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Sunshine would have been too much after three years that felt like one long dark tunnel. I arrive, exhausted, on Koh Samui during a monsoon, the wet jungle swaying with the energy of renewal. That night, a lullaby of raindrops helps me drift off to sleep. The far-off storm flashing on the horizon expels my subliminal rage. I awaken, refreshed, to birdsong.
Rage is one of many emotions that have compacted inside me like coal. For years I have suppressed feeling, lived day to day, hour to hour firefighting, awaiting a break in the clouds. The pandemic had promised to be a productive time for redrafting my novel, but nothing could have prepared me for what was to come. It transpired that my octogenarian father, who suffered from Parkinson's, had been tricked out of his longtime home and wine estate in Piedmont by the very family he had bankrolled and employed all his life. Due to loopholes, destroyed documents, and the painfully slow Italian legal system, we were told the situation was hopeless.
I moved into my father's house to defend his rights. I taught myself Italian law, investigated, tracked down documents and witnesses. Weeks turned into months, then years. Both of my parents became fully dependent on me. There is no way to explain the trauma, isolation, and loss of identity that can come from being a caregiver. Simple tasks become monumental feats. Complex logistics, emergency room visits, medications, incontinence, repetition, and aggression became my life. I mined every inch of my being for patience, annihilating myself and my needs until I was numb.
But my suppressed side, anesthetized every night by red wine, always woke me at 3 a.m. The next day I would jack myself up on caffeine and nicotine, ignoring my back problems, chronic allergies, and migraines. I buried my grief: over losing a father figure, my childhood home, my book, the baby I had planned (now impractical), and the brutal three-year-wide bite that had been taken out of life. While packing up my father's estate, I was overcome with an urgent desire to flush the poison of the previous three years from my cells.
My solution is the trip to Koh Samui, to visit Absolute Sanctuary, but I almost don't make it. My father has had a bad fall. By the time I reach the lotus pink buildings and palms encircling the infinity pool, the stress is affecting my short-term memory. I hate that my fatigued spirit feels out of sync with the benevolent staff and the happiness-inducing scents of Thailand. Weak and with nothing to organize for the first time in years, I hand myself over to wellness consultant Aurelie Gauthier for a seven-day semifasting detox, working on the gut to help switch off an excess of cortisol and encourage serotonin production. My daily regimen includes green shots, detox juices, broth, ginger tea, and two alkalizing gluten-free vegan meals. The resort has a strict no-smoking, no-alcohol policy to boot.
Propped up by nicotine and caffeine for so long, I'm hit by a tsunami of exhaustion as soon as I remove the stimulants. I go deaf in my right ear and fall into a kind of narcolepsy for days, setting my alarm for treatments to which I stagger in my pajamas. On the second day, a caffeine-withdrawal migraine leads to uncontrollable vomiting. “You've been silencing your body for so long,” Aurelie explains. “This is the first time you've given it a chance to speak.”
After a day, we restart the program. I sweat out negativity in the infrared sauna, coughing it from my chest and blowing it from my nose. I am massaged back into existence one limb at a time, supported by petite Thai women who stretch and pummel me with so much force and power while caring for me with such gentle compassion. By the end of the week, I've lost almost nine pounds, detoxed from caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine, and regained my sense of vision and smell.
Kamalaya, in the island's south, is where I go for my second retreat. The word means “lotus realm” in Sanskrit, and that's what I find: a lotus-strewn wellness utopia and heavenly bubble cut off from the world. More upmarket ashram than spa, it is built around giant boulders and babbling streams, with ornamental pools and waterfalls that flow down to a sliver of beach. Prayer flags and devotional marigolds bless the teak pagodas hung with brass lanterns, the candlelit shrines of Buddha and Ganesh, and the clay-colored rooms.
Kamalaya is populated by more than a hundred masters of traditional Chinese and Thai medicine, Ayurveda, and functional medicine. Naturopath Kate Upton encourages me to continue the detox I started at Absolute Sanctuary in addition to the burnout program here, with extensive menus of kaleidoscopic dishes that promote healing rather than abstention. Sessions of Reiki the previous week have soothed my exhausted “giving” right side and primed my starved “receiving” left side, so I am ready for vitamin IVs, ozone therapy, acupuncture, Taoist abdominal massage, physiotherapy, and sessions with a life-enhancement mentor.
Treatment rooms are purposefully monastic, decked in Tibetan art and saffron textiles. In a traditional Chinese medicine session, my practitioner, Pitchaya Kitti, explains that I have an imbalance of elements. My pulse is too fast and my tongue is purple, a sign of stagnated chi and long-term low mood. Pitchaya inserts needles into my forehead, sternum, stomach, thighs, and ankles, then uses a technique often practiced on stroke patients to reopen the body's nine sensory portals and combat depression, which shoots a sudden jolt of electricity up from my left ankle. At night I join other guests sipping virgin mojitos in Soma Restaurant. We eat silently at our own tables, each in a separate golden orb of candlelight and thought while staffers serve as charming go-betweens, serving fragrant pumpkin-okra curry, lentil dosa, and cauliflower rice.
Going to bed early and rising at dawn, I feel recalibrated to the natural order of the earth. Everywhere I go, I am struck by beauty—the song of the Asian palm swifts on the branches, the fragility of ferns—and my own clarity of thought. A voice seems to come from my gut. It says: “It's time to let go.” In Lanna Samunphrai Ron Abdominal Massage, an ancient organ-stimulating therapy from northern Thailand, a fire is lit on my belly, an act that makes my body sacred. As the flame dances like a torch of energy from my navel, I vow to listen, be kind and care for it as fiercely as if it were a loved one.
“You deserve a beautiful life,” says Srinivas Bhat, my life enhancement mentor and a sage former monk from Chennai, with such passionate conviction that I break down and cry. “You are very strong and powerful but you are exhausted. You must stop resisting life, surrender yourself to the flow of the universe.” Healing, he says, is embracing your pain so it can extinguish itself. When he lays his hands on my head, it's as if he has lit a wick in my mind that heats and glows. During guided meditation, my chair seems to levitate off the ground. The pain and grief is embedded so deep, it's as if two tectonic plates in me are parting. I cry and shake with my eyes closed. Afterwards, I feel woozy and as pink and raw as a dragon fruit. I curl up in a towel on my balcony, the sound of monsoon rain massaging my brain. I wake three hours later, somehow changed. That night, after dinner, glowing lanterns line my path like benevolent souls guiding me safely home.
This article appeared in the March 2024 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
