Can you REALLY Zoom yourself Zen?
Happiness lessons live from Mexico. Shiatsu self-massage. Even surfing in your back garden. As some of the world’s best spas host ‘virtual retreats’...
No doubt about it, this pandemic has sucked a lot of joy out of life. Whether it be a drink with friends in the pub or a two-week break in the sun, the prospect of anyone having any fun ever again seems to have all but vanished. by necessity, how we pursue leisure is changing — if not for ever then certainly in the short to medium term — and the wellness industry, born in large part out of people’s desire to find meaning and balance in a frenetic world, is having to adjust.
Products and treatments designed to counteract the effects of long working hours, stressful office environments and gruelling commutes, suddenly have less purpose in a world where many are now working from home, whether they like it or not.
Classes from yoga to Pilates to CrossFit and beyond are all cancelled; gyms and clubs are closed. the booming health tourism market, which was worth around £700 billion last year and, before Covid-19, was projected to hit more than £900 billion by 2022, has taken a massive hit, grinding to a halt along with every other area of the hospitality/leisure industry.
Although many shops and businesses are now preparing to reopen, this whole sector is at the back of the queue.
It’s no surprise, then, that so many clubs, clinics, salons and gyms are
Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you’re exactly the same AUDREY HEPBURN
diversifying online, in a bid to guide their businesses through the crisis and out the other side.
You can attend virtual classes in almost anything, from mindfulness to Barrecore to eyebrow threading, but go on a whole wellness retreat virtually? Can it really be done? Here, four writers put the latest trends to the test … VIRTUAL RESORT: Mexico’s Grand Velas resorts Wellnessing Getaway Online (velasresorts.com). COST: Free access to a one-day virtual retreat via pre-recorded Youtube videos, including a sunrise workout and classes on happiness, nutrition, anxiety, art therapy, dance, yoga and sound therapy. NEXT ONE: Available any time at magazine.velasresorts.com i WAs feeling a bit frayed — who isn’t? — and then up popped this: an invitation to spend a day finding ‘Elevated Bliss’ at the Grand Velas five-star spa hotel in Mexico.
Obviously, things being as they are, the invitation didn’t actually include travelling to Mexico. i only had to get to my computer.
From 10am Mexican time, and for all that Mexican day, this internationally renowned resort hotel would be running a Wellnessing Getaway Online from its Facebook page directly into my sitting room in West London.
Better still, it was free: a bargain of godly proportions when you consider that a 24-hour non-virtual ‘wellnessing’ experience at Grand Velas costs up to $1,400 (£1,149).
the six-hour time difference was always going to be a hurdle. the Grand Velas journey to ‘Elevated Bliss’ began with a fat-burning Energetic sunrise class. sunrise in Mexico starts at our 4pm — about the time (quite early, due to quarantine boredom) my countdown begins for the first glass of gin.
if i stuck with the timetable, Deborah Hanekamp, a ‘medicine reading healer’ (no, i don’t know what that means either), would be teaching me how to transform my ‘bathroom into a healing space’ at around midnight. And roberto Gopar would be live-streaming ‘the multiple benefits on a physical, mental and spiritual level’ of his sound therapy session at 2am, by which time i would have long since passed out to the therapeutic sound of my own snoring.
i’m going to skip over the Energetic sunrise session because there was nothing elevated or blissful about it: a pre-recorded cardio workout with a shiny blonde dame in running pants, standing in front of a wooden wall which didn’t even attempt to resemble paradise or Mexico or a beach. she shouted out things like: ‘squeeze those glutes!’
the next session, Full Body
Workout with rachel Devaue, wasn’t any more elevating: a different dame (also pretty, but with dark hair) stood in a modern kitchen, shouting: ‘Engage that core!’
session No 3 (also pre-recorded) was a talk on the science of Happiness, in which wellness expert, author and former model Nikki sharp told us that ‘happiness is something we all want in our life’.
she posed the ticklish question, ‘Why do we want to be happy?’, before brilliantly answering it: ‘Happiness actually has led to people making more money, so the happier you are means that you do make more money …’
there was a gap in the schedule after that, while the people of Mexico and elsewhere — i didn’t get the sense this was playing out to a large audience — enjoyed their siesta, and here in the UK, i poured myself that gin.
i wondered whether it was worth tuning in again after aforementioned refreshment, given how comically hopeless it had been up until then. But i had nothing else to do, so in i logged for one last session: art therapy.
to soothing music, and after a struggle to squeeze the paint from the tube, art therapist Beatriz did some therapeutic splodging, and as she filled her paper with splodges, she spoke to us softly in spanish:
‘simplemente expresate’, she murmured, which probably means, ‘simply express yourself’.
By the time she held up her splodgy ‘finished’ painting, i was actually crying with laughter. A state of elevated bliss, indeed. so, thank you, Grand Velas. We got there in the end.