The Medicine of Rest During Menstruation

I still remember my first treatment vividly.

My vaidya’s wife stepped outside of their beautiful home carrying a fresh mango leaf in her palm…

Turn toward the sun and pray to Dhanvantari

she said.

I placed the banana in my mouth and began chanting the Dhanvantari Vandana softly. My attention dropped into my womb. And for the first time in years, I felt myself reconnect with the children meant to come through me. My eyes filled with tears. A rush of love and softness I’d been craving for years took over me.

This was the Banana Treatment — a thin layer of herbal lehya spread atop a small piece of banana, dusted with turmeric, administered in silence during the menstrual bleed. A lineage medicine from South India, traditionally regarded as carrying the purification effect of a full month of Panchakarma.

Banana Babies

I’d first heard about the treatment nearly a decade earlier through my meditation community. Some women came after years of infertility and failed IVF cycles. Others traveled to the clinic more proactively, in preparation for conscious conception. “Banana babies,” they call the children conceived after treatment.

My vaidya later told me that just a few generations ago, his family began intentionally offering the treatment to women after realising women weren’t arriving at the clinic in the same way men were. Space had to be created for women to receive care.

DEPLETION

I hadn’t arrived in good condition.

After a long day of travel from New York City, I reached the clinic riddled in pain. Every joint felt tight, sharp, bruised. My thoughts moved through fog. This wasn’t ordinary travel exhaustion.

For months, I’d been a walking mummy — dried out, depleted, on the verge of full-body collapse. I’d just left Hawai’i after years in a season of life that had stretched me far past what my body could hold.

Like many women who come to my vaidya’s clinic in Hyderabad, I timed my arrival to coincide with the beginning of my menstrual cycle — the most potent time to receive the medicine.

My Bleed — A Pilgrimage Back to Myself

Every morning and afternoon during my bleed, I walked quietly through the streets to my vaidya’s home a few blocks away.

For the duration of my bleed I remained almost entirely in silence. It was protocol, yes; but, mainly desire-led.

The treatment felt less like medicine and more like a pilgrimage back to myself.

Back in my room, I waited for my first meal delivery — plain white rice.

Given my history of lactose intolerance, I’d initially refused the milk rice.

I was nervous the simplicity of the diet would leave me more depleted. Nourishment to me meant density. Diversity. More. Predictability.

By the second or third day — after late deliveries, hanger pains, and a level of exhaustion I couldn’t argue with — I finally asked for the milk rice.

NOURISHMENT

Milk Rice

I took the first spoonful cautiously. Waiting for the familiar signals: congestion, stomach pain, heaviness.

Nothing came.

So I took another bite. Then another.

What I felt was primal. Like my body remembering the feeling of being nourished by mother’s milk.

It was one of the deepest sensations of nourishment I had ever experienced.

Instinctively, shortly after finishing the meal, I felt an overwhelming desire to melt inward, and I fell into a sleep so deep it felt unreal.

The next several days blurred into banana medicine, milk rice, silence, hunger, and sleep.

Deep Rest & Simple Food

By my next cycle, I told my vaidya the protocol felt almost too depleting. I barely had energy to walk to the bathroom.

He smiled and told me that when his mother bled, she wouldn’t get out of bed to even comb her hair.

The protocol, he said, was simple: deep rest and simple food.

Was the Medicine the Rest?

My vaidya says it’s the mantras chanted in the preparation of the medicine.

He also told me that the impressions we carry during our bleed shape the quality of our fertility when we conceive.

And it left me wondering what kinds of impressions a woman’s body absorbs during menstruation, when the nervous system, hormones, and emotional body can feel especially permeable.

Maybe he’s right.

To be honest, he usually is.

Softening

What I can tell you is that after three years of increasingly painful and irregular cycles — heavy clotting, brain fog, ovarian cysts — my cycle normalised after two rounds of treatment.