Dr. Suja tells me of a 26-year-old former guest, born without the ability to smell, who’d checked in for an unrelated addiction issue. Two weeks into her stay, this sense awakened for the first time. During my own visit, I chatted to one vibrant British guest who had consulted with a leading doctor in Chelsea for an issue they said would take a year to treat. After a single week at Soukya, it was gone. She’d also struggled with stiffness following a hip replacement but, three weeks into her six-week treatment plan, she was walking without a limp for the first time in four years.
Whether or not these outcomes can be measured in clinical trials, they inevitably pose a question: can sustained calm be as helpful for the body as intervention? The team here aren’t trying to fool anyone, and most guests come to them after exhausting typical options. “At Soukya,” Dr. Suja says, “we need to be sought, not sold.”
Its reputation for results has drawn an impressive list of guests: the Dalai Llama, Queen Camilla, King Charles and Madonna have all visited – the Queen eight times, no less – something all the more impressive considering the lack of gloss. Rooms are basic, with few frills and accoutrements, no TV and virtually no WiFi (it shuts off after 10 minutes every day). The food is low-salt, low-fat, low-spice and vegetarian, designed like everything here, to be easy on the system.
And my system is eased. I don’t know if it’s the blend of 250 herbs – for myself, a heady vetiver and sandalwood-heavy mix – combined by hand into every oil treatment (it takes 50 hours to prepare a month’s 40-litre supply), or the fact I’ve been cosseted like a kitten every day. But I braced myself for inevitable sugar cravings and they never came. I was still hungry when I was hungry, but the compulsiveness had evaporated. Such a small win felt revelatory to me – if my eating habits can be managed through stress reduction rather than restraint, what I’d previously understood as a character flaw began to look rather different. That night, I dreamed I was untangling a heavily knotted necklace, gently picking away at the thread.
