Inside the spa resort visited by King Charles and Queen Camilla, with lush tropical gardens and sheep grazing on the lawns (and no gym)

That Indian spa retreat Soukya, about an hour east of Bangalore, is exclusive could be seen from a look at the lengthy record of celebrities who’ve handed by means of the gates, together with Dame Emma Thompson, Sting, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and, this week, King Charles and Queen Camilla – their eighth go to.

During one earlier journey, the royal couple stayed in the identical suite as mine. Spacious and snug, with a bathe in the peaceable backyard, it’s not opulent in a five-star or perhaps a regal means. Although it has a four-poster with floaty curtains, an unlimited rest room with a hydrotherapy tub and a big sitting room, it feels comparatively easy, embellished with conventional Indian heavy-wood furnishings.

But you don’t come to Soukya for the rooms – you’re right here for the therapeutic. 

Within hours I’ve been seen by three medical doctors, beginning with Dr Issac Mathai, who based the retreat in 2002. Just by scrutinising me and taking my pulse, he concludes that I’m respiration at solely 60 per cent capability, that there’s a blockage in my liver, one thing will not be fairly proper with my kidneys and I’ve some neurological points. ‘Most people over 50 have symptoms of future problems,’ he says. ‘They can be reversed.’

The questions he asks all his company are probing, stripping them again to reveal feelings. Did you concern the darkish if you have been a baby? Do you cry simply? How has grief affected you? What work stresses are you going by means of?

The prescribed answer for me is a detox and rejuvenation programme.

This includes a every day morning dose of shirodhara, a deliciously calming therapy the place oil drips on to the brow to launch your feelings. It’s adopted by a tremendous ayurvedic therapeutic massage with two therapists slathering you with oil, leaving you feeling like a hen that has been buttered for the oven. Finally, heat poultices crammed with herbs are utilized to ease again and neck rigidity.

The merchandise are made on web site. Huge vats of oil are heated with herbs saved in a jar-filled room that resembles an old school apothecary. The herbs originate from the medicinal backyard with its 130 styles of vegetation, from red-berried serpentine to deal with hypertension to leafy water hyssop to enhance reminiscence.

It’s nicely price touring the backyard with a health care provider, stopping at the flowerbed in the type of a human physique the place vegetation designed to assist a specific a part of the physique develop in the corresponding space.

There’s no fitness center (they discourage an excessive amount of exercise because it interferes with the remedies) however there’s a nice path to amble spherical, previous sandalwood timber, grazing livestock and by means of a bamboo grove.

Although a busy highway runs by the web site, this 30-acre natural property instils an prompt sense of calm, with lush tropical gardens, sheep grazing on the lawns and tinkling wind chimes. It’s straightforward to see why Dr Mathai says that ‘half of healing is being in nature’.

It’s sustainable too, with sufficient photo voltaic, wind and biogas vitality produced to place a smile on King Charles’s face. Women work the natural vegetable patch, and no matter they pluck that day is become the tastiest of low-spice, low-oil, low-fat meals at the restaurant, the place neither meat nor alcohol is served.

Guests are requested to eat mindfully – not socialising or discussing signs with these on different tables, nor utilizing mobiles (a request blatantly ignored by one fellow customer who chatted loudly on speakerphone throughout a whole lunch). 

Scrumptious soup is served to these on a liquid detox; it doesn’t go away you hungry in any respect. 

Of course, the detox doesn’t simply contain meals: it begins in the colon (though the much less mentioned about this, the higher).

And at the finish of languorous afternoons involving acupuncture and reflexology, the place stress is utilized to numerous components of the foot that correspond to completely different physique components, company head to the altering room for eye, mouth and nasal washes (pouring the contents of a small watering can into one nostril and, considerably bizarrely, letting it trickle out of the different).

Then it’s on to the twice-daily yoga in the open-air thatched shala whose darkish flooring is meant to soak up negativity.

It’s not your common yoga, however a lot, a lot slower with plenty of meditation, although it proves fairly exhausting to clear the thoughts with a loudly whistling prepare passing each couple of minutes (this additionally occurs at night time – deliver earplugs).

There is night meditation too, held in a room beneath the chapel the place we repeatedly roll our eyes to train them earlier than gazing into the flame of a candle in a apply often known as trataka.

And so the cosseting days slide into one another, beginning with medical check-ups, maybe a dip in the pool sooner or later, and ending with a homeopathic treatment and mattress by 9pm.

Although there’s a wonderful library, company are suggested to not learn for greater than two hours a day.

It’s exhausting to not love the place. Most folks go away not less than a bit of lighter in the physique in addition to loads lighter in the soul.

It’s straightforward to see how, like King Charles and Camilla, you might get hooked on Soukya, financial institution steadiness allowing. 

The excellent news is that Dr Mathai plans to open centres in Britain and Greece in the subsequent few years.