GREAT ESCAPE
Elon Musk, take note. We love your innovations, your swashbuckling business maverick style and your vision that has no bounds. But it’s time to gather your depleted self and let go of those impetuous tweets.
Take a break. Look after your mental wellbeing. Take it down a notch or two and allow productivity to improve and stability to resume, and this can calm shareholders and yourself.
Executives and A-type personalities are recognising that mental wellbeing has upside for the bottom line, especially in today’s “transparent” and relentless digital media world.
With this in mind, we tried out Oxford Healthcare Retreat, a new boutique wellness guesthouse (it opened in April), catering to the needs of stressed-out executives — or anyone really. This elegant oasis is in the middle of Melrose, between high-octane Sandton and the Johannesburg CBD.
Importantly, it’s all about relatively short-term stays to achieve a sense of wellbeing.
The therapeutic goals of the programmes are to enhance your sense of wellbeing, to better understand the mind-body interaction and to experience interventions that restore balance and assist with realigning the system by combining consultative therapies with body work. This is the new way: stilling the mind and allowing the nervous system to down-regulate. It’s more than a few days at the spa.
The aim, says assistant general manager Karen Turis, is to nourish mind and body, bringing both to a place of calm. When you leave the retreat you will be equipped to sustain this inner calm. You can go for one night, but four nights is the minimum recommended for real