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Some experiences change your outlook forever. Once you've dined at a Michelin three-star restaurant, you'll never again look at food the same way. I've had the good fortune to indulge myself at quite a number of them over the years, and while it doesn't exactly turn you off ordinary restaurant fare, it certainly makes you more discerning. Once you've seen what's possible in the culinary arts, eating at your average, pretentious North American 'fine dining' establishment and putting up with bush-league servers is like listening to Wayne Newton have a go at "Nessun Dorma."
These thoughts are prompted by a recent visit to a wellness spa that specializes in authentic Ayurvedic therapies, one of just a handful in North America. I know, I know—'Ayurvedic' massage is featured at most spas nowadays, along with tutti-frutti aromatherpy and Hawaiian hot rocks. As it happens, I've had such an "Ayurvedic" massage at a boutique spa in downtown Toronto: it amounted to a standard Swedish rubdown with scented oil and taped sitar music. No, I am speaking here of the real thing, the authentic therapeutic techniques developed over the five thousand years or so that Ayurvedic medicine has been practiced in India, and dispensed by trained Ayurvedic physicians from Bombay.
Elemental Embrace Spa Review OntarioThe true Ayurvedic experience became available for the first time to southern Ontario and upstate New York late in 2003 when Elemental Embrace opened the doors to a twenty-thousand-square-foot wellness retreat and destination spa set in thirty acres of wooded hills near the resort town of Brighton, Ontario, about an hour and a half east of Toronto via Highway 401. It is the project of an Indo-Canadian family of hoteliers and entrepreneurs. Mother Begum Teja has a long background in Ayurvedic massage and medicine; sons Jazir and Muqit have degrees in marketing and accounting, respectively.
As a system of medicine—probably the world's oldest—Ayurveda offers a full range of treatments for what ails you, and as clinical procedure enjoys much the same status in India as acupuncture in China or shiatsu in Japan: in each country these ancient therapies are taught in universities and practiced in hospitals alongside Western medicine. But Ayurveda, the "science of life" in Sanskrit, is more than medicine. It is a roadmap to a "good" life in every sense of the word. Ayurvedic physicians, called vaidyas, go through four years of post-secondary schooling and follow that with a year's internship, usually in a rural clinic.
Elemental Embrace Spa Review Ontario If you book in to Elemental Embrace for Ayurvedic treatments and a consultation, you can expect to be quizzed by one of the doctors about your medical history, living habits, tastes, dreams, food preferences, propensity to perspire, bowel movements, and a hundred other things... information the practitioners need to identify your general dasha, or physiological and mental makeup. The idea is that everyone has a blend of vata (air and space, representing, roughly, the nervous system), pitta (fire and water—the enzyme system in modern Western terms), and kapha (water and earth, approximating the nutritive/digestive system).
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