Sacred Six: What India Taught Me for Better Health and Happiness

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Recording from Kerala's Arabian Sea Coast

I am recording this from a wooden verandah at the Somatheeram Ayurvedic Resort in Kerala, India. The fans are turning, the Arabian Sea is somewhere below me, and I have just come from a treatment that left me smelling of warm herbs and feeling completely rearranged. This is a "Sacred Six" episode, so I want to share the six things from this trip that have stayed with me. Some are experiences. Some are small shifts in the way I want to live when I get home.

Ayurveda, Temples and Indian Food

Ayurveda is not a spa menu here. It is medicine. On arrival a doctor takes your pulse, asks about your sleep and digestion and moods, works out your dosha, and then your treatments are built around that. My days have been shaped by oil. Warm streams of it poured across my forehead, four hands working in unison, herbal pastes and powders pressed into my skin. It sounds indulgent, and it is, but it is also doing something deeper. I feel calmer in my body than I have in a long time.

We drove out to see a vast statue of Shiva rising up against the sky, and I stood underneath it feeling very small in the best possible way. The temples here are not a backdrop. They are alive with offerings, bells, colour and devotion. You take your shoes off, you lower your voice, and something in you settles. I am not religious in any formal sense, but I left every temple feeling like I had been somewhere sacred.

I have eaten the best vegetarian food of my life on this trip. Coconut and curry leaves, dosa for breakfast, dal that tasted like it had been cooked by someone's grandmother, fruit I could not name. Because the resort cooks to your dosha, the food is part of the healing, not separate from it. It has reminded me how good I feel when I eat simply and slowly, and how much of that I let slide at home.

Shopping, Yoga and Slowing Down

I cannot help myself. I went shopping for silks and jewellery and fell hard for the colour of everything. Saris in marigold and rose, fine gold, tiny mirrored details. There is an artistry to it that mass production has stripped out of so much of what we buy. I came away with pieces I will keep forever, and a renewed love for things made slowly by hand.

Yoga at sunrise, on a platform overlooking the sea, taught by someone who has practised it his whole life. No leaderboard, no playlist, no rush. Just breath and movement and the light coming up. It made me realise how performative my practice had become at home, and how much I want to come back to the quiet version of it.

This is the one I most want to carry home. India has shown me, again, how much I crush into a day and how little of it I actually feel. Here I have read, sat, swum, watched the sea, done nothing and called it enough. Disconnecting, slowing down, connecting with the sacred both within myself and in my surroundings. That is the real souvenir.

Where to Stay and Heal in Kerala

If you want to follow the trail I took, I have written a full guide to where to stay, eat and heal in Kerala. You can stay at Somatheeram or its sister property, Soma Manaltheeram, and let it do its quiet work on you too.

Thanks to our season sponsors, King Living, for helping us create spaces that nourish the soul.

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Hosted by Sigourney Cantelo.