Escape Into Wellness
Take a trip for your health to The Chopra Center, at Carlsbad's La Costa Resort and Spa, where you just may find the path to well-being.
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When Deepak Chopra walks into the room, my first thought is: Wizard of Oz. It’s not necessarily the spectacular Christian Dior glasses with Swarovski crystals that trail from ruby red to deep violet. Or the fact that in person, when he appears in this small workshop space from behind the great media curtain that has cloaked him in fame, he is more demure than I had imagined. What is most wizardly is the potential promise of clear thought (a brain), pure love (a heart) and the recognition of free will (courage). Our yellow brick road, it turns out, is right here before us, we just have to open up to the possibility.
The group that is gathered for the Perfect Health weekend at The Chopra Center for Wellbeing on the grounds of Carlsbad’s La Costa Resort and Spa, while ready and willing to open up to Chopra’s mantra of “infinite possibilities,” is also clearly star-struck. Who cares if Eva Mendes, one of Chopra’s many celebrity followers, is standing in the back of the room? Chopra commands a crowd with his remarkable ability to turn esoteric thoughts into understandable life lessons: He is a storyteller, a myth maker and, as he once announced to HBO’s Bill Maher, a “profit,” able to poke fun at his own multi-million-dollar empire built on a combination of deep wisdom and brilliant marketing.
On this weekend, a group of 20 is gathered for a five-day Perfect Health Panchakarma program, geared to those coping with physical illness, emotional pain, work-life imbalance, or relationship stress. I fall into the work-life imbalance category – full-time job, two young children, husband, and outside interests, none of which I seem to have enough time for. I have not been sleeping well. And then there was that car accident I had the previous week. The program is remarkable in that it combines a renowned medical staff, a time-honored detoxification process and daily foundational teachings in meditation, yoga and the ancient Indian healing art of Ayurveda.
Designed by the center’s co-founders – Chopra, who is an endocrinologist, and board certified neurologist, Ayurvedic doctor and center CEO David Simon – the Perfect Health program integrates the wisdom of holistic traditions with the latest advances in Western medicine. Each day, we are immersed in nurturing treatments while Drs. Chopra and Simon and The Chopra Center’s master educators guide us towards transcendence. I am certain there will be good witches and bad witches along the way, flying monkeys, fields of poppies...
We begin with a dosha diagnosis by filling out a series of questionnaires before we even arrive. After learning whether we are the intense pitta, the airy vata, the steady kapha, or more likely, a combination of two, we begin to learn what foods, professions and ways of being most suit our sensitive systems. After listening to a few lectures on the subject (and the Ayurvedic doctor who told me this directly), I accept that I have a pitta imbalance – too much fire. Understanding your dosha, Simon announces at some point during the week, helps you manage your stress. “An assistant to a pitta would schedule fake people who would cancel, which would give them time to catch up and breathe.” I can relate to that. I long for fake people on my schedule.
Over the next few days, I rejoice in a balancing shirodhara treatment. I surrender to a four-handed abhyanga massage. I tune out during the Gandharva, a sound therapy massage treatment with crystal bowls. I participate in the yoga classes, the movement classes and the meditations. I sip ginger and lemon elixirs, eat vegetarian lunches with dosha-appropriate spices and fall asleep after drinking steamed milk sprinkled with cardamom and cinnamon. Early in the week, I receive a mantra for primordial sound meditation, a Vedic Indian tradition based on the vibration of the universe at the time and place of each individual’s birth using Vedic mathematic formulas. Silently repeating this mantra, we are told, helps us to slip into the space between our thoughts, where our minds let go of the chatter and enter pure awareness. Studies have shown that a regular meditation practice for just one-half hour a day offers numerous health benefits, including lower blood pressure, a stronger immune system and less stress and fatigue.
But it is Panchakarma, an Ayurvedic treatment that releases physical and emotional toxicity, that is the cornerstone of The Chopra Center’s Perfect Health program. Ayurveda teaches that vibrant health depends upon our body’s ability to metabolize all aspects of life, assimilating that which nurtures us and eliminating the rest. When our digestive powers are weak, toxins accumulate in our body, contributing to imbalances and, ultimately, illness. Cleansing of both the sinus passages (using neti pots) and the digestive tract (using basti, a colon therapy) with herbalized oils mobilize this release of toxins. Once cleansed, the body is ready to be replenished with natural foods and herbs, revitalizing massage treatments and meditation and yoga practices offered throughout the week.
During this particular program, our group is lucky enough to have both the often-traveling Chopra and Simon in attendance. Chopra is the yang to Simon’s yin, and together, the life force they deliver is worth every penny of the program’s fee. When Simon speaks, he is quietly profound, an Ayurvedic sage whose depth of knowledge on both physical and metaphysical subjects astounds even the wisest audience. Today, his focus is on digestion. “Agni,” he explains, “is the digestive fire that allows us to ingest information, take what’s useful and get rid of the rest. When fire is weak and undigested experience is stored, it becomes toxic residue, or ‘ama,’ accumulated toxins from the past not serving us in the present.” Ama can be physical, such as cholesterol, or emotional, such as an abusive relationship from the past that makes it difficult to have a healthy one in the present. It can also be financial. “If you can’t digest financial responsibility it could make you sick,” he says. “The goal in Ayurveda is to fully metabolize what is coming into life right now. With a good fire, you radiate loving and compassionate light, which is wisdom.” That barely flickering ama, however, shows up as bad breath, a coated tongue, a dull appetite, delicate digestion, sluggish elimination, pain, fatigue, depression, susceptibility to infections, difficulty manifesting intentions, colds, and flus.
“Ojas” are what we’re aiming for – that’s when you feel rested upon awakening, your skin glows, your tongue is pink and clear, your body feels light and centered, your digestion is strong, and your mind is clear – like children. It’s how most of us announce we feel by the end of this week.
The soft-spoken Simon often works behind the scenes, and does so with the same passion and humility that brought him to develop this center in the first place. Between college and medical school, he became a yoga and meditation teacher, and did his graduate thesis on shamanism: A Holistic Model of Healing. Simon realized early on he was outside the medical mainstream, “which was seeing people as molecules,” he says. He almost left medical school altogether, feeling it was the wrong place for him, when the dean convinced him there was room in the profession for a doctor who thought outside the Western medical box. So he went into neurology, “to have one foot in consciousness and one in biology,” trained with a Zen Buddhist doctor at the University of Colorado and explored mind-body consciousness. He then went on to study Ayurveda and Chinese medicine, which he began introducing into his neurology practice in San Diego, where he was chief of staff and medical director of the Neurological Rehabilitation Center and Clinical Neurophysiology Laboratory at Sharp Cabrillo Hospital.
Chopra was an endocrinologist on the East Coast at the time, had written his first two very successful books on mind-body medicine, and “had a remarkable talent for translating these ideas into understandable concepts,” says Simon. So Simon brought him out to San Diego to design a pilot physician training program for a half dozen doctors learning mind-body medicine. During an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Chopra mentioned the cutting-edge medical program and “the phones started ringing.” Soon afterward, the hospital offered space, a staff and an administrator for The Sharp Institute for Mind Body Medicine. It had a six-month waiting list before it even opened its doors. The program soon branched off from Sharp, and Chopra and Simon moved to a hotel wing in Del Mar. In 1995, they bought a building in La Jolla and named it The Chopra Center for Wellbeing. But because there were no accommodations there, they moved the center over to La Costa.
And here is where the two doctors and their staff have been able to really blossom, to pave their road with yellow bricks. “Peace,” says Simon, “starts with the individual, then the family, the community, and the world. When a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly, the carcass digests imaginal cells and uses the nutrition of the body to support the recreation of a new entity. We are trying to create little clusters of imaginal cells and connect them to create a new global mind and body. That takes us out of the survival of the fittest mode that no longer serves us.” And replaces it, he says, “with the survival of the wisest,” those that embody the sense of the sacred.
Simon acknowledges that the concepts being batted around here are “high conversation… If our stomachs are hungry, higher states of consciousness are not what is prominent.” He explains that the center does its share of committing their profits to nonprofits, educational and health systems and encourages participants to do the same, especially in these challenging times.
Chopra also points out that humanity is suffering from illness: global warming, terrorism, wars. “Everything co-creates everything,” he says. “Is there a connection between biological dysfunction and the fractured relationships with ourselves and each other? Yes. Illness in our bodies is related to illness on the planet and how people bond with each other.” So what will it take for peace? “Enough peaceful people,” he says. Chopra has said in interviews, his own writings and directly to hawkish officials at the Pentagon, that “if enough of us come together around the value of peace, war can be brought to an end. If enough of us shift our awareness toward social justice, human rights and environmental sustainability, then injustice, oppression and destruction of the ecosystem can be stopped. Every great change in the world begins with a shift in awareness, and a critical mass of this new consciousness will bring about global change." His hope for mankind is that we inspire in each other the “realization that we are all part of a single humanity with earth as our home. This shared vision promises a great evolutionary leap for all, and will provide the basis for sustainable solutions to the greatest threats facing us.”
Chopra, dressed in jeans and a white linen shirt, sits on his foot as he speaks; this is not his lecture circuit, the stories I have heard over and over again that he tells to large crowds after one of his bestselling books has hit the shelves. He asks an esoteric question about the soul and a woman answers it, directly quoting from one of his books. He kicks her playfully and tells her to shut up.
Earlier, on day one, he had asked the group to meditate on what we want and what we need. While our desires are individual, our needs, it turns out, are the same: survival and safety, material abundance, love and belonging, self-esteem, creative expression, higher guidance, transcendence.
At the closing ceremony, participants share their experience and commitment to continuing the lessons learned. One of those is Bob, who had a debilitating car accident and shared that he has spent many years taking medication for his chronic pain. “When I came here my intention was to heal my soul, but throughout the week, my soul healed me,” he says. When Bob had his consultation with Simon, the wise doctor gave Bob a prescription. It was not pain medication, not a drug or even an herb. Simon reached to the shelves of his expansive library and pulled out a poem by the Persian Sufi poet Hafiz of Shiraz, called “Cast All Your Votes for Dancing.” As Bob reads it to the group with tears in his eyes, it is clear that the doctor has found the cure to what ails Bob. He has opened up his heart, and the rest of ours with it.
The weekly Perfect Health programs are offered exclusively at The Chopra Center for Wellbeing in Carlsbad, California. For questions about dates and availability call (888) 736-6895 or visit chopra.com.
La Costa Resort and Spa
While participating in programs at The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, accommodations on the grounds of La Costa Resort and Spa range from ultra luxe standard guest rooms to the cozy new one-, two- and three-bedroom villas in Spanish Colonial residences that offer king beds, Saltillo-tiled floors, flat screen TVs, a parlor area around a fireplace (a Queen sofa bed sleeps extra guests), dining for six, a well-stocked gourmet kitchen with Viking appliances, washer and dryer, and a beautiful patio. Villa residents also have their own private pools. The resort’s Legends Bistro is happy to accommodate the strict diets of Chopra Center guests with dosha-friendly dishes that include dahl, the classic seasoned lentils served over basmati rice, granola and ginger elixirs. For more information on room rates and availability, call (800) 854-5000 or visit lacosta.com.
