in this tradition. Having studied for many years in the Siddha Yoga tradition, it is interesting for me to deepen my understanding of yoga by experiencing how meditation, chanting, asana, selfless service and pranayama are practiced in another spiritual community. 

As usually happens when we are pursuing sadhana, all of our own obstacles to a full experience of the Self often come up when we set a clear intention. A certain underlying anxiety that has been an impediment in my sadhana for years came up very strongly. From an ayurvedic perspective, this is most often related to a derangement in the vata energy of the body. This is one of the reasons I had chosen to begin my ‘pancha karma’ with a thorough house-cleaning, understanding the value of an orderly home environment in creating the conditions for balance to reassert itself. I had adopted the healing principle that in each of our lives, when we choose to serve the Highest Principle, imbalances will naturally smooth themselves out as we remain focused on our goal.

So as I experienced this deep anxiety arising within me in such peaceful surroundings, I offered it up to God again and again. It seemed related to what Niika Quistgard had said about deep emotional trauma arising during the process of cleansing.

I remembered a verse from the Spanda Karikas  which describes how the experient can access the Self even in moments of great unrest.  A very terse sutra-like formulation developed in my mind: Terror plus OM equals Prana. I wrote it out in my journal as if it were a graphic emblem for a Tshirt, using mathematical symbols and the Sanskrit letter for the sacred syllable Om. For most of one day, I repeated this sutra to myself, confident that if I could encourage myself to release this old terror, a manifestation of the energies of the lower chakras, into the all-embracing light of Om, a deeply held pattern that has limited my experience of prana, life-force, could be dissolved.

Ten years of experience in the graphic arts trade and seventeen years of experience as an art teacher supported me as I visualized this sign of liberation in my mind. I realized that I really wanted freedom from the over-exposure to chemical fumes and city life that those years had involved. 

Finally, I saw a connection between this graphic symbol in my journal and the road signs on a New York street where I had parked a few days earlier. One sign pointed in one direction and said “No Standing” giving the hours while another sign pointed in the other direction and said “No Parking” also giving certain hours. I had parked in the wrong place, my car was towed and it had cost me a pretty penny to get it back from the Towing Garage.

This had happened late in the evening the day before driving up to the Himalayan Institute for my week of retreat. Underneath this was an understanding about how essential it is to learn how to develop a vigilant and continuous alertness in one’s life. And underneath this was an ancestral fantasy memory of my grandparents, who I had never met in real life, coming to New York City from the country villages of Eastern Europe.

Somehow, in my life as a city dweller, I had lost touch with the deeper patterns of natural cycles. Patterns that are held for a very long time in the deeper layers of the body and mind can be difficult to identify and to release.

Niika Quistgard says,

“One of the big reasons I have the retreat, is to get back in touch with traditional lifestyle. We don’t have a place for immersion here (in the United States). It is not so much founded on truly living in harmony with nature. Ayurveda arose as folk medicine.”

As I faced this terror in myself, I came to recognize that I distrusted my own life energy, that in some way I was rejecting my own prana. Traveling to India might be helpful but, in some way, I needed to find balance in my own life.

When I returned home after my week of vacation, there was still a sense of something not being quite right. I had the intuition that I needed to apply some discrimination about my relationship to healthcare and my practice of yoga. Healthcare has been in the news a lot lately and comparisons have been made between the healthcare systems in different countries. As a public schoolteacher, I am aware how important healthcare is to the long-term health of individuals, families and communities.

According to Niika Quistgard,

“Ayurveda is a system of reference points of how to make good decisions: understanding who you are and what type of imbalances you are going through. Then you can get healthy and stay healthy. How to make those basic decisions.”

Each person’s path to God in their relationship to food is unique, depending on their personal history. Over the last few years, the silence and prayers that I have said before meals have brought up many memories that have been uncomfortable, in the process of creating more space for the light of awareness.

What has come up for me is an awareness of the importance of cultivating gratitude in my relationship to the healthcare that I do have available to me. I have been practicing prayer before meals and it has had a radical and deeply cleansing effect on my digestion, absorption and elimination.

Sometimes, when I get indigestion, it is because I am being warned to avoid certain people or places. In particular, I became aware that I needed to end a relationship with one of my health care providers because it was no longer in alignment with my higher purpose in life. I also became aware that maybe I had been praying too much and not allowing myself to enjoy long walks in beautiful parks.

While I do hope that I will be able to practice traditional pancha karma in India in the future, I think the outer purification I was able to complete this summer was the right choice. My Anusara yoga practice has  deepened as a result.

Niika had said that, “In pancha karma it allows you to release control and people really feel reborn.”