sunday times — style magazine

Getting away from it all no longer means a cheap flight to Ibiza, a jug of sangria and a towel on the sand. Sangria might be good for the spirits, but it's short change for the soul. As for holidays. they have become too busy. All that eating and drinking and lying in the sun is exhausting. not to mention being penned in like cattle at Gatwick. There's not so much as a glimpse of a happy holidaymaker among the red-eyed. pinkskinned wrecks gathered listlessly around the luggage carousel.

A vacation spa is only a little less tiring (all that organised activity and scarily clean people in white coats). And now that your local dodgy hairdresser is offering "treatments", the very concept is losing its lustre. All in all, treatments have become an appointment on every personal digital assistant, so they're more like a must-do than a window in a busy day when we're given permission to lie down. Tick that list: meditation, yoga. pedicure. Oh my God. I forgot to have my massage.

We are what Teresa Hale, founder of the Hale Clinic, in London. and one of the pioneers of alternative therapies. calls "affluent slaves". ‘We're all time-poor: working hard, running to the gym or yoga, rushing to get more material roads. They don't make us happy and we don't know why. Tat's why there's such a big interest in healing, particularly spiritual healing.’

It is also why yoga became fashionable. Madonna and Geri didn't take it up just to give good butt (although the yoga derrière is a lovely thing), but to find some peace, a way of feeling better in the fractured, noisy mess of life.

Let's face it. modern life is punishing. It's aggressive, hostile, competitive and isolating. People are in pain. The figures for depression. anxiety disorders, alcohol and drug abuse, eating disorders and suicide are all on the increase. Depression is a health disorder second only to cardiac disease, while antidepressants are prescribed almost as often as antibiotics.

No wonder, then, that we all need to get away. These days. that means going to a retreat. They are now so popular that they even have their own guide (The Good Retreat Guide, Rider £12.99). Retreats are not simply religious enclaves or spas with a spiritual twist. They come in every shape and size. from yoga to Buddhist to creative writing to soul-searching. But what makes a good retreat? According to Fiona Arrigo, who has been organising them for nearly 20 years: ‘Retreats are about time. Time is the healer. the thing that we all need. The body has an innate intelligence: if we allow quietness, it will start to come back to its rhythm. A retreat should treat people holistically through mind, body and soul. A spa is more externally focused, it's about fixing the physical you.’

What a good retreat offers is essentially time out to download the chaos embedded in our bodies and reprogramme the hard disk that is our nervous system.

I suffer from an illness — clinical depression — so I take a particular interest in healing. Which is why, when I heard about Arrigo and the work she is doing in her retreat. I fell over myself to meet her. She changes lives, works miracles, is what I had heard. ‘We never promise anything.’ she told me. ‘Our work is about being human, offering understanding. If you are cared for, met with gentleness and patience. Own you can heal. People are neglected in all soils of ways.’

Before you're allowed within a manna's breath of the retreat, however, you have a consultation with Arrigo - at least a week before you go. I was not sure what to expect. Mother Teresa? Not high-octane glamour, that's for sure, or a thoroughly dirty laugh, which is what I got. She is clever, and practical, too, with little time for the lunatic fringe of the new age. But what marks her out is her uncanny ability to zero in on what is causing distress.

I talked about myself for 40 minutes and then I left. A week later. I arrived in Somerset. Again. I had no idea what to expect. I was met at the station, driven to a farm, high up on a windy ridge. There was a farmhouse and a collection of cottages, each prettily decorated. Mine was black-and-white gingham with a huge feather bed and a roaring log fire. From that moment, time stopped. There were other people staying there, but I never saw them.

I also never left my cottage. Delicious home-cooked meals appeared. based on a nutritional plan devised particularly for me. I was on the basic detox - no wheat, no gluten, no dairy, lots of fruit and veg and all, naturally, organic. Therapists appeared and set up a treatment table in front of the fire. Acupuncture, massage, facial, reflexology, hot stone, shiatsu, yoga, biodynamic psychology: I did it all. In my search for sanity, I've done it all, too, so I know a bit about alternative therapy. And these people were good. In fact, they were brilliant. Then there was Arrigo, overseeing the process, adjusting the programme according to the therapists' reports and my emotional state, and offering her own particular therapy, which she calls life coaching but which I would call plain wisdom. ‘A lot of what we do is really simple,’ she said. ‘We enable people to be who they truly are.’

The rest of the time there was just me, a log fire, a view out over a windy ridge and silence. When it comes to retreats, this one is out there on its own. It is fabulously expensive, but it is also fabulously effective. The optimum time to spend here is 10 days. I could only manage two, due to various constraints. But I'm going back, for one really simple reason: Arrigo did more for me in two days than happy pills did in two years. Cost: £450-£700 a day, depending on the number of treatments. Included in the price is the initial consultation, a private cottage, all food and drink (designed to each individual's nutritional plan), all treatments and therapies (to a schedule tailormade by Arrigo) and any medical tests required. All meals are served in your private cottage and all treatments also take place there.

from the Sunday Times Style magazine
reproduced by kind permission