Finish your breath

Wednesday was my appointment with the ayurvedic practitioner. A couple of months ago, My Gift was looking into ayurvedic practitioners and I asked her to send me the link she had, which listed exactly one practitioner in my (sort of) area. So off I went on Wednesday afternoon, driving out to the east of Scottsdale, in search of this practitioner in the mountains. It's not as Castenada-ish as it sounds. The mountains have highways and are built up with nice houses. Nevertheless...

I got lost, as is usual, and pulled over up on some hill overlooking more mountains, and used my Blackberry to access the internet and get myself squared away. Sure enough, after a bit of a drive, I found a funky little building with a green door, which led into a little office crammed with bottles and jars and heavy with incense. This must be the place. I stood there in my business clothes and thought, "How have I come to be here? No one in my family nor 99.9% of the people I've known in my life would ever want to track down a place like this..." Truth be told, I was brought up to be an east coast skeptic. Ancient medicine? Eastern philosophy? Even run of the mill fashionable new age? Not.

The woman who greeted me...eventually (I was thinking, Gee, they leave the door unlocked, aren't they concerned about security?...) was not at all the kind of person I was expecting. I couldn't tell how old she was, but she had long, spiky platinum hair (imagine Tina Turner hair, but messier) and old, funky clothes. Kind of a combo of Scottsdale chic and mountain camping utilitarian. Okay, I'll go along with this.

Sure enough, this was my ayurvedic practitioner. We went into a smaller room, where she started off by telling me that she'd had a facelift three weeks ago and still wasn't feeling quite recovered, that her face was still numb in places and kind of tight across the cheekbones.

I've never talked to anyone who's had a facelift (or at least, I've never talked with someone who's told me they've had one and wanted to discuss it) and it was quite fascinating. For one thing, this woman was an attractive woman, or more accurately, she was the kind of woman about whom people would say, "She used to be a very attractive woman," quite admiringly. So now she was a woman who used to be an attractive woman (presuming you believe aging detracts from initial attractiveness) and was now restored, via facelift, to a different kind of attractiveness. A facelifted attractiveness. Which, as I sat and looked at her, is simply a different kind of attractiveness from the natural youthful attractiveness she was born with, and the aged attractiveness I'm sure she had before the facelift.

Apparently, though, the wrinkled attractiveness made her unhappy, so she went for the facelifted one. Where you can see the wrinkles, but they are pulled tighter--well, I guess they are simply flattened wrinkles. It's just a slightly different aesthetic. Looked at without judgement--and it was easy to do this, once I got past the intial shock of Hmmm, I've never interacted with someone quite like this, because she was just a lovely, open person--I suddenly saw her in all three stages, and she was equally attractive in all three stages, though each face was a little different. Inside it, though, they were all, very clearly, her.

Okay, so anyhow, she did eventually get to talking about me. Vata pitta. I'm not terribly surprised. I knew I wasn't slight enough, or ethereal enough, to be a true vata. On the other hand, I'm not muscular enough or angry enough ;-) to be a true pitta. We reviewed my eating habits, my sleeping habits, my energy levels throughout the day, etc. The biggest reason I made the appointment was because work has been sucking the life out of me, day by day, and I couldn't seem to get a handle on it. I just felt energetically burnt out, and like I couldn't rejuvenate myself at all. Even weekends didn't seem to help me get my energy back.

We went over my eating habits, which tended toward light eating during the day, lots of raw food (and lots of days when breakfast was forgotten about or lunch missed because of meetings), and then an evening meal with The Cop. Sleep cycles were also reviewed. I had to 'fess up to the fact that I try to get enough but almost never manage, due to waking at 4:30.

She sketched out a couple of diagrams of eating and sleeping cycles and pointed out where I ought to be. Food: warmer, oilier foods, biggest meal between 10AM and 2PM, very light evening meal. Sleep: well, try to get a little more, and perhaps I'd sleep better with an evening nightcap of warmed milk with cardamom and cinammon. And then she suggested a sesame oil massage each morning before showering. And a sesame oil foot rub at night. She also had a few things to say about breathing (Yeah, yeah, I always think, Breathe. Yeah, I know.) You'd think I'd actually have more of a clue about breathing in "real life," but we'll talk about that later in this story.

Okay. All of this sounded do-able, and actually quite lovely. Well, maybe except for the milk idea, because generally dairy makes me feel sick. At this point, though, it was after 2 in the afternoon and I was starting to get restless and spaced out. I'd eaten a carrot on the way to the appointment because I forgot about lunch, and I had to rush back to work for a meeting. Ah yes, immersed in the glow of my ayurvedic consultation, and now I'm all revved about dashing back to the office.

This whole experience was starting to feel like a wake-up call. Fine. I decided to go get some lunch to bring back to the office, even though it meant I would be returning to the office even later than I expected, and that I'd be eating a late lunch despite the fact that I was slated for a work-related dinner in the evening. I didn't care. My time with the ayurvedic practitioner was very bizarre in some ways (perhaps one day I'll tell the story of her co-worker, who took a minute to tell me about a technology he has for healing people at a distance through his computer) but also...well...a wake up call. Something brought me out here to the ayurveda lady, so it seemed like a good idea to try out some of her suggestions.

***

Time to get ready for led class. Sanskrit Scholar suggested a post-practice lunch today and we've been inviting Mysorians, so that ought to be fun. There is even a possibility that Crim Girl and The British Director, both of whom have been absent lately due to life events, will join us. I'll go on with my adventures in ayurveda in a later installment.