Three hours of sleep. Three melatonin. The problem is not anxiety anymore — the problem is that I have projects I'm genuinely excited about for the first time in a long time, and my brain refuses to shut down. I look up from the laptop and it is 2am. This is, objectively, an improvement over the 3am anxiety spiral. It is not the sleep protocol the practitioners are recommending.
I am aware of the irony of being at an Ayurvedic retreat working until 2am. I am at peace with it.
On waking up without a purpose.
Something I have been thinking about here: a significant part of my problem in LA — and honestly for a few years before that — was that I was waking up without a clear reason to be awake. Not that there was nothing to do. There was always something to do. But nothing that felt like mine, nothing that pulled me forward in the morning with the specific gravity that meaningful work produces.
Without that, structure becomes very hard to maintain. And without structure, people with my particular brain wiring — and I am being careful about how I say this — tend to fill the space with things that are not good for them. I have been sober here for eight days. I think the projects are part of why.
The treatment. A brief warning first.
The Day 8 Basti treatment was the large one — 330ml of honey, herbs, and various things I am choosing not to examine too closely. They massaged me first, with a honey and herb preparation, and then put me in a steam bath.
I need to describe the steam bath because the photos I took are among the more surreal images I have ever captured. It is a wooden box, approximately the size of a coffin standing on its side. You sit inside it. Your head sticks out of a hole in the top. Steam fills the interior. From the outside it looks like a sauna designed by someone who had seen a guillotine described but never actually seen one.
I sat in this guillotine sauna for twenty minutes. I sweated through every decision I've made in the last decade.
Then came the enema itself. I will spare most of the details except to say: you hold it as long as you can, which in my case was four minutes, and then you spend approximately twenty minutes at close proximity to a bathroom, and then they give you food immediately after, which is a disorienting transition. Rice and lentils. Your body, having just expelled everything, accepts them with unusual gratitude.
I walked back to my room slowly. My stomach, for the first time in eight days, felt genuinely empty rather than just controlled. Like something had been cleared that the careful eating hadn't fully reached.
I cannot fully explain what it felt like. Tired. Clean. Quiet in a way that is different from just being calm.
The meditation class I slept through entirely.
I went to the 11am meditation class for the first time. I have been avoiding it. I laid down on the mat.
The next thing I remember is the class being over.
I did not meditate. I slept, deeply and completely, in a room with other people, on a yoga mat. I woke up feeling more rested than I have felt from any full night here.
I have decided this counts.
The afternoon treatment and the weight that refuses to move.
The afternoon Basti was smaller — 60ml — and works differently. The larger one you release immediately. The smaller one you retain, and it does its work over hours. I am doing this for four days. Each session supposedly goes deeper than the last. I believe this. I am not excited about it. I believe it anyway.
I spoke to the doctor again about the weight. I am eating steamed vegetables three times a day. I am walking ten to twelve thousand steps. I am in a calorie deficit by any logical measure. The scale has not moved.
She was unbothered. She said five or six days. I am choosing to trust her while simultaneously finding the whole thing mathematically confusing.
The cooking class.
The chef ran a class in the afternoon — a tour of the herbs they cook with, what each one does, how the kitchen thinks about spice and digestion as the same conversation. I have photographs. The food here is genuinely extraordinary. Not exciting in the Instagram-food way, but extraordinary in the way that you realise after eight days of eating it: this is what food is supposed to do. It is supposed to make you feel well. Not full. Well.
The turmeric-ghee combination. The way ginger is used in every savoury dish. The precision of CCF tea (cumin, coriander, fennel) after meals for digestion. These are not garnishes. They are the medicine.
The conversation about the marriage registry.
Lunch today: I was eating alone, as I have been most days. I am not, generally, a person who seeks conversation with strangers. His mother — the woman I had dinner with the night we went to the temple — sat down at my table.
She told me, with complete seriousness and warmth, that her son is twenty-nine, which in her view is becoming worryingly old for marriage. They have registered him on a marriage registry. He has specifications: tall, pretty, family-oriented. She has taken this project on with the same energy I would take on a business problem.
I sat there in a linen shirt I had been sweating in since the guillotine sauna, eating my steamed vegetables, while she described her son's marital requirements the way someone might discuss a job listing. She was not performing. This is just how it works. He wants it. She is helping. The system exists. She finds my confusion about this charming and slightly tragic.
I asked why not a European or American woman. She said — without judgment, just factually — "they don't respect family the way we do."
I did not have a good counterargument.
It was one of the most unexpectedly warm twenty minutes I have had here. She ended it by saying she genuinely liked me, which I did not expect and which I apparently needed more than I knew.
The evening walk, and something about community.
After dinner, my new friend and two other men from the retreat walked the grounds together. We talked about why we were here. Our various ailments. The treatments. What we were hoping to take home.
Most people here are not here for addiction. They are here for back problems, stress, digestive issues, things that have been accumulating for years. But there is something about being somewhere like this — away from your normal life, doing something uncomfortable and hopeful simultaneously — that creates a particular quality of conversation. Everyone is slightly open in a way they would not be in a normal setting.
I have spent most of this retreat with my head down, avoiding people, going back to my room after meals. This is my default. It is also, I think, one of the things that has made the last few years lonelier than they needed to be. Community is not a requirement I have historically acknowledged. It is a requirement anyway.
The walk was short. The conversation was easy. It was the kind of thing that sounds unremarkable when you describe it and was, in fact, the best part of the day.
On walking after meals.
The doctor mentioned today that walking after eating aids digestion significantly — the movement stimulates peristalsis and prevents food from sitting static in the stomach. I have been doing this and I can feel the difference. Not dramatic. But meals that used to leave me heavy and sluggish resolve more cleanly when I walk for ten minutes afterward.
This is one I am keeping. No snacking, and a ten-minute walk after every meal. Simple. Costs nothing. The evidence, both Ayurvedic and personal, is convincing.
One week in.
It has been exactly a week since I arrived. The first few days were, honestly, a wash — I was depleted and defensive and not quite present. The real retreat started around Day 4 or 5.
So I have had, maybe, four real days here. And something is shifting. Slowly. Not completely. But in the direction I came for.
That is probably enough for now.