Locating Ayurveda in New York City

Written by Georgica Pettus: December 6, 2019

Nuzzled into 55th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues sits New York Ayurveda and Panchakarma Center (NYAP for the sake of brevity). Just a few blocks away from Columbus Circle, it could, in theory, attract a wide variety of visitors off the street. But instead it sits modestly, almost to the point of being nondescript, below street level. Even I, who had sought this place out and knew what I was looking for, walked right past it. After going up and down the same 30-foot stretch of street a few times, I finally saw the dimly lit door with a sign that read “Ayurveda” in semi-script lettering. The door was open, albeit hidden. New York Ayurveda and Panchakarma Center does not call attention to itself, nor persuade the outside and unknowing community to come in. But if you know to open the door, you will be welcomed into the space.

The interior of NYAP resembles a doctor’s office, but the clinical atmosphere that can inspire a sense of dread in a medial visitor is absent. Instead, the comfortable couches and purple walls create a mood of serenity–serenity without sterility. Lining the purple walls from floor to ceiling are shelves filled with bottles and vials of all shapes and sizes. Due to the peaceful—verging on spiritual—atmosphere, it is easy to forget the fact that this is, in fact, a commercial institution. But like any other medical facility, this is a place in which treatment is provided in exchange for money. Treatments start at seventy-five dollars and go into the many-hundreds. Perhaps the main difference between western and Ayurvedic treatment is that the latter offers a more holistic view of healing, whereas the former offers atomistic treatments, dealing with one ailment at a time.

Prior to receiving treatment from one of the Ayurvedic practitioners, the patient receives an in-depth consultation in which her bodily constitution based on the Tri Doshas is determined. The treatments offered are various, but all work toward the goal of creating balance within the body—and by extension—between the body and nature.

Nisha Saini, the founder of NYAP, insists that the reestablishment of this balance is a purely medical science and has nothing to do with Hinduism, or for that matter, religion in general. In the West, we tend to think of the spiritual and the scientific as mutually exclusive; as Steven Engler puts it, “an increase in the perceived legitimacy of one of these terms is necessarily offset by the decrease of another.”[1] Especially in the early Ayurvedic texts, this type of distinction would not exist. Perhaps because of its transplanted Western context, Nisha—and by extension, NYAP—had to choose a side.

Unlike NYAP, the Ayurveda Café—another expression of Ayurveda in New York—announces its presence openly. On Amsterdam Avenue between 94^th and 95^th Streets its orange awning can be seen from at least a block away, and is brighter and longer than any other awning on the block by a wide margin. A fold-up sign about three feet tall invites passers-by inside by describing the specials of the day in large, hand-written, chalked letters. “Welcome,” says the sign, “you didn’t know that you wanted to be here, but you do.” The door is open eleven hours a day, seven days a week. There is no menu per se at the Ayurveda Café; one meal is offered for lunch and one for dinner.

The constituents of the meal differ each day, but always promise to engage each of the six tastes—sweet, salty, bitter, astringent, sour, astringent—if one samples each of the ten items that will always be served. This array works toward the maintenance of your Dosha balance, not unlike NYAP. NYAP approaches the maintenance of bodily balance from a medical perspective, offering treatments and services as well as advising what to and what not to eat. The Ayurveda Café deals instead with the diet side of Ayurveda.

Ayurveda, like Hinduism, was transplanted from India to the United States, and like most transplants it faced some opposition upon entry. In her text Asian Medicine in America: The Ayurvedic Case, Sita Reddy aptly notes that Ayurveda was first introduced as a “holistic alternative to biomedical orthodoxy.”[2] The key word here is: alternative. Right off the bat, Ayurveda was deemed something other than biomedicine. Its validity as a healthy practice or way of life was not questioned, but the qualification of medical science that Ayurveda had and has in India does not stand firm in the United States.

Guru Paraguli, the co-owner of Ayurveda Café, touched on this issue when I asked about the relationship between the café and Hinduism. According to him, Ayurveda comes from the beginning of time—a time before people came to think as science and religion as opposites, and in that sense a time without either science or religion as such. “All systems are Ayurveda,” said Guru Paraguli.[3]  Living an Ayurvedic lifestyle means knowing your body, because if you know about your body, you know what it needs and doesn’t need, and by extension, what you need and don’t need. One may ask, as I did, why the menu is prix fixe if Ayurveda is about each person knowing what is right for herself. Employees of the Ayurveda Café insist that because all six tastes are accounted for, the menu is indeed right for all. Where personal choice comes into play is quantity. The restaurant believes that the customer will intuit what she needs more or less of, and because the meal is all-you-can-eat, she will adjust to her personal needs.

From the Ayurveda Café in New York City

https://nyayurveda.com
http://www.theayurvedacafe.com

[1] Steven Engler, ““Science” vs. “Religion” in Classical Ayurveda,” (Numen 50, no. 4, 2003)): 420.

[2] Sita Reddy, “Asian Medicine in America: The Ayurvedic Case,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 583, 2002, 99.

[3] Interview with Guru Paraguli, December 7, 2019