Global crisis, global detox: the magic mountain cure

‘I wager, three weeks at my retreat, and the leaders of the world would be giving each other foot rubs, not threatening each other with weapons of mass destruction.’

Big words for a small man. Massive words for Bhagwads Dosh, head guru of the Spiritual Retreat for the Conflict Fatigued, who, when standing, stands at a mere five-foot one-inch (although, to be fair, is said to have broken seven feet when yogic flying, two of which were his).

The diminutive Dosh, as his patchouli-scented pamphlets suggest, is an ‘inspiration to us all, a giver of awakened life’. I have got to know him and his teachings well over the holiday break, having spent two weeks at his retreat, cleansing my body and mind of their impurities, and selling them over the internet.

I have come back to ‘the real world’ convinced that we can all learn from him.

‘Why are you here?’ Dosh asked me as I arrived, barefooted and sore. ‘That’s an easy one,’ I told him through his beard. ‘I’ve come to recover from the year gone, and to prepare for the year to come.’ ‘Join the queue,’ he said, spitting into a gold spittoon.

Seems I wasn’t the only one. The place was littered with weary worriers, jaunted news-junkies, and prostrated politicos. They all needed replenishment. ‘I don’t know how much more of this I can take!’ rang the collective wail after lights-out.

2002, I realised as the festive season approached, had been another tense year, full of conflict, terror, and war-talk. 2003, I figured, was likely to bring more of the same, perhaps worse. A guy, I decided, needs to prepare himself for battle. The hedonistic nineties, let’s face it, were a long time and several face lifts ago.

The Dosh Retreat, I calculated on my wife’s budget, was a pricey Marine Academy for the soul. I needed toughening up.

‘Man’s only battle is with himself,’ Dosh once said. These words now adorn the gates of his retreat, which are guarded by armed security men.

I talked to Dosh, tape recorder rolling, and asked him what these words meant in the post 9/11 world.

‘Buy a dictionary,’ he cracked, plucking his eyebrows. ‘You don’t know what those words mean? Look them up, you chump. Jeez, this place sure isn’t getting the class of guests it used to.’

‘But,’ I persisted, ‘if man has no enemy bar himself, then who is this Saddam guy?’

‘Saddam is a deeply tense man,’ Dosh said, sympathetically. ‘About as chilled as a barbecue. He has all these palaces, all this luxury, one hundred per cent approval of his people, and yet have you seen this guy’s wrinkles? And the way he walks, his shoulders hunched, his shooting arm all tight? The guy should try a course of my special acupuncture, with knitting needles. Or some yogic breathing. You know, in through one nostril, out through the other.’

We breathed together. I felt the geopolitical crises lift from my body and evaporate into the scented air.

‘You think he’ll ever come?’ I asked. ‘To the retreat?’ Dosh laughed. ‘A man’s spirit is his own. Sometimes a dove carried on the wind. Sometimes a jackass kicking his hoofs into the dust. It’s up to him and the UN.’

I didn’t argue.

Still, even without Saddam, or maybe because of him, business at the Dosh retreat is booming. ‘I’ve never seen so many destroyed spirits and lined faces,’ Dosh enthused. ‘People are looking for some peace in their lives, some relief from the constant “precipice of war” stuff. Their nerves are shattered.’

And so was I. Halfway through our conversation, I fell asleep. That’s the kind of year I’ve had. Maybe even the kind of year we’ve all had.

The Bhagwads Dosh Spiritual Retreat for the Conflict Fatigued is a converted fairy-tale schloss, hidden away among 2000 almost-unspoilt acres in southern Switzerland. Look up, and you see the Alps. Look down, and you see your pedicured feet.

It specialises in what the Geneva Watch called ‘citizen pampering’: ‘citizen’ because of its concentration on providing relief from the constant intake of political and military tension; ‘pampering’ because it shuns cold turkey in favour of reflexology and scented candles. Retreaters come from all over. Java to Caracas. Gujarat to Pyongyang. Moscow to the Sudan. Although roughly ninety per cent tend to be from Manhattan Island.

It was just what I needed.

But it wasn’t me that Dosh was interested in. ‘You’re not the point,’ he told me during a hypnosis session. ‘The point is the karma of the world as a whole. Currently, it’s all out of whack. It needs rebalancing. It needs some time to meditate, contemplate and hum. The world’s not humming.’

Clearly not. The numbers were surprising. Thousands of tired souls, chanting together, holding hands, taking steam baths while wrapped in seaweed. Conflict fatigue has gone global.

My two weeks were what I will call a pre-emptive strike on stress. The stress will inevitably attack me soon. Best that I get to it first.

I was lightening my load, missile dumping my stockpiles of anxiety and gas. This was a political knacker’s yard (my phrase for political knackeredness). We were all ready to launch a crusade against our neurosis and embrace nothingness.

‘If I had that President Bush in my office now, sitting on that beanbag you occupy,’ Dosh said, ‘I would tell him that he must embrace the nothingness in his brain. Stop trying to show people that he can think. That is the only way the world will be safe – for him to let it go and float away into the emptiness of his head. Oh, and I bet he’d like our massages. Our oil is top quality, and he does so appreciate his oil.’

And Kim Jong Il? ‘I’d recommend colonic irrigation,’ Dosh said. ‘Definitely colonic irrigation.’

I was slicing some cucumbers for my eyes, when a fellow retreater, oatmeal in hand, tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Just imagine them,’ he said. ‘Saddam, bin Laden, that Korean SOB, Musharaf, Vajpayee, that Mugabe, Sharon, Arafat, Putin, Bush – not to mention Milosevic, all those Nigerians, Kashmiris, those Malaysians, and whoever the hell else thinks they’re in charge – imagine them all here, unwinding, taking jacuzzis, foot baths, mud baths, aromatherapy, concaving their spines, doing the crab, a bit of reflexology, the occasional facial. You think if these warmongers pampered themselves a bit, organised some “Me” time, a guy like me would have to be here? Think about it.’

And I have. This guy, whoever he was, real or a product of marijuana-induced hallucination, was right. It is not we who should be at the Dosh retreat. It is our ‘leaders’.

It’s like Bhagwads told me: ‘Weapons inspection? Don’t talk to me about weapons inspection. Who is this Hans Blix guy? Nobody in this world knows more about inspecting weapons than my masseuse.’

Are you listening, Mr Cheney?

All Charlie Chaplin images from the 1917 film The Cure