The drill started before my departure, when Chopra's book Perfect Health arrived at my home along with a packet of triphala capsules, described as a colon tonic. I was to start a cleansing diet—no salt, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, or meat—five days before checking in at the center, and to take two triphala each night (a far cry from the yoga retreat I once went to in Brazil, where we drank caipirinhas and ate beef and candy).

People come to the Chopra Centers (there is another in New York) with all manner of ailments—cancer, gout, depression, obesity, insomnia, burnout. The Center in Carlsbad (about 20 minutes south of San Diego) is on the grounds of La Costa Resort and Spa, a village of white Mediterranean-style buildings with curvy red-tile roofs and serpentine drives flanked by cheery manicured gardens. When I drove up, a Lilly Pulitzer retrospective was in full force on the central plaza and young couples were attempting to commandeer sunburned children in strollers and on trikes between the pool, the hotel, and the mannequins in eye-searing pastel shifts.

Honestly? My idea of hell on earth.

Once I settled in, though, my days took on a pleasant rhythm. Meditation and yoga sessions in the morning, followed by classes on Ayurveda and meditation, and then more yoga and meditation sessions in the evening. Through it all, we were told to drink buckets of ginger tea and to take our triphala faithfully.

Chopra, who wasn't on the premises, taught a class called Higher States via video, and Simon taught one called Emotional Intelligence. He told us that Oprah had been there the week before, and then asked us what we hoped to get out of our stay. When I said that I hoped to find a fulfilling new life purpose, he snapped, "Well that's not going to happen in five days. Think of something else. I'll come back to you." Thankfully, he never did.

The highlights and lowlights of each day were the treatments. The massages were invariably delightful, but offsetting the hedonism of these oil-slicked treatments were the afternoon bastis, or herbal enemas. The staff at Chopra get props for trying to make an awkward situation seem relatively normal: The room is dimly lit, and they show you what's in the bag (but really, who cares?). On one day, my basti therapist was a young man (I'd specifically requested a woman), and even his kindness and waist-length dreads couldn't distract from the fact that he was the age of my friends' sons and he was giving me an enema.

The yoga, which is held in the same carpeted room that you eat and have classes in, left a lot to be desired. If yoga is one of the cornerstones of the Chopra philosophy, shouldn't it get a room to call its own? The broad range of experience in our group mandated entry-level poses, so for anyone with more than a passing acquaintance with asanas, the classes amounted to serene interludes of mild stretching. The teachers—including a 70-year-old man with a great yogic spirit who also helps with flower arranging and catering—invariably propped a Chopra yoga book on their mat, which seemed an unnecessary sales pitch, and began the class with a reading from Chopra's Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.

Rice and dal are provided for lunch on three days, and an Ayurvedic chef prepares more interesting meals—vegetable curry, tempeh wraps—on the other two. The blueberry cobbler snack bars stacked in the Dharma Room don't seem very healthy, though. "Bliss balls" made of ghee, sesame, and raisins were doled out to bolster the triphala. "I don't know," one in our group said. "I ate 17 blueberry cobbler bars yesterday, and now they want me to swallow butter?"

But the Primordial Sound Meditation classes really made the week at Chopra worth it. In a resurrected Vedic tradition, we all got our own mantra, said to be the sound that the earth was making when we were born. (Apparently the ancients recorded such things, and the Chopra folks plug birth dates into a computer program to access the info.) "If you take away only one thing," a series of instructors repeated, "make it meditation." Indeed, scientists working with the Dalai Lama have found that the brain chemistry of longtime meditators differs from that of those who don't meditate. For one thing, electrode maps show a significantly increased capacity for kindness. While the cortisol- and adrenaline-releasing fight-or-flight response provoked by stress leads to disease, the deep relaxation of routine meditation can counteract aggravation and its side effects.

During meditation at the Chopra Center, in the reverent quiet shared by strangers, the infinite human potential that forms the crux of the teachings feels like a reality. There's a palpable sense, in these half-hour sessions, that regardless of our tattered psyches, the future is bright with possibility. Now that's a souvenir to pack up and take home.