It’s a strange moment to be writing about healing and detox while the world feels so turbulent. Holding the awareness that many people are navigating far heavier realities right now. I just finished a simple kitchari dinner, and I’m in the final stretch of treatments at the panchakarma center.

This afternoon I received my second milk basti, and later tonight I’ll have my fourth matra basti before bed. Both are nourishing bastis meant to be retained.

My belly is gurgling softly – signs that peristalsis is moving things along. And I’m holding the bastis in well.

For those of you who have been curious about Ayurveda and Panchakarma (“PK”), I want to share a little more about what this process can look like.

When I lived in India in 2019, I did a two-week PK at this same center. Two weeks is about just enough time for what Ayurveda calls purvakarma, the preparatory phase of PK.

Purvakarma mobilizes toxins that have been lodged deep in the tissues and begins guiding them toward the body’s channels of elimination.

But two weeks was all the time I had between teacher trainings.

In 2020, everything changed.

COVID had just begun spreading, though we didn’t yet understand what it was. For months, I had been experiencing waves of extreme fatigue.

So I booked a full 28-day Panchakarma at another center in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.

By the time I arrived, my body was completely depleted.

I had spent the previous year immersed in intense tantric practices while also healing from a leg injury that required two major

surgeries. At the same time, I was still grieving the death of my mother.

My body needed a reset.

I remember the drive there clearly.

I traveled from Kochi, Kerala and passed long groves and plantations of coconut trees before entering a small Indian town filled with the usual rhythm of street vendors and tiny storefronts. Eventually the road opened into a quiet stretch of land at the foothills of the Western Ghats, where a small Ayurvedic healing village had been built.

It was the beginning of a brutally hot Indian summer.

My memories are filled with bits and pieces. The floor fans blew through the mosquito netting that draped my tiny bed at night. The air hung thick and warm. And my sheets were often drenched in night sweat. Simple gourds cooked with mustard seed, salt, coconut oil, and fresh coconut shavings were an absolute delight. I remember savoring every nuance of flavor in those simple meals.

Thankfully, there was nowhere we needed to go. Food was delivered to my room, and the treatments were in the room next door. The walking paths between buildings were shaded from the sun.

When I first arrived, I met with a junior vaidya for my intake.

She sat across from me with a clipboard and began asking question after question.

What are your bowel movements like? When was your last menstrual cycle? How is your sleep?

The list felt endless.

And I remember feeling irritated.

I had been spoiled.

The vaidyas I worked with in Hyderabad, Telangana could read nearly everything through the pulse. Their assessments felt immediate, almost mystical.

This felt… clinical.

Later, I met with the senior vaidya, and even his pulse reading felt less nuanced than what I had grown accustomed to.

At the time, I questioned whether I had chosen the right place.

My memories from those weeks blur together now:

Hot, sweaty nights. The small bed under a mosquito net. Fans blowing constantly.

Ingesting medicated ghee at 5am every morning, each dose harder to take than the last. And then the nausea began.

Waves of it. For days, possibly weeks.

There were moments where I genuinely wondered if I was going to die.

My body purged violently. Vomiting, evacuating relentlessly through my bowels.

At times I felt intense anger toward the vaidya, though in retrospect I can’t recall why. I imagine I wanted him to embody the same level of presence and awareness I had grown accustomed to with my vaidya.

Panchakarma has a way of stirring things far deeper than the physical body.

But after the final evacuation, something extraordinary happened.

A lightness.

My mind became crystal clear.

My energy returned in a way I couldn’t remember ever feeling before. I looked like a different person. My skin was plump, my face naturally sculpted, and my expressions soft. My bloated belly had deflated completely.

Only then did I realize how much inflammation and toxicity had slowly accumulated in my system. When decline happens gradually, we often don’t notice how far we’ve drifted from baseline.

That PK gave me the most powerful reset.

It returned me to a place where living in alignment with natural rhythms felt possible again.

Sitting here tonight with my belly softly gurgling after basti, I’m remembering that reset… and noticing how different this PK has unfolded.

This time the process has been far quieter, far more subtle. And it’s revealing different layers of how the body holds and releases imbalance.