Sivananda Juice Fast: NY and the Bahamas
Posted in Home on 03/24/2009 03:59 pm by Jane2010 Bahamas Update: As it turns out there is organic produce to be had in Nassau, Bahamas at Good Fellows Farm which I have been told is near the airport. Hopefully Sivanada will forge a relationship with the farm to provide organic produce for the juice fasts and ultimately for all/much of their produce needs.
After my last visit I was assured by several staff members that Sivananda will be switching to eco-friendly cleaning products and abandoning their use of Lysol, Fantastick, Chlorine Bleach and heavily fragranced products. Baby steps but certainly in the right directions. March Forth!!
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I have attended the juice fast at Sivananda both in upstate New York at the Yoga Ranch and in the Bahamas at their Paradise Island ashram this year. Upstate New York offers an organic juice fast and the Bahamas does not.
Manu Dawson, a nutritionist from Integral Yoga, designed the ten day detox which incorporates three juices a day for seven days with raw food meals provided before and after the fast. Upstate New York in the summer is idyllic. At the ranch you can meditate and do yoga twice a day in the bucolic bliss of the Catskills or relax under a tree and take it easy noting the benefits of the juice cleansing your sluggish organs. The stone sauna on the property is the perfect place to speed up the detox process.
Having done dozens of juice fasts I think that more attention could be paid to making the juices delicious. Just because they are alkaline green juices doesn’t mean they have to taste like puddle water. I would also advise bringing your own lemons as they used organic lemon juice from a bottle (pasteurized for sure) if you are concerned about staying 100% live/raw.
Despite the taste factor you do start to feel better. To add to your understanding of the detox process Manu lectures daily on subjects ranging from nutrition to supplements and various health practices. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of herbs and vitamins and is always handy with a remedy for a juice faster who has a nagging detox symptom.
The same can not be said of Sivananda Bahamas Juice fast. I went in knowing that the juices weren’t organic but had heard somewhere that most of the pesticides remain in the pulp and that it is better to juice with non-organic than not at all. I no longer believe this to be true.With each passing day I felt more and more tired and congested.I bailed about day 5 with a bad tooth ache and total exhaustion and just ate the salads provided in the main kitchen. Sivanada in the Bahamas does not maintain the property using eco products so you are inundated with the smell of bleach and lysol and fabric softener everywhere. Upstate new York has done an excellent job of greening all of their household/laundry cleaning products.I wish that the Bahamas would follow suit and practice ahimsa, the sanskrit term for doing no harm. It is a small eco system on Paradise Island and at the moment Sivananda is leaving a pretty big footprint on the pristine landscape.
Their excuse for not providing organic vegetables for the juice fast is that it is too hard to get to the island. They manage to get incense and peasant shirts from India to sell in their boutique so it seems that acquiring organic produce from the USA can be done if they plan for it. The setting otherwise is exquisite.Beautiful beach, rustic but comfortable rooms and plenty to keep you busy with the ever changing roster of guest lecturers and musicians arriving almost daily.
If you are looking to jump into the cleansing process I highly recommend the upstate Sivanada yoga ranch 10 day juice fast and would seriously advise you to skip the Bahamas version until they figure out how to get organic produce to Paradise Island
http://www.sivanada.org