What to Expect Your First Time on an Ayurvedic Treatment Table?
If you’ve never bared all for an endoscopist or gynecologist or shared a common shower facility, here’s how you embrace your treatment. For starters, leave your credit cards, your hubris and whatever baggage you carry with you outside that treatment room. Once you enter the sacred space be fully prepared to surrender your body. That’s all you are in there. A mass of exposed flesh and bone sprawled as naked as the day you were born. Well, almost.
Day 1. Usually, it begins with the doctor telling you what treatment you will be receiving that day. Normally it’s either dry or oil-based. Here’s what preludes. You’re led to the treatment room towards the centerpiece-table which is a very large, traditional-looking stretcher-like-table on legs called the Droni Table. Sometimes it’s ornate but mostly functional with carved placeholders and groves for drainage. The wood is old, solid, and polished from wear. You are asked to undress. Your therapists (2–3) linger, eyes lowered while you change out of your clothes. They help you wear a langot (an old-fashioned string-around-the-waist and tucked-muslin-cloth underwear of sorts) and holding your elbow on both sides they lead to the table. They pull out a footstool making sure you don’t lose a step. Your head is guided to a folded towel while some padding is placed under your elbow or sensitive/ painful areas. Two therapists take their position on either side of you and while the third at the foot of the table near a stove. If you’re lucky they speak enough English to say “sit”, “side”, “lie down” “get up” “over”. If they communicate with each other, it’s in whispers. They light an oil lamp, say a prayer to an idol of Vishnu adorned with fresh flowers and your treatment begins.
You are lying completely exposed, your eyes fixed on the ceiling. They avoid eye contact and you want none at all. You can’t see beyond your stomach anyway. You wonder if the loincloth has shifted and your crotch is all visible to the 3rd therapist who is by now sitting on a stool at crotch level. You wonder how much that person cringing. You try to erase the image from your mind. You imagine your body being judged. You can only hope they have seen worse. You curse yourself for not shaving your private parts before you left home. You have been warned before treatment you can’t shave, cut your fingernails or pluck a nose-hair. Your back tightens up at the first touch. Looking at their bare-boned arms you wonder if they’ve had a decent meal. All doubts evaporate when they start working on you. You wince. Your stiffened spine curls up further. They pause, smile and ever so gently ask, “Too hot?” “Pain?”. You nod and they bring it down a notch. They continue at an unrelenting pace. Up and down and across the front, the sides and behind. Initially, they start with your arms, shoulders and proceed down the middle of your rib cage. They don’t stop to rest. At one point they link their fingers over your stomach and rub across it back and forth, exactly like the motion of two people sawing across a fallen tree trunk. Then they continue massaging/rubbing/pounding down your thighs and repeat the same process all over again for an hour. If your treatment for the day is rubbing with dry herbs, it feels like you’re being sandpapered. You say to no one in particular, “Bring it on. You’re healing me…healing.”
After an hour of being pounded, scraped or massaged you feel like you’ve run a marathon. The therapists help you sit up. Embarrassingly, they go on to bathe you (apparently, they don’t want you to strain) with mung bean powder which makes your parched skin feel like silk. They wash your hair with non-frothy herbal water made of hibiscus. You are then led to your room and asked to rest, but not sleep. You are spent and you oblige willingly, the bed feels heaven-sent. You catch a few winks unobserved.
Day 2–3. Your treatment might change or not but by then you certainly have. You start making eye contact and small conversation and get bold enough to direct your therapists to apply heat or pressure. Just when you are getting comfortable, they tell you they’re starting the herbal/oil enemas. That information usually ruins your day. You don’t enjoy the day’s treatment following which they feed you kanji or rice water. The doctor comes in. Your therapists use a towel to pull your butt-cheeks apart for the doc’s assessment. That’s when you wish you could vaporise through the cracks in the table. The last iota of dignity that you allowed to creep into the room deflates into a slow sigh. The Doctor explains the procedure and proceeds to palate your anus with oil. You stress about the enema equipment. They reassure you it’s a disposable syringe. It’s more or less an icing nozzle with green goo in the bag. Lots of it. You regret asking for a look. You are instructed to relax, and breathe through your mouth. You brace yourself and are asked to relax again. They begin. You try to focus on your breath but your mind has hit prodded-bottom. Stuff travelling up your intestines instead of, as you know, as gravity proposed, is anything but a warm fuzzy feeling. Before you can count to 100 it’s over. You worry you will empty the contents of your innards on to the table but nothing happens. You are relieved but exhausted. You feel like you are sinking. You tell yourself repeatedly, “I am healing”. Gentle hands help you to the loo and wait. The stench is unbearable but better than the procedure itself. It gets easier the next time and the next.
By week two-three you’re so comfortable on the treatment table you fall asleep between the poundings and the massages. You feel a lot lighter. You know you are completely detoxed. It’s a great feeling. You vow to return to that table a year later. You got what you signed up for. You heal because you surrendered.
