AMRITSAR, INDIA -- Rama Ranjit Mehra watched cancer take her husband’s life and nearly take her own. Mehra turned to Ayurveda—a 5,000-year old Indian holistic system of healing—after Western science failed her husband. She beat her cancer and opened an Ayurveda clinic and hotel with her two grown twin sons near the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Sikhism’s holiest site in northern India. Her customers are mostly Westerners who come to this red-brick spa clinic with 20 lemon grass-scented rooms to escape the ever-present crowds in India. Ranjit’s Svaasa, as Mehra’s clinic is known, is a curious mix of old and new; it is housed in a 250-year-old colonial mansion, for instance. Yet it also offers Wi-fi access and the latest glossy-boxed herbal yogi tea.

Rama Ranjit Mehra speaks with guests at the Ayurveda hotel and spa she opened in Amritsar in northern India. (Courtesy: Ranjit’s SVAASA)

Ranjit’s Svaasa is one of many places throughout India that uses savvy modern marketing techniques to repackage ancient Ayurvedic practices. As a result, Ayurveda is attracting an increasing numbers of followers both in India and cosmopolitan cities like New York. Foreigners either travel to India to stay at Ayurvedic spas and attend courses on Ayurveda. Or they sit in their homes abroad and get Ayurvedic treatments over the Internet. Celebrities like Deepak Chopra - who swears by it - and beauty companies such as Aveda—an abbreviated form of Ayurveda—also help generate interest.

“Our focus is on natural healing, self-consciousness and self-improvement of the body and spirit,” said Mehra. Many come to Ayurveda for the nutrition or yoga aspect, which become gateways to the spiritual side, she said. She often recommends meditating on ancient Sanskrit scriptures as a way of creating and maintaining concentration.

While Ayurveda is a centuries-old tradition in India, it is only in the last 25 years that is has made real inroads in Europe and North America. To be sure, there are many traditional biomedical doctors who remain skeptical. But patients are more keen to “talk about their health and how it connects to spiritual rituals and the cosmos,” said Dr. Vincent Silenzio, a medical doctor at the University of Rochester, New York, who has set up a Web site on complementary and alternative health and guest-edited an issue of The American Journal of Public Health on the same topic.

In 1992, Congress established the Office of Alternative Medicine within the national Department of Health and Human Services and allocated $2 million to this new initiative. In 1998, this organization became The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. In 2006, Congress allocated $122.7 million to NCCAM. While the number of Americans who specifically use Ayurveda is not reported, 62 percent of Americans use complementary and alternative medicine, including prayer for healing, according to a recent study by the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The word Ayurveda comes from the Sanskrit words “ayus” meaning life and “veda” meaning science or knowledge and is roughly translated as "the science of living." At roughly 5000 years old, Ayurveda is nearly as old as Hinduism. It was created by the rishis, enlightened Indian sages, from Vedic scriptures.

Ayurveda rests on the belief in the need to balance the physical body, the spiritual soul and the psychological mind. It does so by balancing three biological forces, it calls doshas. Ayurveda includes diet and herbal remedies and emphasizes the use of body, mind, and spirit in disease prevention and treatment.

An Ayurvedic clinician in New Delhi,India with the latest herbal remedies and a Hindu shrine to Ganesh, the Elephant god. (Aili McConnon)

Ayurvedic clinics like Ranjit’s Svaasa can be found in many hotels throughout India, often run by families because it is a system of healing some learn from their grandparents and pass on through the family, and through family businesses. Madhu Mahor, for instance, works as an Ayurvedic masseur at the Best Western in Agra near the Taj Mahal. Her two sisters work in Ayurveda at other hotels nearby and she is training her 9-year-old son in the art as well. Many Indian practitioners realize the growing interest in Ayurveda abroad and plan to spend time in Europe or North America. Mahor is planning to move to the United Kingdom to try her trade there.

Ranjit’s SVAASA, an Ayurveda clinic and hotel in Amritsar, India. (Courtesy: Ranjit’s SVAASA)

Ayurveda is also reaching foreign shores through online clinics such as Ayunique, the first online Ayurveda clinic, created by Dr. Partap Chauhan. Chauhan is considered by many to be the world’s leading Aryuvedic physician and has also created an online college. Ayunique currently sends out packages of medicine to clients in 150 different countries, according to Steve Rudolph, a director of its umbrella organization, the Jiva Institute. Being based in India allows Ayunique to avoid the barriers to entry it would encounter based in the United States for instance. “Our products are classified as dietary supplements and so they go under the FDA radar,” said Rudolph, referring to the Food and Drug Administration.

An Ayurveda massage bed in the Jiva Ayunique Clinic & Panchkarma Centre, New Delhi, India. (Aili McConnon)

In recent years, there has been concern about the lack of regulations for preparing the medications. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2004 found that out of 70 Ayurvedic remedies purchased over-the-counter (all were manufactured in South Asia), 14 (one-fifth) contained lead, mercury, and/or arsenic at levels that could be harmful. Such studies understandably concern customers and make it all the more important to research the specific company behind Ayurvedic remedies. Ayunique, for instance, rigorously tests all of their products for heavy metals, said Rudolph.

Ayunique has improved life dramatically for Sheila, who did not want to give her last name for reasons of privacy. Sheila is an assistant at an Evangelical bookstore in Virginia and had had severe migraines and stroke-like episodes that plagued her for years. She has been an Ayunique patient since December 2005 and her symptoms have already decreased. “The episodes are basically gone and I’m beginning to sleep much better,” she said. She receives her medication package in the mail every two months and lifestyle guidelines from her Ayunique doctor over e-mail more frequently.

Meditation is an area Sheila feels she particularly needs help on. She has found this spiritual side of Ayurveda complementary to her own religious practices. “The Bible tells me to meditate on God’s Word,” she said. So when she receives her online instructions from her Ayunique doctor in India, she finds a quiet spot in her home and begins with breathing exercises to quiet herself. Then she envisions a candle and meditates on the name of God or a piece of scripture. “I’m working to make this a ritual,” she said. Ayunique personalizes its healing guidelines for every patient, so the spirituality it emphasizes can be tailored to any individual’s existing religious rituals or it can introduce customers to ancient Sanskrit scriptures.

The Jiva Institute is also using other technology like telephones to spread the benefits of Ayurveda through India. In its Teledoc program, village-based healthcare workers record and transmit diagnostic data through mobile telephones. Jiva’s Ayurvedic doctors analyze the data, and then prescribe medication and treatment. Jiva hopes to reach 12 million villagers over the next five years.

As Ayurvedic doctors reach out to the West through lecture tours and online clinics, Western doctors are beginning to envision a larger space for alternative medicine within their medical communities. This is partly because there is more patient demand for Ayurveda, said Dr. Silenzio, the doctor in New York. “Spirituality has been so thoroughly excluded in traditional biomedicine, so the religious dimension of Ayurveda is certainly a big draw,” he said. The profile of medical doctors in powerful positions is much more ethnically diverse now than it was 25 years ago. This, in turn, contributes to an openness to incorporating healing philosophies from all over the world, said Silenzio.

“Ayurveda makes people feel intensely light in the body, mind and spirit,” said Mehra, the Ayurvedic clinician in Amritsar. “Who isn’t looking for that?”

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Toward noon on Sunday, the second floor of the Gurdwara Sahib in Glen Cove, Long Island started humming with the sounds of a few dozen small children at play. Outside the three-story white building at 100 Lattingtown Road hangs the saffron triangle-shaped Sikh flag. One flaps outside every Sikh temple around the world.

Freed from their parents who go to prayers in the main temple halls below, the children shuffled and skipped through the hallway towards their Sunday School classrooms, often derailed by a shriek from a friend whom they hadn’t seen all week.

Every conversation began with the murmured greeting “Waheguru Ji Ki Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh,” The Khalsa belongs to God, and to God alone belongs victory. The Khalsa is the baptized state of Sikhs and all Sikhs are expected to be in Khalsa or working towards it as the children are in Sunday School. Here they learn Punjabi, Sikh history and the text and songs of their sacred text: the Guru Granth Sahib.

“Who is going to be an ideal Sikh today?” repeated Mokhetar Singh Kamboj, the tall principal, as he walked down the hallway and gently shepherded the groups of chatting children into classrooms.

When the hallway had finally emptied, Kamboj decided to sit in on the class of the youngest children, a dozen children aged 3 to 6 who sat cross-legged or on their knees around their instructor, a high school-aged young woman in a blue sari. Her hands rested on a harmonium—a large box with a keyboard that forms the backdrop to much Indian music.

The teacher first read two lines of the Gurbani--the text of the Sikh’s devotional songs in the Guru Granth Sahib --without music. Gurbani means message from the teacher.

The children went around repeating the two lines one after another. Then they went around again, each taking turns to sing the two lines they were perfecting that day, a refrain found in many parts of the Gurbani:

Charan Chalo-Charan Chalo-Chalo Maarag Gobind
Mitay Paap-Mitay Paap-Mitay Paap Japeey Har Bind
Walk in the path of Gobind,
Your sins are washed away as you meditate on his name.

Guru Gobind was the last of the ten gurus. Guru Nanak was the first and founded Sikhism in 1669. Gobind gave the community the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy scripture, as the eternal eleventh guru. It is revered as if it were a living guru, and one is installed in each gurdwara.

Crayoned drawings of the ten different gurus decorated the walls of this classroom. Unlike their parents who wear traditional Indian clothing, the children wear jeans or sweatsuits, and veils and small cloth-covered buns –it will take years to grow enough hair to fill a turban.

The children repeated the two lines all together, and this time the classroom took on a bit of a Romper Room atmosphere as some more rambunctious students competed with one another to sing more loudly.

The teacher stopped abruptly to shush them and remind them to sing respectfully. Kamboj nodded in agreement but his eyes twinkled, pleased by the children’s exuberance.

After they have mastered the two lines, the lesson for the day, Kamboj left the room and slipped into another classroom of seven students aged nine through twelve to catch the tail end of their Sunday School Class on Sikh History.

The children spoke casually about Gobind, and Guru Nanak, with the principal.

“Why do we remember him?” prodded Kamboj.

A boy named Agam, which means “infinity,” piped up. “He speaks the three golden rules.”

“And what are those three golden rules we remember every day of our lives?” said Kamboj.

Agam’s sister Angel, a 13-year-old-girl wearing yellow and a translucent white veil, did not wait to be called upon.

First she recited the Three Golden rules in Punjabi and then went through them again in English.

“First, remember God’s Name in every thing you do. Second, share your money with others, especially with those poorer than yourself.” She paused, searching for the third rule. A look of panic began to take form on her face. Her classmates all turned to her, heads cocked expectantly.

“Work,” Kamboj began to prompt her.

“Third, work hard and honestly,” interrupted Angel in a sing-song voice and smiled triumphantly.

Kamboj beamed and bowed gently as he left the classroom.

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