DEEPAK CHOPRA'S LA JOLLA RETREAT GETTING IN TOUCH WITH YOUR INNER DOSHA
By LEE SMITH

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Because my mother had finally remembered when I was born, I felt confident and comfortable checking into the Chopra Center for Well Being for a three-day weekend of healing. The hour of birth would be important in determining my mantra. But more of that later. What brought me to the center was back pain and curiosity about the latest manifestation of Deepak Chopra's marketing genius. I came away from the experience uneasy--even though I have no doubts about Chopra's genuine concern for the human condition.

Dr. Chopra is an endocrinologist--once chief of staff of the New England Hospital of Medicine--who has blended the teachings of Western science with those of Ayurveda, the 5,000-year-old medicine of India. At times a couple of his 15 books (The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, The Way of the Wizard, etc.) have been on best-seller lists simultaneously and have helped provide him an income that ranges up to $2 million a year before travel, staff, and other expenses.

The Center for Well Being, a two-story stucco building decorated in warm pastels, opened in October in La Jolla, California. Exotic oils perfume the air, and here and there the sounds of sitar music are heard. Chopra, however, is not. On the road much of the time, he has left the center in the hands of 50 or so disciples.

The first step on my three-day journey toward Well Being was paying the bill: $1,250, including meals but not the room the center had reserved for me at a nearby hotel. (The seven-day course is $2,900.) My fellow journeyers included a Hollywood producer who suffers from migraines and a young Australian farmer with body acne so severe he is embarrassed to take off his shirt. We answered questionnaires to determine our predominant doshas--a core concept in Ayurvedic medicine. Each of us humans is composed of three mind-body principles, or doshas, but from birth one or two doshas predominate. If your vata dosha rules, you are likely to have a light, thin frame, a restless, creative mind, and a tendency toward dry skin and hair; if it's your pitta dosha that's strongest, you probably have a medium build, a discriminating intellect, and thinning hair; if your kapha dosha is the boss, chances are you're heavyset, easygoing, and have oily hair.

When you are sick or just feeling a little punk, it's because your dominant dosha has got out of hand. The purpose of the weekend was a sort of obedience course for doshas. My score on the questionnaire made it clear I'm a restless vata, a dosha associated with the movement of the wind and therefore dryness. One of the center's doctors, who told me he has an M.D. from Northwestern, advised me to go easy on dry foods, which would make my vata even more intense. I should not eat dried fruit during winter (a dry season) between 2 and 6 P.M., the hours when vata forces are particularly strong. Later, Cheyenne, an aroma specialist and jewelry designer, mixed me a vial of fragrant oils that I can dab on my wrists when I feel a vata crisis coming on.

Meditation is also balancing, and the surest way to rise to a meditative state is by repeating a mantra. The universe is constantly making one of 100 or so primordial sounds, and your best bet for a mantra is the sound it was making at the hour of your birth. I had been informed of this while making my reservation at the center, and prodded my mother into recalling that I had arrived, inconveniently, just after the doctor ducked out for lunch. Francis, my meditation instructor, calculated my mantra with the help of Ayurvedic math and a PC.

The high point of each day was a massage in which two young women marinated and kneaded my parts--one part discreetly avoided--in oils of almond, sesame, and sunflower. Then they wrapped me in sheets soaked in a hot broth of eucalyptus, ginger, juniper, and rosemary, and left me lying on the table like a numb, blissful tamale.

What I liked best about the Chopra Center--in addition to being turned into a tamale--was its spirit of moderation and its lack of fanaticism. No one said that I must never again eat beef or sip single-malt Scotch. Center doctors acknowledged that antibiotics, chemotherapy, insulin, and the other accessories of Western medicine are useful.

Hard for me to accept is the dosha way of viewing life and health. Pacifying a runaway vata with avocados, an out-of-control pitta with melons, or an over-the-top kapha with pears--all part of the center's regimen--seems plain silly. More disturbing is the attempt to link intellectual and physical attributes. People with dominant vatas tend to be quick thinking, adventurous, and thin; pittas tend to be intelligent, strong-willed, and have sensitive skin that sunburns easily; kaphas are forgiving, absorb new material slowly, gain weight easily, and have thick, dark, wavy hair. It's not hard to imagine an employer educated to make such linkages evaluating a prospective hire thusly: "We need a quick learner, and this candidate is overweight and has thick, dark hair. No way." That smells dangerously close to the poison that people of good will have been trying to squeeze out of American life, not put in.

--Lee Smith