Pancha Karma Experience: Catalyst

My Ayurveda experiment was to go through a Pancha Karma.  I had decided that I needed to do some sort of cleanse to clear out the results of a stressful move and transition, and I had no idea what I was getting myself into with the Pancha Karma.  A very difficult cleanse for me, I went through a lot of ups and downs on a number of levels.  I came out feeling better, though with an awareness that I’m still just on the path and not at the destination.

I had gone through a lot of stress and change over the past year and my body had been craving a clean up from the abuses that stress had put on it.  I put my house on the market last spring and decided to move east to be closer to family.  Selling my house, downsizing, and preparing to move out of my community with a full Massage Therapy practice in two locations and a part time job coaching gymnastics was quite a bit to shove into a couple of months.  Looking back on it, I can’t even remember what I was regularly eating during that point in time as it was so hectic.  I wanted to cut out the junk intake and nourish my body so that it could recover.  I was also having some aches pains in my lower right abdominal area.  I had a major injury there several years ago and while I know that the psoas was certainly affected by it, I have been unsure if the ileocecal valve had been as well.  The dull ache has been an additional source of stress.  One of my instructors at the massage school I attended is a Naturopathic Doctor and Applied Kinesiologist, he had recommended doing a cleanse cutting out gluten, dairy, sugar, and any crunchy or sharp foods like seeds, nuts, etc. to allow the valve to fully heal up and see if that was really the source of the problem.  I had never done a cleanse before and I felt like being assigned one was probably the push that I needed to go ahead and get started with it.  I wanted to do a general cleanse, the way that translated was that I should do a full Pancha Karma.