Tao Garden Health Spa - Days 3 and 4

Day Three
Today's 7 a.m. Chi Kung class was abbreviated to 30 minutes so that we could all hike out to a big lake and dam nearby for a meditation. The "15" minute hike actually took about 40 minutes, but in fact that made it more enjoyable. The hike itself was done as a meditation, following these four rules:
1. Walk single file, evenly spaced (about 2 feet)
2. While walking, remember to breathe deeply in the abdomen
3. Maintain some kind of comfortable hand shape consistently for the whole walk
4. Walk in unison, in the same footprint if possible

Our morning was misty and humid, typical for this time of year here in the foothills of the Himalayas. We finally emerged from the greenery to face a huge sloped dam. Our meditation walk continued up the slope as we carefully, steadily, silently climbed the dam. The serene, undeveloped lake was beautiful in the soft early morning light. We meditated by the lake for a little while and then relaxed, conversed and took a few photos before heading back by a different route, this time all chatty and social.

Here's our Detox Day 3 schedule (see past blogs for descriptions of repeated treatments)
7am - Chi Kung and Meditation hike
9 am - Breakfast
10 am - Lymphatic/Rife machine
11am - Herbal Steam Bath
12pm - Colon Hydrotherapy
1pm - Lunch
2pm - Foot Detox (90 minutes of foot rubbing, soaking, kneading, sloughing and massaging heaven) & Reflexology (our feet never felt so light and healthy and the reflexology made our organs feel refreshed!)
5pm - Tendon muscle massage (Russ only - 110 minutes of theraputic massage stretching and loosening the body's major tendons and muscles from the head to the feet)
7pm - Dinner

The tendon muscle massage was the best massage Russ has ever recieved (sorry CA friends who've given him massages before). It wasn't a typical massage--it was like partner yoga with deep tissue massage loosening and stretching tendons as well as muscles in the legs, shoulders, neck, upper back and chest.

After dinner we hung around for a while with David and Jackie (a couple from Carmel, CA) and Dennis (a Tao Garden employee, who is from the Bay Area--wassup with all these Californians at the hippie farm here?!? ;-) David is a Transcendental Meditation instructor among other things and Jackie teaches ESL. They have just spent 9 months in Turkey, where Jackie was teaching English, and now they're trying to decide where to live next. They are scoping out possibilities in southeast Asia. Dennis has been "traveling" for 20 years now. Back in the day he used to work as a salesperson for IBM (back in the days of the marvelous blue chip) and currently he is a Tao master and at home here in Chiang Mai. People's stories are so fascinating.

Later in the evening we got online and got some fun news: Lesley's long-time friend Jason from Detroit is arriving in Phuket on the 27th! Jason visited Thailand a few years ago and really connected with the people, their culture and the way of living here, so he stayed for many months and even was trained in Thai massage in Chiang Mai. When the tsunami hit the Phuket area last December, Jason immediately got on a plane and came here to help (he is an EMS/ambulance health care provider), again staying many months. Now he's coming to stay for one year, this time employed by a health/wellness facility in Phuket. We have tentative plans to visit Ko Chang, an island in the southeast part of Thailand, but with this news, we are reviewing our plans because it would be excellent to spend time with Jason, see Phuket through his fond eyes.

Day four
Day four was a much needed day off. Russ managed to get up for the 7 a.m. Chi Kung class but slept for several hours after returning in a relaxed state. Lesley, often a mild ansomniac, burrowed deeper into bed when the alarm went off, acknowledging that serious rest is hugely important for the detoxification process. On her way to the pool for a swim in the morning, Lesley passed an outdoor satellite TV area, and found Dennis watching... the World Series! Dennis claims things like the World Series and the Superbowl are tendrils of connection to his old American culture (although he has lost his taste for beer during his life's quest).

After lunch, Russ, Lesley and Jackie took a Thai vegetable carving class. We made leaves out of cucumbers, a rose out of a tomato peel and other carvings, decorating a whole plate. It was fun! We'll have to bust out our new skills at a dinner party someday. We manged to squeeze in a swim and a few pamperings (steam bath, banana leaf treatment) before the usual 5 to 6 p.m. total downpour. Lesley bonded in the herbal steam bath with Rae, a friendly yoga teacher from LA who has been traveling alone for many months and is currently teaching yoga in the hills of Indonesia. She came to Thailand just to visit and ended up getting sick on some bad food somewhere, so she came to Tao Garden to recover. She decided to do a detox and it is causing some heavy emotional circumstances to bubble up for her, so it's great that she is surrounded by supportive people along with the thoroughly serene environment. We all attended the Tao Yin evening exercise together--a quiet, yoga-like floor-based series focused on the spinal core of the body. The Laughing Buddha posture was a blast: you lay on your back, put your arms and feet up (like a dead bug in an old cartoon), shake them around like crazy, and--laugh. Yes, laugh and giggle and chortle your heart out. You'd think it's hard to laugh on demand, but everyone found it so goofy that in no time we were all laughing for real, and Lesley actually couldn't stop giggling even though the posture was long over.

And that, dear family and friends, was our delightful day off. Tomorrow we go back to poking, prodding, rubbing, steaming, and so on. Phew!