Health Retreat

The best thing about spending 7 days at a health retreat in a sub-tropical rainforest with 25 strangers is that I learnt how to Salsa. I was rubbish, but I loved it.

The worst thing about living in a hermetically sealed wellness universe for a week with 25 strangers is that some of what this universe accepts as given truths are not always so universal.

Not all of us believe in guardian angels or alternative therapies lock, stock and barrel. Not all of us buy the Positive Psychology model as the superior path to happiness and self-fulfillment. Not all of us consider wearing a name tag day in day out normal.

But then what’s normal about chunking-up my mortgage to pay for a week’s holiday (first in 10 years) to some place where I wake up at sunrise for Tai Chi? What’s so great about sustaining a 2-day caffeine-withdrawal headache and enduring the daily torture of something called a spin class? Why chose to be on intimate terms with mosquitos that think they’re fighter-bombers?

Before I paid for this health retreat that promised to coach me into submission with a personalized ‘wellness vision’, have me living outside my comfort zone and without virgin olive oil, I figured out that my repayments were about the equivalent of 3 lattes and 2 sav blancs a week.

I can do that. Not a biggie when I put it like that. I deserve a break. My stress levels are off the radar. I’m self-medicating with booze and carbs like a wharfie on a busman’s holiday. My family and work commitments are overwhelming and my love life is … well…complicated.

On arrival at our health retreat we all stand about self-consciously, summing up the other in a glance. She’s looks like a pain. He’s a fitness freak bozo. Those two in charge are just too perky-positive to be real.

I am wondering if it’s too late to ask for my money back. This place looks like an upmarket school camp but without any of the sugar highs or sexual experimentation to look forward to.

As the day progresses my initial defensiveness dissolves into surrender, although I do maintain a pretty active bullshit-metre throughout the stay. Initially I leaven it with humor and self-deprecation and then gradually give up the performing for the more serious stuff like learning how to breathe. Apparently I haven’t been breathing properly for 50 years.

Sometimes the daily discussions and workshops about exercise, diet and the latest in neuroscience and mindfulness training really get to me.

First-world worries! I wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t had a special price on offer. Everyone from the psychic flower reader to the life coach with a PhD in chutzpah thinks he’s a shrink. This is a kibbutz but with less concern for the community good and way better bathrooms. A massive share-house for rich people with nothing better to do than talk about gluten intolerance and strengthening their cores.

Other times, like when I’m striding and sweating up and down mountain-sides, the local fauna scuttling up the forest trees, the air clean, damp and smelling of frangipani, and all the while chatting intensely with a couple of my new best friends about everything from kids to kayaks, I feel the best I have in ages.

As we talk and walk, every day a barrier down, a revelation shared, I am blown away by these women. By day 2 we are laughing and crying like adolescent girls on a night out.

We are 20 women and 5 men; the usual gender ratio at this place apparently. There is a husband and wife team too and I just can’t imagine coming to such a place as a couple. I don’t know why exactly but it just seems to defeat the purpose or something. The men are blokey-jokey and we are most of us probably over 40 and at one of life’s crossroads.

I don’t avoid the blokes but the subtle peculiarity of group dynamics means that I end up spending most of my time with 4 women, in particular.

I am alone in my real life quite a bit but there’s always a distraction at hand. Here in this technology-free-capsule I am alone in my room by 7.30pm and it’s just me and my little fast-detoxing brain. I am not used to this kind of silence and it’s confronting. My leg muscles are burning. I can hear my heart beat.

Is it possible to make substantial changes to the way I am living my life after only a week here? They say it takes 21 days to change a habit. But there’s no denying the power of hanging out with a bunch of people who are all trying to be better, let alone absorbing the palpable goodwill and positive vibes.

By day 4, I have done 16 hours exercise, had 2 massages, 1 facial and participated in over 10 workshops about love and intimacy to navigating the hormone highway. The one about stress, cancer and heart disease scares the bejeezas out of me.

But it’s the dance classes where I really let myself go and forget to be embarrassed. I haven’t danced in years and it feels fantastic!

The chef is a fat-free, sugar-free genius and living without alcohol, coffee and chronic negativity is a welcome change to my usual routine back home.

A member of staff here is one of the funniest and inspiring people I have ever met. Another is more inappropriately flirtatious than my car mechanic.

Some people snuck food in. One burly fella had a secret stow of protein shakes. Another, the token husband, becomes the skinny, hungry guy I give my desert and mid-afternoon snack to. One woman confesses she’d panicked and secreted an empty tuna can in her room-safe after a late night binge.

I never thought I’d like yoga. I always reckoned meditation was for other people. I’d never really savored food without oil, tea without caffeine, and sharing 3 meals a day with people I had little in common with. I never thought I’d keep a straight face in a steam room full of naked people.

It was my sister’s birthday while I was away – it’s over 2 years now – and the retreat’s head gardener suggests we plant a frangipani for her on the day. He tells me he’ll look after it and send me a photo when it flowers after giving me a quick hug and leaving me with my plant. They’d be red flowers, he tells me.

I wonder what my sister would have made of this place.

“Jesus El! You would have been better off giving your money to asylum seekers or something! But if it makes you feel better and, you know, more able to cope with me being gone now and everything…. Oh, and by the way, I saw you doing The Salsa. Don’t give up ya day job, will ya?”

By day 6 most of us have become sufficiently institutionalized to be apprehensive about re-entering our former lives. I want to take home the funny and inspiring staff member to keep me on the right track and off the beaten one.

What’s not to like about a week of company, community and conversation? What’s not to feel grateful for after a week of pampering, positivity and papaya fruit?

Back home now and my real-world first-world problems are all still here. There’s been an initial exchange of mutually encouraging txts with my new best friends –

How you handling it? Have re-toxed already. You go girl!

But they have stopped now.

And it feels a bit weird and lonely all of a sudden. It’s like the end of an affair you both knew had no future but was gorgeous while it lasted.

I am driving along my usual route to visit a friend in Melbourne when I see something.

A man is shuffling, no hoisting, no dragging himself along the footpath on his bum. I pull up next to him. His suit is dusty from the street and he is wincing and straining as he tries to lug his body along the ground in the direction of the train station. It’s maybe 100 meters away only, but he is like the snail committed to doing the length of his leaf by nightfall and travelling very slowly. It must hurt. So I pull over and unwind the passenger window.

            You okay there, mate? I never call anyone mate but what can I say? Are you okay there, Sir? Mister? Mate just seems right.

            Yeah. Nah. Not really, he says.

I can see his face more easily now and he is younger than I had first thought.

I’m going to the train station. Want to get home, he says.

Where’s home? I ask.  He tells me and it’s a suburb not far away and I used to live in it.  I am thinking I’ll run him back and that it won’t take long.

You need a hand? I could drive you there.

Then a white station wagon stops too and there’s a bloke with a beard and his family in the car – teenage son in the passenger seat and mother and daughter in the back. I get out of my car and walk over to his window.

            Hi, I say. Thanks for stopping. Are you busy for the next half hour? Do you mind  following me while I take this bloke home?

Sure. That’s all he says. We both know what we need to do and nothing else needs to be said.

Somehow I get the bloke on the footpath into my passenger seat and he even manages to belt himself in. Which seems a bit perverse given the risks he’s already taking with his personal safety.

I can smell the alcohol and desperation. I can see the fall from grace.

The bloke with the beard in the station wagon is following close behind.

            So what’s going on? I ask the man sitting next to me now. Why don’t you use a wheel chair? That’d be easier, wouldn’t it?

Yeah. No. Not really. Tried that but it’s harder, not easier. He isn’t slurring exactly, but he is paying extral attention to how he forms the words in his mouth before allowing them to fall out for my benefit.

He tells me some stuff that doesn’t make sense and other stuff that is crystal clear and has the effect of both reducing and summing up a life in a few short sentences.

            I was an accountant. Had my own firm. The wife’s gone. Don’t see my kids. Nah, don’t see my kids. They’re both in their 30’s now. I don’t see my kids. They won’t let me see them. They don’t wanna see me. Had my own firm.

By now we are in the suburb where he reckons he lives but he can’t give me a street name, let alone a number. So we start driving around and around the place searching for something that might jog his memory.

He looks out his window for some point of reference. I am starting to get a bit nervous by now. I am not scared but I am feeling a bit silly. The bloke in the station wagon is still following me on this joy ride;we have both been at it for a good 45 minutes by now.

            There, over there! He calls out. That park! That park looks familiar. I am starting to get a sinking feeling that maybe his home is a nice little split level park bench.

Over there! he calls out again. That street! It’s a home. You know a residence for men.  I’m not a drunk. I’m not a deadbeat drunk or anything. I was an accountant. I’m good with numbers.

Finally we pull up at a corner that is right opposite where I’d lived 15 years ago with Mum for a while after a bad relationship break-up.

The man in the suit refuses my help getting out of the car but he does let the family-man with the beard help him to the front door of what looks like a fairly respectable looking rooming house.

           Hey! Ya dick head! Where ya been? There’s a bloke calling out of an upstairs balcony down to my man in his dusty suit.

This lass drove me back from the station, he calls back, nodding in my direction.  She’s got a boy 11 year old.

It’s all he’d asked me during our 45 minutes together: You got any kids? That’s all he’d wanted to know.

The man in the beard sees him to his front door and the man in the suit waves at us both and almost falls over. When we get back to  the family-man’s  station wagon he says,

            My name’s John. This is my family.

They all smile at me one by one. I was right about the seating arrangements.

Hi, I’m Elly. Thanks. Thanks for that. We shake hands and he heads off.

I’m not some no-hoper drunk, the man in the dusty suit had said to me.

I know you’re not mate. I know you’re not.