Good morning! We haven’t met personally yet, but now is the time to talk heart to heart. Maybe I’ll start with a story about what’s eating away at us all – how to wake up and become the best version of ourselves. I was given 3 days to do it – do you think the experience was a success? Spoiler: something, as always, didn’t go as planned 🙂
I have never been a model of courage. Enduring two days of hard intermittent fasting with the dignity of a martyr or, sleepless, finishing all the work that should have been done a week ago – that’s our way. And long runs like “stay on a healthy diet for a month” and “ditch coffee for a habit-forming marathon” — no thanks, and may my cappuccino gods hear your sedition. In general, consider me a follower of short but intense sprints of good habits. Sound sleep and a well-established daily routine, which makes sense, are not among them.
Therefore, when fellow editors from other media offered to go to Sochi for 3 days to “restore diet and healthy habits” at the Green Flow Healing Hotel, I agreed before I even finished to listen to the offer. 3 days – that’s my format. It was decided that during this time I would do everything I had read and seen enough on Pinterest and banned social networks – I would put my life in order.
For once, I’m going to follow through on the idea, learn how to get up early, make the bed, cook trendy acai bowls for breakfast instead of reheated buckwheat from yesterday and I’ll be Zen. Yes, the hope of being able to repeat all these exploits that make bloggers famous on social networks still wavered in me. And I started this experience, of course, with the fact that I hadn’t slept enough.
Bingo! A great start to a three-day transformation is filling yourself up with an inhuman cup of coffee and going to the airport at night to boost your health. Prepared to grunt all day, I arrived in Sheremetyevo at 3 a.m. and received “thunder” – the program for the upcoming weekend. The Green Flow program included encouraging words such as “neuro-meditation”, “spa complex”, “mountain yoga” and “SPA” – in general, all things that I have not tried.
But then, at the check-in counter, the funniest word on this list struck me as “lunch.” And, what’s most fun was at the table (not in the mountains, not floating – more on that later), but at dinner my first Sochi catharsis took place. Marina Savateeva, general manager of the healing hotel, who met our delegation of journalists, said with a disarming smile: “The more you eat, the faster you lose weight.” What, sorry?
Alright, it sounds, to say the least, powerful. For some reason, every year it hasn’t worked after ice cream with pizza at a bachelorette party to notice the long-awaited “minus” on the scale. Marina explained to us at length and in detail that, firstly, if you consciously choose high-quality products, and secondly, if you really eat until the body is full, the metabolic processes in the body will normalize and come to harmony. Well, I more than liked this shot – especially the “until you’re full” moment.
Of course, it’s not about pizza with ice cream. Green Flow takes nutrition very seriously. Extremely. Not a single dish, even with a strong craving, can find an ingredient added to it “just because”. If lingonberry jam is served with duck, it means that it is a fresh berry that interrupts an unhealthy craving for sugar. If tea is brought with the main course, it is a local collection that accelerates metabolism and calms the nervous system.
Well, enough about the daily bread – it’s time to think about the spiritual. On the second day, it was strategically planned to bypass all the “attractions” of the SPA from the hammam to the “soul of impressions”. Immediately I will give a spoiler: the impressions are jets of water of different temperatures hitting walls and the ceiling, then are replaced by Niagara Falls from the sky.
Only a cave with cold water, ice and hot fonts could compare with such a “carousel” – like in a fairy tale, when Ivan Tsarevich jumped from a boiling vat into a frozen vat and is become eternally young. Only in reality it is better to do the opposite – then soak in warmer water.
For sissies, like me, a series of such procedures will certainly be enough for six months – but in the steam room and bio-sauna it is much calmer. You sit in the clouds of steam or near the coals, breathe in the smell of wood in silence and feel how thoughts disappear from your head. To be honest, I was never a fan of all those bath procedures, and I didn’t come out of Green Flow as a fan of saunas. But I understood their meaning well: after jumping from the ice police, then you wait for Niagara to fall above you from the ceiling, then you stretch your legs on the wooden floor, you feel that your body turns out to be alive.
Such feelings have remained somewhere far in childhood: palms scorched with nettles, clothes sticky from the summer rain, poplar fluff tangled in the hair – and you run with broken knees, feeling the wind and life with every cell in your body. Either I’m so impressionable or the spa area in the hotel has been really brilliantly thought out – but no meditation has ever “grounded” me so much.
By the way, about the meditations. I had high hopes for them. Either because it is easier to wait for the transformation sitting on a yoga mat, or because… Yes, waiting for the transformation sitting is very convenient. Jokes are jokes, and everyone who isn’t lazy talks about the benefits of meditation, and if you’ve also had an obsession with motivational videos at some point, you know what I’m talking about. In Green Flow they talk about it too – only with aspiration.
“Have you ever tried neuromeditation? You have to leave ! warned random neighbors on lounge chairs by the pool. After such an advertisement how not to go there? Also, the “neuro” prefix is intriguing. In general, the problem turned out to be this: a special smart device called Muse is placed on the head, which is an electroencephalograph. During meditation, it reads the state of the brain and transmits it to your smartphone. To this, in turn, you connect the headphones – and here the magic begins.
If you lose focus, the gadget lets you know by playing the rain or storm sound (depending on the program you choose). When you can concentrate and relax, the birds begin to sing. The main thing is to learn to hear your conscience translated into sounds and to calm it down yourself. It sounds, of course, luxurious, but the first experience was completely unexpected. Needless to say, birds rarely sing among reporters?
At the end of the session, Muse gives you a chart that records the characteristics of your meditation. Percentage of being in a state of anxiety, rest, neutral periods – everything is logged so progress can be tracked. Well, you can congratulate me – 24% peace. Zen itself…
Muse showed me 24% on the first day I arrived in Krasnaya Polyana. I didn’t measure the results before I went – I sat with my colleagues in the mountains, squeezing the warrior pose out of me in a yoga class. And, I’ll say it right away, it’s not about bad time management. It just let me go.
From an achievementist attitude to the fact that you have to check if there is progress, otherwise they won’t put a five for spirituality. The desire to wrap up in oversize, because “well, I’m not ready for the beach season yet”. Fuck beach season. It will come in a year, and in a year I can already forget what it is like to reach out to the sky of Sochi and feel how the air smells like the forest. And how in fact the body can do more than I realize – not just shavasana. And how it only takes 3 days – only 3 days out of 365 to let go of your violent little head.
Why am I. At the time, standing at the Sheremetyevo check-in counter, I found what seemed like a cool ending to a future story about a trip to Green Flow (yes, planning ahead is another bad habit of an anxious mind). I wanted to write that I “transformed my life, leaving the old and starting a new one”. But I was wrong. Didn’t stop and didn’t start.
There, at an altitude of 1100 meters above sea level, you are not starting a new alien life as a millionaire blogger with an innate talent for yoga and a collection of healthy living recipes embedded in your head. You get yours back.
Source: The Voice Mag
Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.