It's about 5:30 in the evening. I'm heading to dinner.
4.5 hours of sleep last night. One a.m. to somewhere around five or six. So that particular problem hasn't resolved itself. What has changed is the feeling — yesterday I was raw and open in a way that was almost unbearable. Today I'm not that. Today I'm numb. Sedated. Like I went through something yesterday that used everything up, and what's left is this flat, quiet stillness that I can't quite decide is peace or just emptiness.
The enema. Again.
Day 10. I'm in the final stretch. And today's landmark was the second-to-last enema, which I am marking with the same quiet dignity with which I have approached everything here, which is to say: I am extremely glad it's almost over.
I understand what's happening. I understand the mechanism. The body is clearing things it has been holding, and that's the point, and the practitioners here know exactly what they're doing. All of that is true.
It's also just deeply unpleasant. There is no version of having a tube and someone's finger in your backside that is comfortable or dignified, and you can dress it up in as much Sanskrit as you like and it is still what it is. Today it took more out of me than usual. I felt genuinely drained afterward in a way that felt physical rather than just psychological — like the body expended real energy on the process and had less left over for the rest of the day.
One more. I'm looking forward to having a bit more energy back.
Walking. And what I've figured out about the weight.
I did a lot of walking today. A lot. Last night I hit 14,900 steps and then paced around my room for ten minutes to hit 15,000, which I am aware is not normal behaviour. But I have a goal, and the goal required closing the ring, and I'm not going to apologise for that. The point stands: I am convinced that for me, getting to the weight I want to be is going to require two things above almost everything else — more steps, and actual sleep.
Speaking of which, the food here continues to be whatever the opposite of calorically generous is. The portions are medically appropriate, I'm sure. They are also the size of something a thoughtful parent would serve a small child as a light snack. I eat my tiny plate of rice and vegetables and I think: yes, this is beautiful, this is healing, this is exactly what my body needs right now. And then I think about a burger and feel something very dark.
I was reading about what happens to the body when sleep is poor — water retention, inflammation, cortisol dysregulation that changes how fat is stored and how hunger is signaled. I've known this abstractly for a long time, but I'm feeling it in a way that makes it real now. The scale isn't moving the way I'd expect it to given how little I'm eating and how many steps I'm pacing around my room at midnight counting. The most logical explanation is that my body is in a stress response and holding on to everything. Not because I've done something wrong. Because sleep deprivation is a physiological stressor and the body responds accordingly.
What's strange is that I've never had trouble sleeping before in my life. I mean, there's the obvious explanation — significant jet lag I probably never adjusted to, a different climate, treatments that are physically demanding, a complete removal from everything familiar. But I've also been someone who could fall asleep anywhere, in almost any conditions. This is new for me. A new vulnerability I didn't know I had.
When I get home, that's the first thing I'm working on. Not weight, not exercise, not food. Sleep. Because everything else becomes exponentially harder when that isn't working.
The craving that caught me completely off guard.
This is the thing I haven't been able to stop thinking about since it happened.
I was watching a show. It had a lot of drinking and drug use in it — not unusual for television, and I've watched other things here that touched on that and it didn't register at all. Didn't even think about it twice.
Tonight was different. I was watching it and something shifted and I just — I wanted it. Specifically and physically wanted it. I had to turn the TV off because I could feel what was happening and I didn't want to keep sitting in it.
What scared me wasn't just the craving. It was the clarity that came with it. I sat there and I thought: if I was in a hotel room right now, I would have ordered something. Not maybe. I would have. There would have been no meaningful resistance. Twelve days into a retreat, treatments and meditation and all of it, and the craving was strong enough that the only reason I didn't act on it was that I'm in a place where I can't.
That's a useful piece of information. Not a comfortable one, but useful.
I've been feeling so clear here, so removed from all of it, that I think I'd started to let myself believe that the distance was doing more work than the retreat itself. That I was getting better in a way that would make things easier when I left. Tonight reminded me that the distance is a container, not a cure. The container has been doing a lot of the work.
People, places, and things. And the plan I haven't made.
They say it in every room. Change the people, the places, the things. Remove the contexts that trigger the behavior.
I haven't done that work. I haven't sat down and actually mapped out what my life looks like when I get home in a way that accounts for what I now know about myself. Which situations are genuinely risky. Which relationships enable what I'm trying to move away from. What I do the next time I'm on a long flight and the anxiety spikes and every muscle in my body wants a drink.
Flying is a real one for me. I have significant anxiety in the air, and alcohol has been my management strategy for that for a long time. The flight home is long. I know what it's going to feel like. I know what I'm going to want. And I haven't figured out what I do instead.
What I know is that it would be genuinely devastating to leave this place and have the first thing I do be poisoning my body again. That's not going to happen. But knowing what I don't want is not the same as knowing what I'll do instead, and I need to spend some real time on that before I go.
The plan when I get home: a therapist. Meetings. The community of people who understand this not from the outside but from inside it, because without that I tend to isolate, and isolation is where I use. I need accountability that isn't just self-imposed, because I've proven to myself many times that self-imposed accountability has limits.
I'm glad the craving happened here and not in a hotel somewhere. It was a real reminder that this isn't something I've healed from. It's something I'm learning to live with.
What happened after I put the pen down.
I've been carrying this as a kind of addendum to the rest of the day.
I was writing some of this down earlier, and when I stopped and put the pen down, the sadness came back. Not the craving this time. The sadness that I felt in the treatment room yesterday — the deep, sourceless, chest-heavy thing.
I'm thirty-six. I've had these patterns for a very long time. And I know, intellectually, that I'm not hopeless — I have moments of clarity and feeling genuinely good. But there's a version of looking at this mathematically that's not encouraging. The track record is what it is. And I don't know what to do with that.
There's no talk therapy here. There's physical treatment and there are practitioners who are wise and kind and expert at what they do. But there's no one to sit with the inner child part of this — the sadness that I genuinely believe has been the engine underneath all of it for a very long time. The thing I've been trying to outrun with substances and projects and retreats and experiences.
I'm good at figuring things out. I'm genuinely good at it. And this is the thing I cannot figure out. I don't understand it. I don't know how to hold it. I don't know what to do with it when it comes, other than sit with it and wait.
Which I guess is what I'm doing.
The finish line.
I can see it from here. And what I'm realising is that the work of being here is one thing, but the work of preparing to leave is something I've been avoiding — and I need to stop avoiding it and actually build the plan. What does the first week home look like? Who do I call? What do I do on the flight? Who do I stop seeing, and what do I stop going to? Change people, places, things. Simple enough to say.
I'm going to spend the time I have left here actually answering those questions, instead of just walking around pacing 14,900 steps and thinking about them.
Wish me luck.
Alex is the founder of DoshaFlow, writing from an Ayurvedic retreat in Kerala, India. Take the dosha quiz → · Read more from the retreat →