Well hello there and welcome to this newsletter.
I am writing to you from my room on a retreat in Sri Lanka where I am sitting at a makeshift desk, wearing a black cloth sarong and a cotton turban wound around my oil-dripping hair. I also have a gritty reddish paste spread across my shoulders and down my spine.
My morning started like this: I slept through the morning yoga and went straight to breakfast - millet porridge, a plate of papaya, watermelon and banana. Then I went to the treatment rooms, which are in an open-aired pavilion, with long black sheets separating the treatment areas. There I had a head massage, a face massage and a ‘nasal cleanse.’ Afterwards, my therapist, Linisha spread this reddish paste across my shoulders and back. “For pain,” she said. I’m not allowed to wash it, or the oil from my hair for 3 hours.
There is no aircon nor fans in the treatment rooms. There are no fluffy robes, or expensive creams or potions used in treatments - it’s all oil. Lots and *lots* of oil. The therapists are women from the local village who have been trained here and through this opportunity, are able to liberate themselves from the difficult lives they would otherwise lead.
Some mornings my treatments may be a full body massage, shirodara (warm oil being dripped for half an hour across your forehead where the ‘third eye’ is,) a steam bath and a foot massage. (The steam bath is taken in an anachronistic piece of apparatus that looks like a wooden version of an iron lung) or a combination of another four therapies. Treatments always end with a ‘sun bath’ - lying on a lounger outside the treatment area with a turmeric-yellow facemask.
Despite it only being only 40 minutes from the coast, it’s very rural. If you go outside Plantation Villa’s gate and turn left, you will walk along a small bitumen street, dotted with houses that peter out, as does the road, at a Buddha statue on a corner. From there, you go up on a dirt “road’ through palm plantations and basically keep going up - it just gets more and more ‘jungle-y,’ with troupes of monkeys playing high in the trees. If you go right as you turn out of the gate, there are a few more village houses, spaced by rice fields, often being grazed by long-horned cows who are always accompanied by a long-legged white bird.
Last night, needing to stretch my legs, another guest and I grabbed our torches and went for a walk in this direction, turning left at the ‘small’ temple and taking a path past backyard tea gardens and small plantations of rubber, crossing a bridge over a sluggish stream and coming out at ‘the big temple’ and then back to the road. As we walked past the rice fields, they were filled with dancing fireflies - like our own personal light show. It was spectacular.
Plantation Villa is definitely not a ‘health retreat’ in the traditional western sense, so if you come expecting that, which I think guests occasionally do, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Apart from yoga and meditation, there are few planned activities (this is purposeful.) A nature walk perhaps, or a very casual cooking class by Plantation Villa’s cook Padma, who seems perplexed at our constant questions about something she probably has done on auto-pilot every day of her life.
The retreat is Buddhist, but there is never any doctrine preached and apart from the giant buddha statue in the yoga shala and a few smaller ones dotted around you wouldn’t know.
It’s also ayurvedic. There is an ayurvedic doctor here every day and you are welcome to chat with her whenever you want. If you are on the full ayurvedic package, she will prescribe medications for you, which are delivered to your table in the dining room at breakfast and dinner. The treatments too are ayurvedic and designed to balance your doshas (we all have Kapha, Pita and Vata and ayurveda believes that an imbalance in one creates health issues for us.) Most people who are here seem to here for minor health issues that plague many of us though, rather than anything too serious.
Others, however come simply for the yoga and medition. There is yoga twice daily in the open-sided yoga shala. There is a long-term teacher here of some repute, however both times I’ve been he’s been on a break, so we have two guest teachers who alternate in classes of yin and flow.
And speaking of flow, there is a constant arriving and departing of guests. I’d guess the average stay is a week to 10 days. At one stage, during my first week, there were only 4 of us. The past week has been almost full. With shared tables, everyone eventually gets to meet everyone else. Guests are multinational and very interesting. They’re not the type you’d meet in a typical ‘health retreat’ but neither are they likely to be found hanging out in an Ashram in India. Off the top of my head, this morning we farewelled an Italian who works with the EU in Islamabad; there is a French interior designer, who has been here a month. There’s a Slovenian tourism operator, and a Lebanese flight attendant. There are a couple of young teachers from Austria, a mother and daughter duo from the Netherlands who work in agriculture and IT respectively and a German couple who keep to themselves. There’s a recently arrived Iranian whose story I haven’t learned yet. Around 3/4 of guests are here on their own.
Meals are very simple and vegan (there’s no real attention drawn to this though) with a lot of produce coming from the retreat’s own large gardens, some of it quite unfamiliar to me. Today for lunch, for example, we had ‘golden apple’ curry. I’m still not sure what golden apples are, but they didn’t seem to be very closely related to the apple. Only coconut oil is used for cooking and there is no salt, refined sugar, or wheat either. But there is plenty of flavour thanks to curry spices and coconut milk. Alcohol of course is unavailable, as is coffee and tea. Instead, we get all kinds of herbal teas. I did have a caffeine headache on day four, and days two to six, I had very puffy eyes and black circles, part and parcel of a detox.
This is my second visit to Plantation Villa, which is in the locality of Nehinna, east of the coastal city of Kalutara. I came once in 2018, when I realised that it was a far cheaper option than doing something similar elsewhere in the world. That was for 21 days. I came to lose weight (which I did - 6 kg) but it was also a great mental reset. This time I booked for 17 days, because I wanted to spend a few days before arriving here elsewhere in Sri Lanka and didn’t really want to be away from home for more than 3 weeks.
So why am I here again? I’d reached a health nadir and needed some ‘shock treatment.’ I had put on a lot of weight, was drinking too much and not sleeping well. I felt stressed and extremely anxious and could feel the black dog of depression just over my shoulder.
It’s now day 14. I’m almost loathe to tell you because I don’t want to sound like a dodgy Facebook ad or a paid influencer, but I feel reborn. My stress level is zero. My anxiety has disappeared and the black dog has taken off elsewhere. When the doctor weighed me 3 days ago, I was 4kg down. My skin is glowing, I’m sleeping like a baby and I can feel myself getting stronger with the daily yoga.
Being something of a ‘long termer here (most people seem to stay 5 – 10 days) I’ve watched everyone arrive looking the same as I did when I came. A tension in their faces, shoulders hunched with the weight of their lives and their responsibilities. Angry because they can’t control anything here. The “giving in” takes 2-3 days. It’s like they exhale deeply and stop fighting. The responsibility we take for others in our everyday lives is transferred entirely to self-care, a rare and precious privilege. There’s no negative stimulation; no noise available as a filler and everyone is moving towards the same goal - health and mental peace. And in this remote place, nature, the great healer, fecund and untamed embraces us in our journey.
As always, for my paid subscribers, there’s a little extra below - my insider tips on getting the most from a stay here.
Ciao for now,
Natascha