Wellness

Wading through breakup grief, I’d hit the haziest stage of recovery, somewhere between lying horizontal in dark rooms, and shaving my head. Short of purchasing clippers, I’d resolved to write about wellness travel. Clad in regulation white cotton pajamas in the Western Ghats of India, my lifestyle habits had been judged (hard) and my thoughts about aging, recalibrated. A vigorous wellbeing regimen had revealed my 34-year-old body to be pushing 40, metabolically. Confronting? Yes. Salvageable? Also yes. (More mindfulness, fewer cigarettes, and – my addition – no men). Next stop: I’d pull on my hiking boots for a flight out of sweltering Mumbai, to icy Tokyo.  Post-Covid, Japan dominates algorithms and bucket lists.

"Is that the one where they put a tube... up?” I asked, gesturing to the ceiling. “Yes, ma’am,” Dr. Arun nodded. It wasn’t the unplug I’d had in mind. Sitting in a doctor’s office in the middle of a forest near the western coast of India, clad from head to toe in white cotton, I was feeling vulnerable. Dharana Wellness Retreat had appeared the perfect place for me to attempt a true digital detox. If I couldn’t close my laptop in the famously spiritual mountains of the Western Ghats, there was surely no hope for me. A friend and I had flown in fresh from a boozy work event in North Goa, where unbeknown to me, my body had apparently celebrated a milestone birthday.

Rebecca Illing’s résumé doesn’t read like your typical hotelier’s: circus school graduate, free diver, marine conservation advocate and certified death doula. So when the thirty-seven-year-old Londoner inherited a rundown guest house in Portugal’s northerly Minho region, the property was destined to be reimagined as something more than a straightforward B&B. Illing had spent childhood summers at Paço da Glória, roaming its cork oak woodlands and swimming in the nearby Lima River. But the circumstances of her return in 2020 were less idyllic. Europe was entering lockdown, and she was grieving the sudden death of her brother.

I’m holding a respectable tree pose on a sun-bleached jetty above St. Lucia’s turquoise waters. It’s the sort of place you drift off to mentally when you are midway through a peaceful meditation in a reassuringly mildewed London yoga studio. This time, though, I’m actually here and ready to embark on one of the latest wellness trends: a holistic diving experience in the Caribbean complete with breathing exercises and underwater yoga that will allow me to reach “whole new levels of relaxation” and, one hopes, enough spiritual transcendence to get me out of the water if things don’t go to plan. But there are boat engines roaring, tourists being herded on and off and an unusually aggressive coastal wind is picking up, along with the tide.