WELL BEING
Renewing oneself
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A quiet palace in Palakkad lets you get in touch with your deeper self. HUGH AND COLLEEN GANTZER
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Photo: Hugh and Colleen Gantzer
Serene surroundings: The Kalari Kovilakom palace in Palakkad.
THE lamp-lighter waded through a winking mist of fireflies; a breeze whispered the fragrance of lady-of–the-night; and an American woman closed her eyes and sighed: “If there is a heaven on earth , it is here! It is here! It is here!̶
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It was unreal: very unreal. So unreal that we would not have been here in the first place. When Jose Dominic of the CGH Earth group had suggested it, we had been incredulous. A steamed, low-spice, frugal vegetarian diet? Meditation, yoga, massages… cut off from the world for a fortnight? “Jose, you must be joking!!” For over 30 years we’d been immersed in travel, on the move for at least six months out of every 12, omnivorous by choice, and with a carefully cultivated scepticism about fads. How could we, possibly, sequester ourselves like anchorites, and let the zestful world pass us by? But then, suddenly, things started to fall apart. An international publisher became culpably inefficient, a neighbour tried to grab our land, and stressed-out fatigue settled on us like a heavy, grimy, horse-blanket. We wrote to Jose and accepted his offer.
And it was one of the wisest things we have done in recent years.
Soothing ambience
Kalari Kovilakom is in an old palace in Palakkad, Kerala. Wooded hills, with cotton-shreds of clouds, rise as a backdrop. A high bougainvillea-dripping wall encircles the palace; carved pillars support tiled roofs with multiple gables; central courts, open to the sky, draw in cool air from the herb-gardens alive with butterflies; a lone cormorant, and kingfishers like glittering chips of the rainbow, dive for fish in the stone-stepped tanks; and there is the fresh scent of lemon-grass oil on the glistening Chettinad-tile floors. This is a heritage refreshed and restored and as mint-new as it had been when the matriarchs of the Vengunad family of Kollengode had built it in the late 19th century.
Our room, in a wing built for the European guests of the matrilineal dynasty, gently blended the past and the present: Raj era furniture, a four-poster bed, an intricately carved ceiling, and hi-tech conveniences where they were needed, including ceiling mounted air-conditioners and a 24-hour back-up power supply. A tailor measured us for six kurta-pyjama suits, we were given straw slippers because leather is a no-no, told that we would start our therapy tomorrow after consulting t
he Ayurvedic doctors and the Yoga and Meditation Therapists. The ringing of a temple bell would announce our meals and, today, we would meet our fellow guests in the dining gallery.
Collapsing barriers
They were a mixed bunch: a gentle Malayali giant from Dubai, a tax lawyer from Zurich, two American women who were travel agents, and a stressed out young Austrian going through a bad patch in her emotional life. Here, like passengers in a life-boat, we found people reaching out to each other, barriers fell easily and confidences were exchanged. Very soon we felt that we had known them for most of our lives: that, indeed, is one of the unscheduled therapies of Kalari Kovilakom. Food is another. Ayurvedic dieticians structure every meal for every guest and even the drinking water is spiced with special herbs for each individual. Organic raw materials are cooked in traditional stone and iron vessels, served on thalis lined with bana
na leaves. At first the seemingly frugal diet seemed inadequate but, after sleeping deeply on the first two days, the portions became more than adequate. Do we eat to combat stress? And so, does the absence of stress diminish our excessive appetites?
Next morning, at the Treatment Centre, the physicians asked the most probing questions with a gentle insistence. They also weighed us every day, recorded our progress, prescribed the next day’s therapies and diets. We rose at five-thirty to the sound of bhajans from a temple outside the campus; walked along paths through the dew-starred herbal gardens, climbed the steps to the yoga pavilion.
The yoga sessions are designed to restore flexibility to the body and slow down the accumulative process of aging. The yogasanas are too well known to warrant description. Here they are imparted by therapists who have lived in yogashrams and qualified as yoga teachers. They are not self-taught amateurs. And, as all good yoga teachers do, the sessions are tailored to the needs of the individual; no other guests are present.
Breakfast then: herbal decoctions, melted jaggery instead of sugar, a steamed banana perhaps; or variations on a vegetarian theme to ring the changes. A brief hour or so to visit the library, or unwind in a hammock, or converse with the other guests. Then the first massage in the warm and fragrant treatment rooms while soft. meditative, music plays. The two daily massages, and the diets are designed to dislodge the toxic deposits of unwise lifestyles, bring them into the digestive tract; and then eliminate them on Purgation Day. Though purgation is daunting in anticipation, it leaves one with a spring in one’s stride when it’s over.
Tapping resources
Meditation differs from boon-seeking prayer. Judging from what we discovered, meditation could be a tapping of the reservoirs of our own deep memories, the wisdom that is a distillation of our own experiences, and the lessons that we have learnt from them. There could be other more psychological, or spiritual, explanations but this empirical one is good enough for us.
And in the evening, after dinner, there is music, or a classical dance performance, or a talk. There is no television and we never found the need for it.
Soon, too soon, the fortnight had fled. We now had friends all over the world, had lost three kilos each but, most importantly, we felt renewed and…yes.. rejuvenated. Now that the equilibriums of our bodies and minds have been re-established, they will, hopefully, be able to handle the stresses of our peripatetic way of life.
Because, somewhere, deep within us, a lamplighter still walks through a cloud of flickering fireflies, in the scented serenity of our own Kalari Kovilakom.
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