The Farm at San Benito - Unplugged

There was something about going to the Farm at San Benito that felt like I had come home. Yes, the grounds are spectacularly designed—feng shui’d within an inch of its peaceful and serene being. (Have I mentioned how inadequate I feel writing about the beauty aspect of spas and wellness retreats? To me, the experience is sublime and visceral, yes, but these are feelings that don’t lend themselves sufficiently to a block of words on a page. They are better experienced through stillness and an acknowledged sense of awe. So please don’t take my abrupt descriptions as anything but an admission that I choose not to attempt to properly do justice to works of beauty that are designed to create an emotional response within.)

The facts are that the Farm sits on what once was a coconut and coffee plantation—hence the term farm. It sits at the base of Mount Malarayat and any footpath you choose will take you one of many private oases where you can sit and . . . breathe in the beauty.

But as a follower and user of complementary therapies, what most compelled me to want to visit is the fact that the Farm is one of the few—and certainly one of the first—wellness facilities to seamlessly and unabashedly weave medical and complementary therapies into their core reason for being. They have a staff of 150, which includes 5 medical doctors, nurses and one medical secretary who can field calls from guest 24/7.

Now, to grasp how radical a concept this was when they opened in 2002—and apparently continues to be—can be put in perspective best this way: Just this morning I received in my inbox a media release from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which is a part of the National Institutes of Health, announcing that their medical journal, Academic Medicine, is about to publish research studies on why CAM (Alternative Complementary Medicine) courses should be required in medical school—just now, on the cusp of 2008!

It’s good news that the allopathic establishment is finally realizing that there must be something to this trillion-dollar wellness industry. But something makes me wonder if trying to crack the code on energetic healing quantifiably is a doable task. When Albert Einstein came up with E=mc2, he was saying that mass and energy are both manifestations of the same thing, that mass can be converted into energy and vice versa.

In the most simple language I can safely conjure, that’s the kind of healing that is happening at places like the Farm at San Benito: Medical doctors are looking at real diseases and, along with close medical monitoring, are using natural healing practices to excise disease. The owners say they chose their location because they found that it possessed four distinct energy wells—locations that vibrate at a higher level. They include a 200-year-old mango tree, the amphitheater, the orchidarium and one of the villas.

The Farm at San Benito is located in Lipa, Batangas, about 2 hours from metro Manila.