Deepak’s Bliss Factory
“My desires are like seeds,” the physician and New Age luminary Deepak Chopra is saying. “Left in the ground, they wait for the right season and then spontaneously bloom into beautiful flowers.” His voice is a silken thread, emanating from an audio cassette spooling through the tape player in my car. I’m stuck in Friday afternoon traffic on Interstate 5, wondering whether my desire to reach the Chopra Center for Well Being in La Jolla (about 110 miles south of L.A.) will ever blossom.
Founded in 1996, the center is part day spa, part holistic retreat, with a full roster of therapies (consultations, yoga, guided meditation sessions, massages, facials and wraps) inspired by the 5,000-year-old Indian health and spiritual practice known as ayurveda, which views body, mind and spirit as one.
There are multi-day programs as well. But I’d chosen a less expensive option for Saturday only: the daylong “Balance” program ($335), consisting of a 70-minute ayurvedic facial, an hour of mindfulness meditation, breakfast and lunch, a 70-minute massage and 65 minutes of yoga. To further cut costs, I planned to stay over for just Friday night in a double at the Empress Hotel a block from the center, usually priced at $149, but $89 with a Chopra Center discount.
I know people who have pored over Chopra’s best-selling books and tapes (such as “Quantum Healing” and “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success”) or heard him speak, and would kill for the chance to visit the center. Other, more skeptical friends who know that the Indian-born endocrinologist-turned-guru has made millions by relaying the wisdom of ayurveda to diseased and soul-depleted Americans told me to make sure I found out exactly how the system works. Which is like asking how Zen Buddhism or Episcopalianism works. Either you make a leap of faith or you don’t.
I’m perpetually poised to leap. Then, too, I’ve been to India and sampled ayurvedic therapies at their source. In fact, the morning before I left for La Jolla, I washed my hair with an ayurvedic shampoo purchased at the Kairali Ayurvedic Health Club, 10 miles south of central New Delhi. There, about a year ago, I gave myself over to a two-hour treatment ($50), with two attendants slathering me in scented oil while a third kept a steady stream of heated oil dripping on my forehead and through my hair. The rubdown was called abhyanga and the forehead treatment, dhara. At the Chopra Center, virtually the same treatment lasts an hour and is called Odyssey massage and Shirodhara ($150).
The first law in Chopra’s Seven Spiritual Laws of Success is the Law of Pure Potentiality, which involves being nonjudgmental. This is why I didn’t gripe when I learned that the free Friday evening guided meditation session I’d rushed down from L.A. to make had been canceled. The five of us who showed up at the graceful beige-stuccoed center on Fay Avenue were told that we could sit in the second-floor meditation room, with its circular window and pillow-strewn banquette, meditating on our own.
I finished meditating just in time to take a free introductory yoga class at the Master Yoga Academy next door, which is where the Chopra Center’s instructors are trained. My room at the modern Empress Hotel was well furnished and equipped, with a sliver of an ocean view. And over dinner at the pleasant Bali Indonesian Restaurant in the same block, I read Chopra’s “Ageless Body, Timeless Mind” while working my way through a plate of chicken satay.
I checked in for my program at 8 o’clock sharp the next morning. Breakfast in the private dining room, which opened onto a sunny patio and study, got me off to an excellent start. There were teas blended for each of the three ayurvedic “types”--vata, pitta and kapha. Based on the results of a questionnaire I filled out, I’m a vata, so my tea was made of cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and licorice. Two women who’d come all the way from Pittsburgh to study meditation at the center joined me for the meal, composed of fruit and granola laced with pine nuts and warm soy milk. While we ate, my companions told me that they hadn’t been lucky enough to meet Chopra, but they had snooped into his inner sanctum, noting the pictures on his desk.
Next came my facial, gentler than the European facials I’ve had, with no extractions. Instead, the aesthetician applied a masque, massaged my arms, hands, neck, chest and face with essential oils, and gently touched points on my body known as marmas, considered so critical that in ancient times the most skillful warriors used them as targets to inflict the greatest possible injury on enemies. Relaxed and luscious-smelling, I retired to a consultation room upstairs where a young staff member named Francis with a singsong Caribbean accent talked me through a meditation and expounded on Chopra’s seven spiritual laws.
After lunch, during my Odyssey massage and Shirodhara treatment, I did absolutely nothing except lie on a cushioned table in a darkened room while two attendants rubbed me with a cup of oil, lightly at first and then deeper, their motions perfectly synchronized. The forehead treatment is a mystery. Who knows why it feels so good? Yoga class followed, capping off the day with gentle stretching and instruction in some of the most basic postures, such as Crooked Knee Pose.
In the bookstore afterward, I bought a new Chopra tape for the trip home. When I looked up, I saw a man in an Italian-cut suit. He turned, and I froze. It was Deepak Chopra himself. This called for a celebratory cup of tea on the oceanfront terrace of the La Valencia Hotel downtown, where I spotted a whale cruising down to Baja for the winter. What bliss! I couldn’t decide which sighting made me happier.
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Budget for One
Gas: $10.00
Empress Hotel: 98.35
Dinner, Bali Indonesian: 17.00
Balance Day: 335.00
Tea, La Valencia: 3.25
Chopra tape: 11.95
FINAL TAB: $475.55
The Chopra Center for Well Being, 7630 Fay Ave., La Jolla, CA 92037; tel. (888) 424-6772, Internet https://www.chopra.com. The Empress Hotel, 7766 Fay Ave., La Jolla, CA 92037; tel. (888) 369-9900.