India Spas: Feel the Heat
Washington Post, March 19, 2006

By T.R. Reid

Like a chicken being readied for the rotisserie, I am naked on a hard wooden table, my skin marinated in warm oil that has been laced with 46 herbs and medications. At regular intervals, two short but muscular Tamil men smite my back and shoulder with small bags of rice that have been immersed in boiled milk.

It's not exactly a day at the beach, but for a growing number of adventurous tourists, this is vacation. Indeed, my stay at the Arya Vaidya Chikitsalayam in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu puts me at the heart of a hot new trend in exotic getaways: the ayurvedic massage tour.

A growing number of hotels, spas and hospitals are luring travelers to some not-often-visited corners of India for a soothing -- and sometimes life-changing -- regimen of massage, meditation, herbal medication and yoga. It's all based on the teachings of the ancient sages who invented ayurvedic medicine three millenniums in the past.

To some degree, you can take part in the ayurveda boom without traveling this far. Yoga salons and self-styled "ayurvedic" clinics are springing up all over the United States. The best-selling guru Deepak Chopra has opened a spa promising ayurvedic techniques in midtown Manhattan, with medicated oils for the massages flown in directly from the subcontinent.

But going to New York to experience ayurveda is like going to Paris to take in a rodeo. The authentic way to benefit from this ancient medical methodology is to travel to the land where ayurveda was born, to work with licensed Indian healers and yoga trainers amid the color, the clamor, the crowds, the temples, the flavors and the fragrances that make the subcontinent a tourist destination unique in the world.

You can find ayurvedic spas today all over India, from northern hill stations in the Himalayas to the southern vertex of the country where the Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean meet.

India's southernmost states, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, have particularly embraced the spa industry's hottest new phenomenon. In these areas -- where ayurveda is the main form of medical treatment -- hotels, resorts and hospitals offer packages ranging from a weekend to a month designed to introduce Americans, Europeans and East Asians to ancient Indian massage, medication and yoga. In the fascinating seafront city of Kochi (formerly Cochin), Kerala, the options include such giant establishments as the five-star Taj Malabar hotel and the 26-room boutique resort Brunton Boatyard, built on the site of a 19th-century shipyard.

But if you're serious about ayurveda, or if you have a medical condition that might benefit from a supervised course of alternative treatment, you can bypass the resorts and head instead to a full-scale ayurvedic hospital, or chikitsalayam , to use the Sanskrit term. There you will find doctors and nurses trained at leading universities -- many Indian medical schools offer degree programs in both allopathic (Western) and ayurvedic medicine -- who employ the full panoply of massage, medication and yogic and spiritual techniques.

I tried both approaches, the hospital and the spa, when I joined a team making a documentary film about ayurveda (coming to your local PBS station next year).

We first went to the Mayo Clinic of ayurvedic medicine, the Arya Vaidya Chikitsalayam and Research Institute (AVC) in Coimbatore, a gritty industrial city in Tamil Nadu. Then we headed to the lavish resort Ananda, a spectacular palace in mountains north of New Delhi.

The AVC clinic in Coimbatore is so highly regarded that the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health has chosen it as the locus of its first controlled, double-blind study to determine whether ayurvedic medicine really works. The study is designed to determine whether the ancient Indian approach can match or exceed Western results in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis; results are expected in a year or so.

The vaidyas, or physicians, at AVC were eager to take part in the NIH study because they are certain that their approach is effective. "We know that ayurveda works, or it wouldn't have lasted 3,000 years," explained Sumit Kumar Ghosh, a young vaidya on the staff. "Even when the British raj tried to suppress ayurveda and replace it with allopathic treatments, the Indian people kept our tradition alive because they recognized its healing power."

Today, thousands of Indians annually come to the Arya Vaidya main campus and several sister institutions to be healed. Recent years, though, have seen an influx of Western visitors who travel to Coimbatore for treatment sessions lasting from 10 days to five weeks. During my stay at AVC, we met several tourists, including a physician from Los Angeles suffering from uterine fibroids, a retiree from New Jersey with chronic emphysema and a carpenter from Australia whose arthritis made him unable to work. None had found a complete cure, but nearly all reported significant improvement and reduced pain from their stay at AVC.

The basic plot of our documentary involves my search for relief from traumatic arthritis in my shoulder, the result of a military injury some 35 years ago. When I asked Ghosh whether he could provide a cure, he gave me the answer that vaidyas have given their patients through the ages: "We don't cure any specific ailment. Your body is going to cure itself. The goal of ayurveda is to open the channels in the body, to restore the natural balance of forces. This evokes your body's own healing response."

To help my body heal its painful right shoulder, the vaidyas prescribed a daily regimen of foul-tasting herbal medications, regular prayers at the Hindu temple on the grounds of the chikitsalayam and a consultation with a staff astrologer, to determine whether the timing was auspicious for a cure (it was).

The heart of my treatment, though, was massage. Two experienced massage therapists, Vinod and Balu, came to my cottage on the hospital grounds three times each day. (For female patients, the massage team is all women.) I would lie back on a long, hard table of neem wood with gutters along both sides to catch the excess oil. After Vinod chanted a prayer to the Hindu god of healing, Dhanwanthari, the work would begin.

Each morning began with an utterly delightful procedure called abhyangam , a 70-minute full-body massage in which I was thoroughly basted with heated, medicated sesame oil. The massage itself was structured, methodical and comprehensive. Vinod worked every oily limb and every muscle in my body. He massaged every finger and every toe; he cracked every knuckle; he massaged my earlobes and my eyelids. He used long, powerful, relaxing strokes that flowed from my right shoulder to my left heel and vice versa. I could almost feel the blocked channels in my body opening up to release the flow of prana , a vital force that the ancient sages said was essential to balance and health.

The abhyangam left me feeling wonderful, but it also left me drenched in oil from hair to toes. The solution to that problem was almost as good as the massage itself. Vinod would wash me all over with a soupy soap made of ground lentil beans. This daily ritual removed all the oil and left me smelling like a green legume fresh from the garden.

This full-body workover was followed each morning by a localized massage called pizhichil . That one involved an even warmer oil application and even stronger massage, focused on my arthritic right shoulder. While Balu dripped the hot oil over my shoulder, Vinod's forceful fingers would go to work on that troubled joint. This one, too, felt marvelous.

Each afternoon, the pair would return to my massage table for the strangest treatment of all, the navarakizhi . One man would immerse fist-sized burlap sacks filled with rice into a vat of boiling milk; then the other would use those heated rice bags to swat and knead my back and ailing shoulder. Ghosh explained to me that this was an ancient method for reviving debilitated muscle tissue. To me, both the procedure and this explanation seemed bizarre. But I didn't complain; the navarakizhi felt great, after all, and presumably could do no harm.

Along with the herbal medicines and massage, the doctors imposed restrictions during my treatment. No alcohol was permitted and no meat. The rather bland vegetarian meals served up by the AVC kitchen were to be eaten without utensils, the common way to dine in southern India. To enhance my body's healing power, I was also ordered to remain sedentary, calm and quiet in my comfortable but plain four-room cottage on the hospital grounds.

The AVC campus is a quadrangle, with three sides providing patient accommodations: single rooms, suites or cottages. The fourth side is the Hindu Temple, thronged with priests and worshipers most of the day and night. The central square is a lush tropical garden, where patients and doctors sit in the sun to chat or read or meditate. My "cottage," a four-room unit with a Western-style bathroom, included a golden statue of the god Dhanwanthari and my own personal massage chamber. I welcomed the priest in saffron robes who visited each day to anoint my forehead with cream and flower petals; I was less enthralled with the "smoke-wallah," a man who stormed in daily with a fiery vat that filled my cottage with foul, noxious smoke (to suppress mosquitoes).

Still, I found it hard to obey the rule restricting me to the campus, because I couldn't resist the colorful, teeming streets just outside the hospital grounds. The neighborhood, Ramanathapuram, is a microcosm of Indian city life: a noisy, muddy, friendly place where women in pastel saris gather each morning to do the washing at communal water taps, and households dump their garbage in heaps at the corner, to be eaten by the cows, goats, oxen, donkeys, monkeys and mangy dogs that throng the gravel streets. At a wooden lunch stand, a freshly cooked chapati served with a variety of succulent curries and chutneys made a classic Indian meal. The price: 6 cents.

Despite these forbidden excursions, and despite the fact that my stay at the chikitsalayam was only half the recommended treatment period, the ancient methods produced a clear improvement in my medical condition. After two weeks of medication, meditation and massage, I had considerably more movement and considerably less pain in my arthritic shoulder. With regular exercise, I've maintained that improvement since I left.

From the relative austerity of the clinic, we moved on to exquisite luxury. Some six hours north of New Delhi by train and car, on a manicured green hilltop amid lush forests, the soaring stone palace of the Maharajah of Tehri Garhwal has been converted into an almost perfect resort, Ananda in the Himalayas. Ananda is the Sanskrit word for bliss, and the name is entirely fitting for a place where the setting, the solitude, the service and the sumptuous meals should make any guest blissful.

Ananda offers guided treks overlooking a deep valley where India's holy river, the Ganges, comes tumbling out of the mountains. It has exotic gardens, squash courts and a six-hole golf course carved into a hillside. But the resort really centers on its attractive modern spa, where the staff offers all of the ayurvedic massages I experienced at the chikitsalayam, along with courses in Sadhana (meditation), Indian dance and yoga. More dedicated practitioners can travel a half-hour along a winding mountain road to the dusty town of Rishikesh, the self-styled "world capital of yoga." There the banks of the Ganges are lined with ashrams teaching all varieties of yogic techniques.

Even in India, a country where per-capita income is still less than a dollar per day, the indulgences of Ananda do not come cheap. In the off-season (January), we paid more than $500 per day for room and meals; extra charges are tacked on for each of the ayurvedic treatments. That one-day rate was higher than the price for one week of room, board and medical care at the chikitsalayam down south.

But whether the setting is austere or extravagant, the heart of an ayurvedic massage tour remains the healing technique devised by Indian medical sages centuries before the birth of Christ. You can make the trip, as I did, with a medical goal in mind. Or you can spend a few days at an ayurvedic spa in the course of a traditional tour of India. In either case, one thing is certain: You're going to get the best massage you've ever had.

T.R. Reid is The Post's Rocky Mountain Bureau chief.