eat, pray, love yourself

Sometimes you just need a break! Whether you're with loved ones or on your own, here's a handful of sanctuaries and retreats where it's all about treating yourself with soul food and inner nourishment

- KEITH BAIN

POPLAR GROVE KAROO 

An ordained zen monk, Antony Olser is a local legend when it comes to mindfulness, meditation and blissing (or zenning) out by simply taking the time to properly notice what’s going on around you. A student of Buddhism since the early 1970s, Olser runs meditation retreats at his Karoo farm, about 30km from Colesberg. He believes that withdrawing from the daily grind makes it easier to unwind and find something he refers to as “spaciousness”. It’s that feeling of having greater capacity to deal with whatever you need to deal with, and make a deeper connection with yourself and what’s around you. He says that changing your environment by trekking to the remote Karoo can be a useful tool for finding harmony and inner peace – “a tool to help you pay attention,” he says. Guests are encouraged to be attentive to everything that’s happening, in fact, to be mindful of each and every experience and action.

“You learn to observe the movement of breath, even while walking, sitting and attending to small tasks such as preparing food or cutting wood,” says Olser, whose retreats are also silent. Attendees refrain from speaking as an aid to disentangle from social and personal habits. “It simply means we don’t engage in our normal social patterns,” he says. “Just as the Karoo gives us physical space, and the discipline of the sitting meditation gives us space, our silence gives us another kind of space.”