Tuesday 22 January 2013

Tomorrow we start


Tomorrow is my first day of a 14 day Ayurveda treatment and I’m excited.  I told Dr George that one goal is to lose between 7 and 10 kilos (sure it might take a few more weeks longer than the 2 weeks of treatment - but it didn’t last time).  So my goal is to go from 81kgs down to 71(ish)kgs. For my height that is plenty as I was about 60-ish when I was an anorexic teenager and that was just ick.  

Plus my neck and shoulder muscles have spasmed and are hot. The loads of work I did before I left Australia plus lugging suitcases to Singapore and then to Trivandrum in Kerala, India has left me in pain and inflamed. Too much Pitta.
                                                                                                        
The GREAT news is that I know that after this ayurveda treatment I will be like new, reborn, reinvigorated and the streamlined me instead of the overweight me – my dosha’s will be re-balanced.  I know this because nearly 5 years ago I experienced just that after a Panchakarma treatment and it was profound.  The change to my body after only 14 days was the extreme opposite to how it was when I started.

I had travelled with my 2 closest friends to India to celebrate my 40th Birthday at the Taj Mahal.  Only 1 hour before I left for the airport my sixth sense said to go and pee on a pregnancy stick and much to my amazement it was positive. No it wasn’t a divine intervention, I was actually having an on-again-off-again relationship with a commitment-phobic guy who also had his own health issues, and so it was his baby. 

I decided to stick to my plan and go to India and if the baby survived it would be a survivor.  Just on the off chance the test was wrong, I bought another one at Singapore airport (they stock them!!) but decided it could get too messy on the plane so waited what felt an unearthly long time to re-do the test within minutes of arriving in India – yep its positive.

I had been doing my manifesting meditation asking to be pregnant before I turned 40 and here it was.  So no celebratory drinks at the Taj Mahal for me, but I didn’t care I was thrilled and amazed – it had worked.

13 days later after many white knuckle rides around north Indian provinces in our Ambassador car with our driver, the friends separated and I travelled to Dharamsala at the foothills of the snow-capped Himalayas to begin teachings with His Holiness The Dalai Lama.

The bus ride was so scary in parts all I could do was focus all my attention on the monks shaved head in the seat in front hoping that his goodness will keep the bus on the road and not in the steep ravine.

While applying for a “passport” to attend the teachings my new French friend commented on my photo that I looked similar to the baby white owl that my friend and I had rescued in Varanasi after witnessing it being attacked by a gang of monkeys.  After calming it down with my heart beat on my chest for most of the night, it died in the morning and we did as the Hindu’s do and hired a boat to take us to the middle of the Ganges River and give him over to God.  I liked the French girl’s analogy; I felt like I had baby owl wisdom and was on a journey to gain more.

Only my face was pale for a reason because the next morning I woke to see that I had lost some blood, dark blood. My newly inherited German grandmothers assured me its normal and probably nothing to get worried about.  But I was now late for the start of the teachings and was thrilled to be let into the special area to sit amongst the Buddhist Monks and His Holiness looked directly at me when asking who of the “foreigners” was here for the first time. 

The first day’s teachings were about impermanence.  The state where nothing stays the same, that all things change and the teachings had a profound effect on my understanding that losing this baby was indeed just a state of change.  But it was physical and emotional agony.

After 4 days of heavy bleeding I could no longer attend the teachings because of the pain and too weak from blood loss and no appetite for food.  I was too heartbroken to move.  I spent a time eternal looking at myself in the mirror feeling raw heartache.  I had so much wanted to have a baby.  I felt grateful I was on my own to experience this, I felt so grateful to have had the teachings to guide me, I felt I could understand the Buddhist teachings of suffering.  And I finally said goodbye to my desire and need to have a baby.  I got in touch with the loss and feeling that it was just never going to happen for me and said goodbye to the part of me that wanted to be a mother.

After another 4 days I knew I could possibly die there so had to find a way out since there were no flights from there.  I had met an Australian/Indian woman who gave me the contact of an Ayurveda Doctor in Kerala – right at the very other end of the country.  And since I was on a journey to discover I decided I would go to Kerala to experience some Ayurveda which I knew nothing about.

I was soooo very grateful to have booked a “sleeper” bed with a curtain on the 13 hour overnight bus ride back to Delhi.  Since I hadn’t eaten in a long time I thought it best to try eat a falafel but with a bout of unexpected exploding diarrhoea and no toilet on the bus, I felt I had kinda hit rock bottom when I was forced to throw my dirty nickers out the bus window in the middle of the night.  Well I guess a bus crash could be worse.

After an overnight stop in Delhi I flew to Trivandrum and within 10 minutes was seeing this recommended Doctor who promptly shipped me off to a Hindu Medical Doctor via a hair raising rickshaw ride.  Her horror at me being unmarried, travelling alone and pregnant was really unpleasant – almost as unpleasant as the 3rd world surgery I went to for an internal examination with a big metal rod.  I had done a total of 9 pregnancy tests over the time, even one only an hour before which had showed I was still pregnant, but I didn’t know it would have just been the hormones – I had hoped for a miracle but the scanner showed what the Doctor confirmed - that “baby is gone”.

I needed to be by the ocean, be at a beach, to rest and soak up the sun’s energy since I was still losing much blood and felt lifeless but strangely ok, like it was all ok.  Kovalam Beach itself doesn’t have any roads or cars so after being dropped off I was quickly escorted into the labyrinth of laneways in search of a hotel, and as we walked towards the beach a beautiful Indian man standing at the entrance to a bright purple hotel with swimming pool and palm trees said “come and stay here”.  So I did, and that was the man I eventually married and we had our own miracle baby boy.  

But back at my city Hotel after the miscarriage results, my friend had arrived just in the nick of time as I prepared to move to Kovalam Beach for the rest of our holiday before departing for Dubai for work. 

So from Kovalam I travelled daily by back breaking rickshaw back to town each day for Ayurveda treatment but was not feeling any better – in fact I got worse and now had a terrible sciatic pain running down my left leg.  How could my body stand any more?  I think the lady massage therapists would leave me for too long on the heavy wooden tables and it activated this shooting pain on top of everything else.

Its chance meetings that can make or break you and meeting Vim was a winner.  He had been to see Dr George who had “cured” his back pain and he looked like he was mid-40s when I later found out was mid-60s and said his body now felt like when he was a 12 year old boy.  Yay, so I booked in for a one hour’s massage with Dr George and so did my friend.  This felt different, it was an Abhyanga massage – it’s hilarious but true that it’s called the “Mother of all massages”.

And so I quit my city Doctor, quit my trip to Dubai and stayed for a 14 day Panchakarma treatment.  My friend had said that he knew I had searched the world for help with my pain and he could also feel it was something special.  Every day I felt the pain exiting my body slowly – not outwards but downwards, my back ached, then it was gone, but by bummed ached, then it moved to my thighs, then calves, the inflammation was exiting my body.

What I think made an equal profound effect was the compassion of my therapist.  He knew my “medical” condition and just let me sob and sob until my heartache was gone.  One day I asked if he thought my body could be healed and he said “of course, why not”.  Why not indeed, what was holding it back from being healed.  So I embraced Kerala and its lovely people and its treatment and I was – pretty much – healed. 

On the airplane coming to Kerala
And so I am back close to 5 years later, with my husband whose family lives close by, to introduce our 3 year old boy to 3 generations of his Indian family - Amachi (Grandma) and Oumama and Oupapa (his great grandparents).

And I am back for another treatment.  Its time.  With the undiagnosed neurological disorder I had suffered from for over 25 years the spasms had made some structural changes to my bones and this would take a little longer and the inflammation was trying to return.  And anyway its best to have a treatment for at least 3 consecutive years if you have major problems, and in the meantime I’ve had a baby.

Who is now a very vibrant toddler lapping up all this family love even when he doesn’t understand the language – isn’t that a Spandau Ballet song? The language of love.

And tomorrow it’s down to the business of healing my body again.

my lovely boy Watson at  Singapore  Airport

by Alison Jose from Prana Healing Holidays.www.pranahealingholidays.com