The Times - Kalari Kovilakom, Kerala, India
02 January 2010
Ayurvedic detox heaven in Kerala, India
I’ve played a Bond girl and a 60-year-old, but a no-limits detox was quite another challenge, says actress Rosamund Pike
A few weeks ago I was 60. Thanks to the wizardry of film make-up, I am 28 again.
Having spent several weeks in Montreal in a state of prosthetic ageing for a film version of Mordecai Richler’s novel Barney’s Version, I have decided to make a non-surgical attempt at rejuvenation by going to “the Palace for Ayurveda” in Kerala, South India.
It promises stress relief and complete mind and body renewal through a combination of diet, therapeutic massage and yoga. The place is called Kalari Kovilakom. Saying it aloud, I wonder if it is, in essence, a yogic mantra. Maybe repetition of the name weaves an invisible web of wellbeing around the speaker.
As my travelling companion and I consider Kalari Kovilakom, we start to develop a kind of nervous hysteria. I have planned this trip without a full appreciation of what it entails, and my companion, who is ill suited to interacting with human beings at the best of times, is particularly alarmed by the idea of humans who choose to put themselves through a cleansing process that involves five types of elimination.
The palace is set in eight acres of coconut trees and ponds, nestling in the foothills of the Annamalai mountains. Reading the brochure we realise that these will remain tantalisingly out of bounds because guests are not allowed to leave the grounds (compound?) for risk of disturbing the treatment. We imagine ourselves creeping away after lights out, or making a bid for freedom in the early dawn. I’m sure other escapees have been gently led back down the mountains in their time.
The most worrying things on the website are the confinement and the “cleansing process”. I am alarmed by the prospect of the wake-up call at 5.30am combined with the prohibition of coffee and tea. My companion is anxious about the cigarette ban. Will we both be in a foul mood and irritated further by the other wellbeing escapees, who will be rejuvenating and diminishing before our eyes, and apparently freely discussing their sex lives? Open discussions of bodily functions are an essential early part of the Ayurvedic diagnosis. So, too, is complete adherence to the regimen. I fear that the lack of autonomy will send us ricocheting in the direction of naughtiness and truancy. I imagine those doctors on the website doing a martial art with swords and shields, and I imagine being sealed inside the wooden steam baths that trap you, leaving only your head and neck poking out. Will we submit?
What is really fascinating about Kalari Kovilakom is the complete surrender that you are required to make; and how beneficial that is to body and soul. Yes, I bought a huge Kit Kat Chunky at Cochin airport to see if it would be seized when I arrived (all the food at Kalari is low fat and vegetarian), but of course the staff embody grace itself and would never do anything as crude as to confiscate a chocolate bar. As it was, the Kit Kat remained untouched for the duration of my stay. The staff and doctors at Kalari lead by example and one peaceably submits.
It’s a magical place, which weaves its spell slowly. The buildings that appeared forbidding on the website became intensely beautiful over the course of two weeks; the confinement, liberating.
The grounds of this palace are like a physic garden. Almost every plant has healing properties harnessed in some way by the herbalists who brew them into richly coloured medicinal massage oils, decoctions and tablets.
When one is not bombarded with images, signs, advertising and newspaper headlines, the mind uncoils. I found my eyes and my imagination quickening to my surroundings, picking out birds and butterflies, colours in stone and changes of light. I saw my first kingfisher, which has been a long-held desire.
I’ve always known that if I were to see one in England it would be a quick flash of electric blue by a river, glimpsed once, fleeting, incomplete.Here I was able to see my kingfisher several times, to sit and observe him standing and watching the water. I even saw him catch a fish. This was the essence of Kalari. Time. Leisure. So different from the cluttered ideas of leisure I had before.
There are web-based reports that say ominously that this is not so much a couples place. Mr & Mrs Smith say that it might be best for Mrs Smith to go alone and leave Mr Smith behind. My companion read this as an indication that the place would be full of unhappy single women trying to lose weight. I imagined being glared at for bringing the only male on the campus. I read that certain dosha (energy) imbalances stimulate envy, and I pictured the more envious inmates with their dosha Geiger counters going haywire as an unavailable male stalked around like an endangered species. As it was, there was another man there. Whether he was brought under duress or not we don’t know, but we noticed after the first week that he was poring over literature on Sanskrit wisdom and yoga.We also noticed that he was not talking to his wife any more.
I’ve never done a detox before, and I don’t know much about them. I certainly don’t know much about openly discussing my bodily functions, but this is how every day began. During an 8.30am appointment with the doctor, intimate questions are asked about sleep patterns, dreams, urine and stools. I suddenly found myself eager to analyse and discuss my bowel movements.
My companion was so alarmed that we came up with euphemistic terms to deal with the finer points. We decided that there is something fundamentally wrong with the language of upset and illness, and that when one is feeling under the weather the worst thing one can do is to make oneself iller by talking about it.
We decided to call diarrhoea “the giggles” — “Must dash, I’ve got the giggles” — and instead of spiralling downhill, we felt rather sanguine about the whole business.
Of course there was not a great deal of giggling going on. This is a serious place, after all. It is a sophisticated treatment facility and the primary aim is to make one feel better. I do know that the mind detox was one of the most intensely relaxing and de-stressing experiences of my life. I realised that when I went to India I was craving going to bed with a mind that did not feel full and overwhelmed at the end of a day. Ayurveda understands that good digestion is as much mental as physical. Indigestion is the inability to digest any physical, mental or emotional input. This notion of “mental indigestion” was a revelation to me. There is a name for my ailment. During my two weeks at Kalari I learnt that the mind is like a blackboard that can be wiped clean. “Be master of your mind, not its servant,” is the mantra that I have taken away.
The sense of diligent, expert care and attention is where Kalari really distinguishes itself. Here, five star means thought and care, foresight and imagination rather than fluffy bathrobes.
The massage, which takes place on carved wooden tables in airy treatment rooms with incense burning, is like being given a mighty dose of healing energy. The exertion of the masseuses is impressive and, for the most part, two therapists are working on your vital nerve spots. There’s a concerted energy coming out of these hands: you’re almost receiving a benediction as well as a pummelling.
I don’t want to say too much about the cleansing, save that its starting point is treatment with medicated ghee (warm and greasy clarified butter), which absorbs all the fat-soluble toxins in your body and eventually leads to some serious giggling.You drink increasing quantities every morning until your body is completely saturated, and finishing the ghee process is like a rite of passage, which leads to more involving massages, and even more delicious things to eat. Depending on your constitution you will do it for three to seven days. I stuck it for four, my companion for six. It is not pleasant but it is definitely healing: the lightness I now feel after two weeks back in England was worth the periods of sluggishness and weakness in India. I have not touched tea or coffee since my return and my companion has not had a cigarette.
You need nothing at Kalari. Your contaminating leather shoes are taken away and your clothes are replaced with white cotton pyjamas. While we came to love our outfits, there was one night when we stood on the roof of the palace to watch a wild and delirious carnival go past, and realised that the dancers must have thought that we were the inmates of a psychiatric hospital. But back in London, scrabbling around trying to find something to wear to the British Fashion Awards, I kind of missed my three identical sets of pyjamas.
It’s difficult to tell what the other guests do in life. All the usual markers are taken away: clothes, accessories, make-up, mobile phone. You cannot tell what tribe anyone is from, and they cannot determine which you are from. You search for clues, but most people, including yourself, remain unreadable.
I certainly feel that Kalari has given me the keys to peace of mind, which will prove doubly useful when I need to pull back from the brink of Hedda Gabler’s bitter and deluded thoughts in March. It never occurred to me that, as our inspiring yoga teachers put it, the mind is a blackboard that can be wiped clean. Hopefully Hedda’s algebraic confusions of mind will stay firmly in the theatre, and I will enjoy falling asleep under a chalk-free board.
The phrase that keeps coming back to me is Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquillity”, the freedom of imagination that comes with mental rest. But from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, it is this passage that really sums up the main lesson of Kalari: “The human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants, and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this.” Of course, that said, Wordsworth never tried a Kit Kat Chunky.
NEED TO KNOW
Wellbeing Escapes (0845 6026202, wellbeingescapes.co.uk) offers the recommended 14-night all-inclusive Ayurvedic Programme at Kalari Kovilakom from £3,850pp. Price is based on two sharing a Kovilakom Suite with all meals, treatments, therapies, a lifetime membership of the centre and Emirates flights from London to Cochin, Kerala, via Dubai, with private transfers.
