Subtle Innuendo: the Gentle Art of Ayurvedic Enema

Everyone should learn to do Ayurvedic enema, or basti. It is the simplest purification technique of the oldest naturopathic system in human culture. It has very few contraindications. It is cheap and easy to do at home according to need and constitution, once you’ve received frank and intelligent instruction.

Most importantly, basti is the most powerful tool for soothing and calming the general force of movement, communication, impulse, and thought-patterning in your whole being – the force of vata dosha. Unlike colonics, basti does not fire-hose out chunks of adherent waste, it rather lubricates and encourages the colon’s own self-cleansing intelligence, and, in the process, calms the physiological root of every fear, anxiety, and doubt you have about the stability of your very presence in this world – all by nourishing vata dosha.

Vata dosha is the conjunction of the subtlest elements – air and space – that gather at the cusp of the material world and blow forth into the infinite forms and functions of life. It is responsible for the fashioning of the body in the womb, the spacious cavernosa of the lungs, the blinking of your eyes, those delicate peristaltic stirrings that we call the “call of nature”, and the speed with which the mind connects ideas to each other or to actions.

When vata dosha is out of balance – and in this culture we can assume that it always is, between the speed of life, the coldness of social alienation, the brittle static of a billion cell phones and nothing to say, the dryness of forced-air heating, the stagnancy of our closed-systems glass buildings, and the pervasive fear that ripples through our politics, economy and ecology – we are vulnerable to gas and bloating, insomnia, chaos in appetite/menses/sex, loneliness, dissociation from nature, and the strange belief that the universe is not only failing to support us, but actually waging a war of attrition.

And where does this mysterious vata dosha ‘live’? According to Ayurveda: in the breath, the bones, the nerves, yes, but primarily within the colon – an open, spacious tunnel of absorptive genius that dries the stool as it extracts the subtlest energies of our food. In the ancient texts, the colon is said to be the root of the tree of health, the organ from which all other organs derive their nutrition and vital impulse, and the focal point for the health and balance of vata dosha.

Thus, it is vata dosha and its myriad functions that are the object of Ayurvedic basti – not “mucoid plaques” or other over-dramatized forms of so-called intestinal sludge. It’s impressive – those ropes of black goo that folks are tweezing out of the toilet in pictures on the internet. Unfortunately, they’re not real. They’re simply the accreted mass of the colon-cleansing herbs they’re selling you in that hysterical tone: figs, psyllium, various emollient oils, senna. No autopsy has ever revealed “mucoid plaques”, and the gastroenterologists never see it.

In Ayurveda, the notion of cleansing is subtler. The body is not a tangle of tubing that needs a good scrape. It is, rather, a web of intelligent forces that can become forgetful of their inherent power or disorderly in their patterns. Certainly enema may remove some adherent fecal matter, but its main purpose is to nurture the mucoidal secretions and flora that allow the colon to calmly sip the joy of life like the root that it is.

The colon is a very emotional organ, and when it gets into one of its “moods” (which is invariably a precursor to one of our own) digestive issues from opposite ends of the spectrum manifest. Anxiety and fear promote the dry and contractile bowel of constipation, which is not just an inability to let go of stool, but also an inability to let go of the past. Warmth and oiliness and love are required. Anger and aggression promote the overheated and dilatory bowel that moves too often because it is too impatient to digest life, and needs to rush onwards, propelled by its inflamed appetite to devour the next meal of dramatic experience. Bitter tastes, astringency, mung sprouts, and moonlight are all advised.

But in both cases, periodic basti therapy, in the comfort of your own home, in the proper season, after taking a simple cleansing diet for several days and fasting moderately, after warm self-massage with oil and gentle sweating, will press the reset button on the nervous system, and nurture the root of your digestion. You’ll also sleep deeper than you ever have before.

Specific instructions for basti – which will differentiate between amounts of liquid applied, herbs and oil type used, length of retention, time to administer, and number of repetitions – depend on constitution, age, season, health history, and presenting symptoms. So I can’t give meaningful instructions here. Not because it’s complicated – just that it’s individual. The value of Ayurveda, in basti as in all things, is in recognizing that your pathway to health is as unique as you are, and that the dovetail of training and self-awareness is the golden road.

Everybody should learn Ayurvedic enema. To calm vata dosha, improve absorption, and nourish the bones and skin. Get some good training, and do it.