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Health

I Traveled to India to Try an Ancient Detox and Found Enlightenment with a ‘Shart Chart’

I hated myself for blindly filling prescriptions and taking the advice provided by the "rehabilitation team" surrounding me in Canada. I needed a change.

Nasya: the final frontier. Photos courtesy of the author

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

One year ago, I made a commitment to get off the drugs that modern medicine had promised would heal me. My liver was starting to hurt from all the painkillers, sleeping pills, antidepressants, and anticonvulsants I was taking. I had been floating in bed on opiates for weeks and was completely content in this world of no feeling, no pain, no headaches. I kept taking the pills to numb the debilitating pain around the left side and frontal cortex of my mushy, empty, non-working brain brought on by multiple head injuries. There had been hockey hits from the biggest girls, bicycle woes from the worst taxi drivers, and, this time, a car accident caused by geriatrics still clinging to their drivers' licenses.

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I hated myself for blindly filling prescriptions and taking the advice provided by the "rehabilitation team" surrounding me. I fought the urge to decapitate myself and pushed through the crushing sense of loss to do what so many escapists do—I journeyed to India to an Ayurvedic health center, where I would try to purify myself.

At a time when juice cleanses, colonics, butter coffees, and the Beyoncé diet were ubiquitous, this seemed like a more wholesome approach. Ayurveda—the 5,000-year-old science of life—places a strong foundation on food as medicine. Ayurveda reasonably believes that no two bodies are alike, and it defines bodies based on their constitution (both mental and physical) and how we, as individuals, relate to the energy flowing within. I was drawn to this field of study for its all-natural views and ancient lineage. I also had a deep willingness to try virtually anything that promised to rid me of my chronic headaches.

My speculated cure was to be found in beach-abundant Goa among a large portion of the more than 2 million annual international and domestic visitors flocking toward the Arabian Sea. Historically known for its Portuguese architectural influences and its drug-infused trance nightlife, the visitors of Goa today are still pleasure-seekers, but in a different light. A booming industry has been built around health and wellness, especially yoga retreats and Ayurvedic detox getaways.

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I committed to a 14-day panchakarma, a popular (and intense) cleanse to bring the body back into balance and prevent disease. Most of the patients at the center were Russian and interpreters were ever-present. If you can imagine a Girl, Interrupted–style residence set in desolate Siberia with palm trees, those were my surroundings.

The physical treatments I openly subjected myself to seemed bizarre to me, with my Western upbringing, though they are familiar and unremarkable for most people in India. Under the guise of one young female doctor and more than a dozen interns (who seemed more concerned with my "American" love life than my health), I was scheduled for three full hours of treatments every day and had a strict diet to follow that was cooked by one of four Ayurvedic chefs on site.

Treatments were focused around bodily fluids—pissing, shitting, barfing, crying, sweating. We talked about my period blood and my pussy juice. Food was lackluster. I forced myself into acquiring a taste for cantaloupe so I could take a break from the three-times a day serving of kitchari—a staple mixture of two grains hyped for its nourishing qualities and digestibility.

A dough crater filled with hot liquid: the best thing to put on your back for hours at a time

Upon arrival, I was stripped down to nothing in front of two young female doctors and covered in a small piece of cloth held in place by a thin cotton string. A lonely grown-ass women in a diaper, I sat on a sturdy oak-framed table where warm oil that smelled of a stale vintage store was poured over the crown of my head. The oil percolated its way through each follicle and eventually down my face, greasing my hair. I survived a synchronized body scrub that felt like I was being skinned alive layer by layer with sandpaper gloves. I was put in a trance by way of a 45-minute traditional shirodhara ceremony—a warm oil drip slowly moving from temple to temple to stimulate the third eye.

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I was trapped in a wooden steambox to sweat toxins and excrete metabolic waste profusely—a treatment known as swedana. Every time my body was inclosed in the box filled with herb-infused steam, I took the opportunity to explore my exhibitionism and the psychology of public masturbation. With my head perched above the steambox, I wondered if the interns in the room could sense when I was peaking or if they were just impressed by my Western-bred kidneys and liver working hard to detoxify my blood.

I underwent a strictly ghee (clarified milk butter) diet for three days as part of purgation therapy—where I finally learned that we are what we eat, but more importantly, we aren't what we shit. I kept a very detailed poo diary I affectionately labeled the "shart chart" and had to face the darkest, most vulnerable emotions as I quite literally "let go" of things that no longer served me via my anus.

The sweat glands in my underarms were secreting toxins that produced the most wretched odor my nose had ever encountered. I took nutraceuticals with high levels of heavy metals and succumbed to the recommendation of an oily enema. I lay still for hours with a doughy oil-filled crater set on the base of my spine like a suction hose to the skin. My back was stamped and burned by scalding-hot satchels of healing herbs. Oh, the ecstasy of human experience.

On the basis that stagnation is the enemy of good health, my doc prescribed a final detoxifying treatment called nasya for my last days at the center. In a room that looked like a bit of the set from Saw 3, I sat down on a robust wooden recliner to accept a set of lubed hands in a vigorous face, neck, and chest massage. I was led over to a sterile metal chair where I was told to lean over an electric gadget producing steam of the herbal variety. A heavy fleece blanket was draped over my head, forcing me to embrace the haze. I lasted only two minutes of the prescribed ten before I quickly moved out from under the fleece, as I was certain I had given myself third-degree burns.

Back in the medieval chair, the sadist wiped moisture from my face, tilted my head back until my nostrils were facing the sky, and put a mixture of ginger/lemon/milk/herbs in the holes of my nose until I felt liquid rising in the back of my throat and was forced to spit the wasabi-like burn out my mouth. A gauze-like cloth that had been soaked in ghee and dried out was used as a Zig-Zag to roll up powdered turmeric—the magic spice known to combat inflammation that leads to disease. The Ayurvedic blunt was lit up and jammed into a phallic metal smoking apparatus with an opening on each end. My head was cocked back and I was instructed to inhale the dense smoke twice through each nostril until I could blow a milky cloud out my mouth.

It hit me hard. I was scared, but ready to follow the white light that had begun to dominate my vision. It was as if a force greater than all our parts had stripped the roof off the clinic and the blueness of the Goan sky folded in on itself and church bells and temple calls started ringing in my ears. I saw a black dot for a moment that felt like an eternity and when the doc said "finish" my sight and sound came into the moment and I was sucked back to Earth. Back to the godforsaken chair we had started in. She jammed cotton balls in my ears and warned me to stay away from ceiling fans to protect the interdependent anatomy of my ear-nose-throat.

If there was something I subconsciously went to India looking for, then I had found it. Evacuation of the bowels brought on by clarified butter and a milky hit from a turmeric blunt was the medicine that made me feel human again. My vision, my disposition, my whole constitution had shifted. I no longer felt like a slug with a low processing speed and weak cognitive functioning. My head was out of the clouds and I could feel again. I didn't want to numb anything anymore. I was ready and willing to live with or without headaches, depression, and anxiety. Maybe it was a textbook definition of the placebo effect, maybe it was the 5,000-year-old science; one can never be certain. But I can now say this with certainty: Letting go is far more important than taking in.