Thailand’s breathtaking Kamalaya Koh Samui has become a beacon of light for travellers craving a digital detox and time out to discover life-changing healthier ways. Scott Podmore tracks down the resort’s beautiful owners to share their incredible love story and how a dream was realised.
“She (Karina) had studied Chinese Medicine so it was kind of perfect. So it was a case of how do you take health and spirituality and translate that into a contemporary language and deliver something that is of value to people, that can help people find their way.” ~ John Stewart (Kamalaya founder)
Discovering a deeper connection
YOU only need two minutes in the company of Dr Karina Stewart to start feeling better.
Spend half an hour talking with her and husband John Stewart about Chinese medicine philosophies on life and wellness, and the elements that set apart their extraordinary Kamalaya Koh Samui wellness retreat in Thailand, and your bucket list has a new leader.
“I would say Kamalaya is a place people can come and explore through various different avenues, many different options,” Karina explains before presenting to a small group on the subject of Medicine As Food.
“In essence, a guest at Kamalaya is going to explore a deeper connection to themselves and to what life is really about and what is most meaningful and essential,” she adds. “Then they can go back home and share that with their loved ones, with their colleagues and with their communities.”
Calm, tall, graceful and ageless, Karina is quick to explain it’s not a case of one size fits all.
“The avenues for that connection to oneself and that meaningful reestablishment of core values can be through fitness, it can be through cooking classes, it can be through meditation and yoga, stress management – there are so many different ways to reach that, and that’s what Kamalaya is very good at: providing many different options for people,” she says.
The ultimate digital detox
So how does one describe Kamalaya in beautiful Koh Samui? Celebrity Deborah Hutton says it’s the “ultimate digital detox,” a place where she takes an annual pilgrimage to “rest and restore” and basically recharge her batteries. Luxury travel designers describes it as a place where one can experience a life-enriching healthy holiday with wellness programs offering solutions for detox, stress and burnout, healthy lifestyle and yoga.
Think luxury Thailand wellness escape with food as medicine, and a stunning resort designed with all the elements of nature in mind. The aim is to deliver “an overall enhanced state of wellbeing” by the time you leave the resort to begin your transformation back home in the real world.
John and Karina are two beautiful souls who have followed their hearts and used their heads in weaving together a clever business plan intrinsically driven by their mission to heal with a ripple effect in mind.
Their back story is fascinating.
Inspired by her Mexican mother’s interest in natural therapy from an early age, Karina was motivated to create a dedicated sanctuary that incorporated both eastern and western healing practices. Karina believes that in a modern world saturated by “excessive consumption”, a detox is more than just cleaning out toxins; it’s about clearing out old emotional patterns and living more consciously.
A love story to rule them all
And how does gentle natured John come into the picture? It’s a love story of epic proportions.
The Canadian and former art dealer was introduced to Asian philosophy and spirituality at the age of 15. He left home at age 16 and after seven years in North America and Europe, he arrived in the jungles of northern India where he spent the next 16 years living under the tutelage of a Himalayan yogi master, helping to build and develop a renowned ashram.
He says many years spent in a traditional yogi lifestyle taught him the values of truth, simplicity, love and sanatana (eternal) dharma, in addition to patience and discipline.
“I had the great opportunity to live with a wonderful master in the Himalayas and he put me in a cave that was very remote, though it was attached to a community so I wasn’t completely isolated,” he explains.
“But that began the journey that informed everything else that I do and Kamalaya is the translation of all the experience I had in India in 16 years living in a remote Ashram, remote monastery, building it and fulfilling all the dreams and vision of the teacher.
“There was a certain point when the teacher said, ‘The only way that you’ll know what you’ve learned is if you go and build something yourself’.”
Enter Dr Karina, oceans away but John’s perfect match in love and business. One could be forgiven for thinking greater powers were orchestrating a beautiful plan.
“He (the teacher) suggested getting married and going doing something. So I had already fallen in love with Karina years and years before; I had written letters to her for 11 years from the jungle of India, and I went to America and she was recently separated from her boyfriend and I just stepped in as quick as I could,” he says, laughing, in between flashing loving glances at Karina.
“She had studied Chinese Medicine so it was kind of perfect. So it was a case of how do you take health and spirituality and translate that into a contemporary language and deliver something that is of value to people, that can help people find their way.”
Painting the perfect picture
And Kamalaya, the concept, was born once the beautiful destination was discovered. The way the resort blends in seamlessly with the landscape has a lot to do with the vision of Australian architect Robert Powell, someone John and Karina feel indebted to for helping realise their dream.
“The property is really respectful of nature,” Karina says. “The land was already offering and Robert, who was also known for his paintings, was really sensitive to that and designed the buildings incorporating the granite boulders, incorporating the three-dimensional terrain pretty much so that throughout the property you have views that are spectacular: of the beach, the ocean, or a sunset, or the waterfall.
“It’s so sensitively designed and there’s such a love of the land and of what nature offers. People feel the love in the property.”
John agrees.
“Robert’s an artist and he designed every window as a picture frame,” he says. “Every single window looks at a view. If he saw a tree, or a rock or a stump that he loved, he designed the building so that there could be a window that looked at it. It’s incredible.”
When wellness meets travel
Speaking of matches made in heaven, tourism trends clearly show wellness travel is in a boom period, along with cruising.
“In conjunction with cruising, wellness is also a prominent trend in the luxury sector right now,” says Yvonne Verstandig, Executive Edge Travel’s Head of Leisure. “In this digital age of constant media consumption, people are needing to allocate time to escape, rest and detox. I’m a perfect example of a person who sleeps five hours a night and works constantly attached to my phone, iPad and computer. So when I holiday, I ensure the journey has a wellness component.”
John also shares his thoughts on why wellness retreats have become such a factor in the way people spend their holidays.
“I think that we ran out of time,” he says.
“And now we have such small amounts of time to do all the things we would normally have done in a lifetime. Traditional societies have these times of pause. You have social holidays, you have cultural holidays, you have religious holidays. In the past with our family you would follow these things and nowadays we’re more purpose driven. We have to produce.
“So on our two weeks, or three weeks, we have to take care of our body, our soul, our heart. We have to take care of our children. We have to take care of everything.
“(In the past) We thought that we were on holiday and we saw most people in good resorts weren’t interacting with other people. How do you create a place where people can really feed, nurture and learn about the things societies have forgotten?”
It’s also about finding an easier way to break habits, according to Karina.
“I think the reason that travel and wellness are coming together so powerfully now is that people recognise that when they go away they step away from their habits, their day to day habits,” she says.
“It’s easier in an immersive experience that we can create in travel to learn new ways of behaving and then bring that home to some degree. It’s a lot more difficult to create more radical changes in our lifestyle while being surrounded by our daily habits which might be 20 years, 30 years, decades old. So I think there’s that element as well.
“When you step away into a wellness holiday you are really committing to make changes when you’re away from those daily habits.”
Customised health programs
Kamalaya’s offering after you arrive is one you won’t forget. After a Bioimpedance Analysis, naturopaths create a customised wellness program for each guest in the areas of ideal weight, detox, stress and burnout, yoga and optimal fitness.
Applying principles of Asian healing which nurture guests back to prime health, each program comprises various holistic therapies, spa treatments, fitness options and medicine.
Chinese medicine plays a big part in the journey.
“Because my background is in traditional Chinese medicine I think that really influenced the way I wanted to view the health programs in particular, the wellness programs,” Karina says.
“In traditional Chinese medicine each individual is viewed as a unique eco-system and even though you may have 10 individuals with the same Western medical diagnosis, in Chinese medicine you wouldn’t treat them all the same because we’re all unique, and we all have a history, and a family history, and a constitution.
“You might have a stronger digestion than John but you both might have, say, high blood pressure – things that really make each person different. And the way the treatment should be delivered should be unique.
“So that influenced me profoundly. Even though we were creating programs that would be set and specific in terms of the treatments, it had to be flexible, so the cuisine allows for a lot of adjustment. The treatments allow for adjustments so that tailoring is possible.”
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