The Master of my Domain
Post Pancha Karma
My neighbour got married today. She is 78 and her partner is in hospice care with a few months to live. She has been excited for the last three weeks, preparing for her wedding. Her dog was preened; the best a kelpie can do when it comes to wearing ribbons. She even found the most perfect shoes to go with her outfit. She bought them online and they fit!
My neighbour resisted the ceremony for awhile because she felt like it gave her partner false hope; he was prone to the fantasy of believing he would get better soon in order to do a road trip with her to Tasmania where he wanted to get married. She spoke to me at length between indulging in the fantasy or shutting it down due to the reality of the situation.
But she found a middle ground and today she got married and I have never seen her happier. I gave her a wedding present of a frame to put a photo of her and her partner in. She is Christian and the verse I chose to put on a note was -
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
- Corinthians 13:13
I’ve been thinking about the preciousness of life of late and how healing can come in such random ways. You never know where the spark of life will come from. Bad becomes good becomes bad becomes good. In my post purge healing path, I let the journey come to me this time, without knowing that it would, and discovered an inner resolve I didn’t know possible and emotional healing that had been stuck for awhile.
My tongue - the portal to my path
Now that I had control over my diet and lifestyle I consulted my tongue to observe my state of affairs, the stark reality check, and how I would proceed forward. It had a thick white film covering it. What was worse was that the film wouldn’t completely clear after tongue scraping in the morning. This meant that toxins had embedded deeply.
The response to a situation like this is to fast, which stimulates the digestive enzymes into repair mode, to clear the old debris, but I was in a weakened state after the excessive purging I went through, so it wasn’t appropriate. I had also lost 6 kilograms or around 13 pounds in a month, which was beyond uncomfortable. I didn’t want or need to lose weight. I had never experienced such a drastic weight loss in my life and it frightened me because it felt like it had a mind of its own. I was eating but it wasn’t making a difference to my weight, which was steadily decreasing.
I had the very real visceral experience of deeply understanding the link between digestion and life force and how precious and important it is to maintain.
I opted for the following protocol -
Eat regular meals but leave as much space in between as possible to allow my appetite to really build. In this way I was still providing energy to my system but also leaving room for toxins to clear. I started off with two meals a day and slowly increased to four smaller meals, instead of increasing the portions. Since my digestive system was weak it couldn’t take a lot of food at once but I needed the calories.
The normal approach to building digestion is to eat a type of gruel, a thinner watery version of a rice porridge and slowly thickening it over time towards solid foods but I found that this wasn’t working and would produce more film on my tongue. It became a trial and error as to what I could eat that would digest easily. I found steel cut oats with cinnamon and honey a good fit. For yourself, I highly recommend discovering what your “easily digestible” food is, should you ever need to refer to it at a future date. There are theories on this and then your unique experience.
I’m normally vegetarian but found legumes too hard to digest so I ate roasted chicken (without skin) with some boiled veggies with salt and pepper for some protein. I couldn’t digest fats that well so oily broths wouldn’t work but if you can digest oil well then broths are an excellent rejuvenative. In Ayurveda meat is used medicinally for short periods of time and this is how I like to use it - on an as needs basis. I was enjoying the chicken and found I had an appetite for it so I followed what my body craved like a pregnant woman. When digestion was strong again, I switched to legumes.
I introduced digestive herbs slowly once my appetite was established. I didn’t want to rely on herbs because I had the opportunity to re-instate my infrastructure - bringing my internal triggers to life. I wanted my appetite to feel like mine alone, and my digestion to learn to respond to a healthy appetite. A tougher approach than we’re used to these days but I ended up stronger for it.
A new bond with food
The week I landed I went to the local farmers market. A local group had just started offering a CSA veggie box subscription (community supported agriculture) and was offering some of its left over produce for sale. I signed up for a box and began volunteering once a week to harvest the veggies.
Many of the organic produce available in stores in our area comes from Sydney, three hours away, and some of it, unfortunately doesn’t taste that great. My guess is that the food sits in storage for a period of time and it is then refrigerated and defrosted. One of the benefits of being cleansed was that my sensitivity increased and I could sense the food that was alive. I would choose the organic shop version of veggies over the supermarket chains any day but the CSA option of harvesting that morning at a field close to home surpassed all options.
The volunteering was symbiotic. I specifically chose it to work barefoot and without gloves so I could connect to the soil (I’m currently living in a townhouse). I consider the pranic benefits of being around food gardens on par with old growth forests - there is an aliveness in the earth.
For anyone that suffers excess Vata and needs earth energy to ground their nervous system, I can’t recommend this practise enough, not just for the soil but to create a close relationship with your food from harvest to plate. If you are fortunate to grow your food, wonderful, otherwise seek out a local CSA group- they always need help and the energy you feed towards it comes back in the food you receive.
It is ideal and preferable, from an Ayurvedic perspective, that you heal through food rather than supplements. We all need helpers now and then but it’s the relationship to earth, not only the food, that is the circular economy of wellness.
Re-establishing my sacrum
The over purging weakened my sacrum and my sciatica flared up. An energetic chasm had created a lack of cohesiveness; my hips felt off centre and my lower back was in pain. I didn’t have the strength to do my usual yoga practise so I became inventive.
No meditation in the beginning because I was so light and etheric. Instead I did simple alternate nostril breathing and held a Muladhara mudra (hand gesture to ground the root chakra) whilst focusing on my sacrum.
Serendipitously I had taken Donna Farhi’s “Art of Teaching” course last year. She had previously broken her sacral bone after falling off a horse and had to knit herself back together. Here was my chance to self align my base, my sacrum, through the techniques she taught. For yoga teachers out there, I can’t recommend it enough. In this way, you learn how to transition and hold postures without causing back pain. I don’t believe transitions are taught well enough in general yoga classes and Donna has spent her yoga career trying to correct some basic errors that have been causing a large amount of Sacro-illiac issues. Here is her short course FYI. Yoga therapy is a highly underrated modality and if you find a practitioner near you that can help to form a solid sacral base, don’t underestimate the influence it has on your state of mind as well as building a strong and effective yoga practise from.
Invigorating Pranic life force
I was working with the fire aspect of my digestion, the earth aspect of food, soil and restructuring my form. The next practise was to invigorate life force back into my body and allow it to move freely now that it had a solid form to work within. When Vata becomes stuck in the body, that is what pain feels like. I also had the alternate nostril breathwork under way so the invigoration wouldn’t become erratic.
I found inventive and traditional ways to bring the life force back -
I enlisted the help of an acupuncturist. Her interpretation was “stuck chi” which followed my own assessment of obstructed Vata. It took a few sessions of trial and error to find the pathways of where it was stuck but it did offer some relief.
I remembered that my mother bought Revitive - a circulation device that helped her improve blood flow when she became sick from pancreatitis and her legs swelled from edema. Because my sacrum felt dislodged and weak, I felt disconnected from my lower legs and they felt cold. This invention is genius. It is marketed to the older generation that has bad circulation but it is a pranic invigorating machine that can help revitalise anyone that needs to stimulate energy in their body.
I saw a documentary of a couple in Queensland that used shaking to heal clients with impaired nervous systems, even helping paraplegic patients (difficult to find this documentary on the search engine, I will keep looking and edit this portion if I find it) and I recalled a body worker vaguely mentioning it to me when we were in session years ago. I searched and found TRE. I have now incorporated about twenty minutes of shaking every morning before I do my asana. Even with my lower back feeling better, I find the idea of shaking a marvelous way to awaken the body before salutation. It’s a process of release and surrender and with the amount of toxic crap swirling our airwaves at the moment, I highly recommend incorporating it into a daily routine.
The freedom to be unwell within the guardrails you established
It’s two months since I did the big purge. I have put weight back on. My appetite and digestion are back in business and I’m slowly increasing my capacity in exercise and yoga sessions. I have even noticed a new sensation of boredom starting to creep in which I’m excited about, because it signifies an abundance of energy to productively utilise.
It might come as a surprise but I wouldn’t change this experience. I got to see how miraculous the body and mind can be and how important and profound the process of suffering is - the kind of suffering where it feels like your body is very rapidly degrading itself with no idea of whether the weight loss would stop reducing. It was what I imagined the process of death might feel like - where all your elements fall in on themselves and a total loss of control. It is pure surrender and it creates a completely new perspective on life - life is precious, go towards things and people you enjoy that enjoy you back.
I had stopped reaching for help when I realised that I was just meant to go through something unknown. It was obvious to me that my usual tactics weren’t working. This was further brought to light after I happened upon a video by Friar Thomas Keating, an American Trappist priest, who talked about the process of letting go. In it, he states “you stop resisting what happens beyond the reasonable point of taking steps to heal it but at some point you come to the end of doctors and you accept that you’re just supposed to be sick for awhile.”
What a freeing notion.
I would like to add, however, that without years of a slow and methodical Ayurvedic and Yoga daily practise, I doubt this opportunity would have come my way. I finally understood what my practise was for - creating the robust guardrails for karma to experience itself within.
The take home insights -
Clear toxins before any rejuvenative protocol. Check your tongue to observe whether there is a film. If there is, and if it can’t be scraped easily, then you have some clearing to do before rejuvenating.
Try to use your appetite as a tool to stimulate digestive enzymes to clear the toxins. For weak individuals, stick to regular meal times and widen the space between meals to stimulate digestion. For strong individuals, fasting directly can be helpful. Cultivating a strong appetite inevitably leads to better digestion. So many people don’t know what their true appetite feels like, which results in emotional eating, which causes toxins (see step 1).
Supplements and herbs are ok to help heal as aids but when healing, creating a relationship with food is a more sustainable approach. Where is it grown, how long does it sit on a truck in a fridge before it gets to you, does it feel alive? If you can find a local CSA I highly recommend it.
Connect to the earth. If it’s too cold to walk barefoot, get your hands in it. I’ve also been using an earthing mat for sleeping lately and I find it helpful.
Learn some techniques to realign your sacrum. Find yoga teachers that can help you create a home practise if you suffer sacro-illeac issues. I would recommend learning how to transition safely on a one-one basis before taking general classes. Yoga injuries can last a lifetime (as I have learned). Your sacrum is your home base along with your feet placement. The Chinese call the lower part of the body earth and the upper part heaven. The earth must be stable before reaching for heaven.
Once your base is established, start shaking the prana to life! Revitive is a clever device, so is using your own body through techniques like TRE. Balancing the prana with alternate nostril breathing ensures that the energy doesn’t become erratic.
Forgiveness and Acceptance - emotional healing
I left the emotional component until last because it is the Ayurvedic way to build the house first before facing the subtle and profound world of emotions and feelings.
If you’re on the spiritual path then you, too, have been feeling the shake up of leaving behind old worlds - old relationships, old ways of being, old paradigms - all the things you relied on for your foundation, all slowly becoming redundant. Things that felt exciting no longer do. People you felt close to are no longer on the same page.
No one gave us the handbook for what the world is going through and thank goodness; how horribly dull to think we know the end game, but within this are emotional clearings that are being thrust upon us.
I personally struggled with forgiveness in the last few years. The definition of forgiveness, according to Sadhguru, is reestablishing a relationship again, not simply the verbal acknowledgement. I think anyone can say that they forgive but to fall back into a relationship is next level maturity. It is easy when the other party acknowledges their wrong doing, but without that acknowledgement, it becomes a process of self inquiry.
Will it happen all over again if I let them back into my life?
There is something in being close to death in hospice care, or feeling your life force wasting away, that puts everything in perspective. You are at zero, such a wonderful place to be, where you literally do not have the energy to ruminate on the past. It sets you up for faith and hope.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
- Corinthians 13:13
And then that one day, I chose a random guided meditation as my way back into the ether. It began with forgiveness! I instantly went to the Loving Kindness Buddhist meditation I had learned decades ago (but never practised consistently) and saw the objects of my grief all standing close but separated by a chasm in the land. Between us was water. Each one of them was smiling and glowing - fully healed. I held that image for the whole session and have been practising it since.
In some cases, the tension some of us have experienced is not related to the relationship issues we have commonly known but a feeling of realigning in a completely new direction and realising our “perpetrators” have been commissioned to hold up the sign - don’t turn back, go forward. You may realise the more you try to go back to the “old you” the more tension you attract. The grieving, I discovered, was not as much about what had transpired but in the acceptance that I’m meant to move on.
Acceptance became my healing mantra. Sometimes Love shows up as the terror as well as the sublime.
Onwards, into the unknown. I’ve been there before and, just so you know, it all turns out ok in the end.