Refresh and de-stress – with coffee
Sometimes, travel can be medicinal. When you’re chronically tired or rundown, a week or more in the sun is just what a good holistic doctor should order. And if you’re in a really bad way, or really need to clean up your act, a wellness retreat would surely be a sensible prescription.
This winter, I used the foul weather we had most weekends in Auckland as an excuse to hibernate and it wasn’t long before I began to feel like a big grizzly bear who’d raided the confectionary aisle of her local supermarket before retreating to her den. When I developed a cold I couldn’t shift, I grew even more lethargic. I wasn’t going to break free of my dangerously comfortable hidey hole from the world unaided.
When an invitation to attend a weekend retreat at Rotorua’s Polynesian Spa landed in my inbox, it seemed serendipitous, and I gratefully accepted.
But, in the lead-up, I began to worry that a sudden adjustment to clean living would be too much of a shock to the system. On a previous retreat, I had been required to rise before dawn each day to do an hour of fairly strenuous yoga, before sitting down to a breakfast of raw cereal in silence, and forfeit things I had considered basic necessities (caffeine, alcohol, cooked food, a phone and the internet).
For a night owl who slept with her phone and felt she couldn’t function on less than two cups of coffee a day, it was tough. At first. Once the caffeine withdrawal subsided and I got used to my new timetable, I began to enjoy the karma yoga sessions that saw us complete simple tasks around the solarpowered house and its sustainable garden (think picking olives and brining them); reading up on lifestyle philosophies from around the world; and chatting with other guests about why we were there (almost everyone seemed to be at some kind of crossroads).
While I hadn’t a clue what I was saying, I even came to enjoy the chanting in Sanskrit we did before settling down to our evening drum sessions and while taking part in an ancient Vedic fire ceremony (imagining the things and people that annoy you combusting proved surprisingly therapeutic).
After a week I was a new woman: relaxed, revived, less pasty in complexion.
I felt much the same after the retreat in Rotorua. And I hadn’t even had to give up coffee or digital devices. You can read more about what might be New Zealand’s best-value mini retreat on page 18.