Reset retreats

After a year of disruption, food crutches and late-night emotional binge-watching, we are looking to the summer holiday period to reconnect with our best lives.

- Anna McCooe

It’s a situation as old as affordable air travel: You’re on the final leg home, elated and exhausted, feeling like you’re going to need a holiday to recover from your holiday. Adventures have been had. Fuzzy memories made. And if it all feels like a blur, at least the rings under your eyes testify to your success in squeezing every last drop of life out of your trip away. That was before COVID – when only the boring and privileged holidayed to relax. This is now, and in 2021 we’re putting rest and recovery at the top of our annual-leave agenda.

To understand the recalibration process, let us introduce you to Megan Bardsley. At Queensland’s luxe Gwinganna retreat, Bardsley is the emotional wellbeing manager and resident equine therapies practitioner. She says a change in environment alters patterns and allows us to step away from the stressors in life – think commitments, schedules, and the constant exposure to world events served up on our phones. “We can then start to let our body rebalance, our mind to slow down, and our central nervous system to switch from fight or flight into our parasympathetic system [known as rest and digest].”

A wellness retreat is primed for elevated self-care. And we strongly recommend scheduling one ASAP. Though even if a retreat is not on the cards for this summer, there are other ways to turn the break you have into the recharge you need.