Soak your troubles away
Rotorua could just be home to one of New Zealand’s best value micro retreats, and a great respite for a ‘monkey brain’, writes Lorna Thornber.
For me, one of the best things about a wellness retreat is the opportunity it affords to absolve yourself of responsibility for your health, wellbeing and daily schedule. Deliver yourself into its communal cocoon and you are guided at every turn by people far better qualified than you are to prescribe how to live your best life.
Eat the healthy food they put in front of you, participate in the pre-arranged activities, follow their instructions and advice, and voila – you emerge transformed.
Good retreat leaders are essentially fairy godmothers for world-weary adults in need of someone else to take care of them for a bit.
The trouble is, retreats led by people you’d be happy to have run your life for a few days tend to be expensive, especially if you have to shell out for overseas airfares as well.
Hence my delight at discovering what could just be New Zealand’s best-value mini retreat. At one of the country’s oldest and most renowned commercial therapeutic spas, no less.
After a winter of torrential rain and tight deadlines that left me so exhausted by Friday, all I longed for was a two-day Netflix binge in bed, thinking there were few greater pleasures in life, the two-day Mindful Moments Retreat at Rotorua’s Polynesian Spa – with its long soaks in hot springs, gentle exercise and meditation sessions – sounded just the thing to help me get my mojo back.
Held at the geothermal complex on Lake Rotorua, the weekend retreats, which cost $479 a person excluding accommodation, are led by mindfulness and meditation teacher Helena Keenan, and journalist turned yoga instructor and wellness coach, Rachel Grunwell.
Chilled, cheerful and clearly not advocates of the ‘‘thou shalt eat nothing but caveman fare’’ and other super-restrictive food philosophies, the pair made it clear from the start that we weren’t in for anything too strenuous or extreme.
Unlike at certain ultra-luxurious but ultra-strict retreats I could mention (Gwinganna in the Gold Coast being among the most high-profile), coffee, smartphones, leaving the premises, and other attempts to re-establish contact with the outside world aren’t banned. We were welcome to chug down coffees from the on-site cafe and were free to do what we pleased at the neighbouring Sudima Hotel each evening (tut if you must but a weekend is not a weekend for me without a generous glass of pinot gris).
The main aim of the retreat, Keenan and Grunwell stressed, was to take full advantage of having two days to relax.
Sipping on green and sunset-coloured smoothies (I’d pre-loaded on caffeine at the hotel), we began by introducing ourselves and sharing our reasons for being there. While men are welcome, our group of eight were all women, and included a new mum whose partner had told her she looked like she needed a break, a mate of hers who’d decided to tag along, two sisters who lived in different parts of the country and thought they may as well indulge in some quality pampering together, and a couple of Auckland-based Germans in need of an escape from the big smoke.
You know you really are blessed when your first task for the day is to sit and soak for an hour, and I was hyper aware of this as I swapped the frigid outdoor air temperature for the 39- to 41-degree Celsius heat of the Pavilion Pools. Watching geysers erupt across the lake as I lolled about in one of three pools fed by the Priest Spring, sonamed for the Catholic clergyman said to have been cured of crippling arthritis after bathing in its slightly acidic waters, was much better than watching a Netflix nature doco in bed.
Looking a bit worse for wear these days, I made sure I left plenty of time to immerse myself in the alkaline waters of the Rachel Spring, once said to bless bathers with ageless beauty.
Claims about the benefits are more Advertising Standards Authority-friendly these days, but many still swear by its anti-ageing and skin-soothing properties (the sodium silicate it contains is a natural antiseptic). And it’s a lot cheaper (and more enjoyable) than a round of botox.
Muscles loosened by the warm water, we headed back indoors for a gentle, hour-long yoga session.
As someone who normally opts for faster-paced power yoga classes, it seemed on the slow and easy side to me. But it was nice to prioritise relaxation over burning calories for a change. Plus, I was so sedated after the ‘‘swim’’, I’d have been quite happy if we’d spent the entire hour in corpse pose.
After a vegetable-stuffed quinoa salad, chocolate-flavoured bliss balls, fruit and (in the spirit of a non-restrictive retreat) cheese and crackers for lunch, we were shuttled to the city’s famous redwood grove in Whakarewarewa Forest.
It’s not hard to see why The Redwoods was on Prince Harry and Meghan’s must-visit list on their trip to New Zealand – the centenarian specimens of the tallest species on Earth that line the twokilometre Memorial Grove Track are majestic.
Settling in for a ‘‘wellness wisdom’’ session after our walk, Grunwell told us about how she went from being an ‘‘unfit mum’’ who couldn’t run from one lamp post to the next without turning seconddegree-sunburn-red to a serial marathon runner largely by ‘‘continuing to show up’’.
Grunwell spent several years interviewing experts from New Zealand and abroad on a range of health and wellbeing topics for her book Balance: Food, Health and Happiness, and shared some of their key messages and strategies, including positive psychology guru Martin Seligman’s theory on what makes humans happy.
Dubbed Perma, his model stands for ‘‘positive emotions’’ such as optimism that helps us keep calm and carry on through tough times, ‘‘engagement’’ in activities we can become so absorbed in we enter a ‘‘state of flow’’, solid ‘‘relationships’’, a sense of ‘‘meaning’’ or purpose, and targeted ‘‘accomplishments’’ to guide us. I don’t have a big enough word count to delve into the theory properly here, but I’d recommend Googling it.
It was bucketing down when we arrived at the adults-only Deluxe Lake Spa the next morning for an hour’s soak before our treatments, but that meant we had the five lakeside pools and geothermal loungers set in a pretty rock garden more or less to ourselves. A vast improvement, I was told, on the bedlam the night before when they’d been packed full of tour groups.
Feeling the rain on my face as I floated in the clear water (eyes shut and ears beneath the
steaming surface), I fell into something of a trance.
I wish I could say it was because I had finally mastered the fine art of mindfulness but it was relief, I think, at being able to properly relax.
Muscles suitably re-relaxed, we headed back inside for our choice of hour-long treatments – mine was the signature hydrotherapy massage inspired by the spas of Aix-en-Provence in France.
After being covered from neck to toe in mud (you can opt for fruit- and nut-scented scrubs if you prefer), a series of shower heads continued to pass over me as the togs-wearing masseuse got to work on muscles I soon discovered ached immensely.
While getting water up my nose made it difficult to breathe at times, my back felt much less like a fulltime keyboard warrior afterwards. And I hadn’t felt so clean and pure for some time.
The meditation session that followed provided a fairly comprehensive introduction to the increasingly popular practice, along with tips on how to calm a ‘‘monkey mind’’ (we all hear voices pretty much all the time, it seems).
A guided meditation that encouraged us to imagine ourselves in some idyllic alternate reality (I can’t elaborate as I drifted off after a few seconds), was followed by five minutes of sitting or lying in silence (at least half of us drifted off during that, too). Most of us struggled to get up from our mats afterwards, and failed to stifle yawns as we said our goodbyes.
Heading back to Auckland, I realised I’d probably spent about a quarter of the retreat asleep or comatose. That’s a miraculous result for a chronic insomniac such as myself.
The monkey in my mind may still be hyperactive enough to make meditating for more than a minute seem impossible, but I left feeling far less frazzled, with a firm resolve to make more time for gentle exercise and long baths.
I can’t say it was a butterfly that emerged from the cocoon that was the retreat that rainy weekend, but it was certainly a less drab, more alert looking moth.