Taking the Cleanse

Today is Saturday, the day after returning from a 7 day cleanse retreat at Hacienda del Sol. I awoke before dawn, and instead of going back to sleep, had the energy to stay up and meditate, doing my usual toning practice.
I then squeezed two lemons, added a bit of water and a strong dash of cayenne, and it further jolted me to alertness. Charlie and I were on the beach by 6, and I was ahead of my regular routine by one to two hours. The night before, I read until 11:30, so my body seemed to be happy with less sleep.
On the beach I tried jogging but didn’t seem to have the energy to keep it up. I also felt the cayenne in my stomach, which did not encourage jogging. A couple more attempts failed to take off for long. It felt great stopping to chat with a couple of friends, one of whom was JP, the raw foods chef who had prepared our incredibly delicious dinner the first night of the retreat, and the last time we would be eating solid food (except for oatmeal and fruit the next morning) for six days.
That dinner was so good that it changed my whole attitude about raw food. It was a complex meal with lots of small items that had taken him all day to prepare. But it showed me how much flavor you could pack into a raw food cuisine.
Our routine started Saturday, after the delicious oatmeal breakfast, another eye-opener because I’d never had oatmeal this good. We started that day with our first colema, which involves using a five gallon jug filled with water and the flavor of the day to wash out your bowels. We were each given a jug of coffee to mix with the warm water. Menhla gave us a group instruction in how to use the devices, in six stalls, and we were assigned shifts since there were 12 of us.
This day we also met with Mitra, who met with us individually for a health consultation and then gave us acupuncture. I had had a couple of acupuncture sessions with Mitra in Nosara, and it was on his encouragement that I cut way back on alcohol, started changing my diet, and was attending this cleanse.
We started our juice regimen, with different drinks assigned at specific times during the day. We also made a roughage mix, mostly from psyllium powder, twice a day to drink down.
Sunday started our regular routine and that meant yoga at 7, preceded by a drink of lemon juice with a dash of cayenne. Adya is a beautiful teacher, Mitra’s wife, who gave a gentle yoga routine that was challenging for the beginners and satisfying for me. In Shivasana each day, Mitra would give us needles, customized for our needs, and he typically pinned me in the lower legs and on the arms.
We had colemas both in the morning and afternoon, and for the next four we added a 16 ounce bottle of lemon juice to our five gallon mix.
We also did some meditations in the evening and over the days I felt myself getting much deeper into these.
On the fourth day we switched to garlic in our colemas. Mitra put a needle between my eyes, which facilitated a very deep meditation for me.
The group consisted of a Polish-American couple from Ft. Lauderdale about my age, if I averaged them out. The rest were women in the 25-35 age group, mostly on the low side of that range. Two became sick, apparently contracting a flu-type sickness that lasted two to three days. Others were struggling as well, but I felt pretty steady, although a bit weak. I was starting to sleep much less at night, although was also unable to read at mid-day without nodding off, which has been my lifelong pattern.
Thursday was liver cleanse day and the day we would break back into solid foods. Wednesday night we had two glasses of Epsom salt solution, two hours apart, and before retiring we drank a 16 ounce bottle of a mix of olive oil and orange juice. It was an unusual taste but went down pretty easily. Two more Epsom salts in the morning and a coffee colema. We should have been expelling gooey balls of waste, but mine didn’t come out until had a second colema that afternoon. This was number 11 and final, a total of a 55 gallon drum barrel of fluids having been flushed through my colon at this point. I checked the sieve that I had placed in the bowl to screen my excretum, and was happy to see a number of gummy balls. My liver, free at last!
We had an afternoon snack of papaya, maybe the best I have ever tasted, and a salad around 4.
I also experimented with a Rife frequency machine the last three days. The theory behind it is that ailments and diseases have their own frequency, and a machine dialed to those same frequencies can provide healing to the recipient. I chose a few frequencies from a directory that I thought might promote well-being, and any affects were subtle. During the week Menhla also gave me a cranial-sacral treatment, which led me to a deep, meditative relaxation.
Since my return I’ve eagerly made grocery purchases of products to continue this healthy diet. I’ve strayed a little bit from the guidelines and food list that Mitra provided for me, based on his analysis of my personal nutrition profile. Other than the late morning lull, my energy has been good all day, and my mind has been more clear than normal.
Although the effects have been gradual, I feel like I have received what I had set as my intention, which is to have more energy on physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels.