Christa D'Souza experienced the world's most 'intimate' massage, and loved it - it even cured her hangover
Please. Another fab new guru? Do we really need another one in our lives? Not that I already have one (or indeed have ever had one), but just in general… aren’t people who find any excuse to drop the fact that they themselves have one into a conversation, the most tiresome thing in the world? Besides which… how do you get to be a guru exactly? Perhaps you can become one by deed poll?
Who knows, but when a friend of mine emailed to say I simply had to meet with her special guru while she was in London, I could so easily have passed. Jolly glad I didn’t.
Suffering from a spectacularly vile hangover, I meet Guru Yamuna in the vacant London pad of a client of hers: a Notting Hill townhouse with a giant metal chute slide leading from one floor to the one below. More transfixing than the strange, grown up playscape surroundings, is Guru Yamuna herself, who has white hair down to her waist, skin the colour of a conker and a body to absolutely die for. Just the way I long to look now, let alone when I am 60 (her age).
Though you and I may never have heard of Guru Yamuna, back in New York, where she is based, she has a massive following. She is most known for something called Body and Face Rolling but if you look on the internet you’ll see those are only a tiny part of her massive healing and yogic repertoire.
What is Yamuna® Body Rolling, exactly? Well, since that’s not what she decided I needed today, I don’t know. Suffice it to say it basically involves two patented rubber balls with their own special pump which you roll up and down your body, Rolfing style, to align the body correctly. (There are lots of other fun products to buy online too. Spiky rubber balls to roll your feet back and forth on to aid stiletto wearing, specific face rolling balls, yogawear and so on.)
What she has in store for me, possibly because I am ashen with overhung-ness, is an hour of something called Yamuna® Body Logic, incorporated with some, um, buccal cavity massage.
Anyway, after some very pleasurable pulling and prodding and stretching of me this way and that (which, if I were rich, I’d have someone do to me three hours a day) I hear the snapping on of a rubber glove.
Uh-oh. Now, I guess, comes the interesting part. How to explain it? Well, would it be very, very wrong to describe it as being pleasantly, non-sexually… invaded? Because that is what having the inside of your mouth and your gums vigorously, I mean vigorously kneaded, while simultaneously being poked and prodded and vigorously kneaded on the very inside of your groin, is like.
The point of this little story is that after whatever it is that Guru Yamuna has done, not only has my mother of all hangovers completely disappeared, I feel such a sense of elation and wellbeing, I may as well have taken class A drugs. As I write this I’ve already got some of her balls on order (apparently you can do them in bed, by yourself, and they’re fabulous for menopausal bellies) and have booked a “face-balling” session with one of the “disciples” she has trained up and now has working at Selfridges. Meanwhile I cannot WAIT until my guru comes back to London again.
Find out more at www.yamunabodyrolling.com