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.

Last train to Hot Springs

When I was 19 my sister and I took a side trip around the island of Sicily during a two-month family stay in my mom’s home town of Sant’ Ambrogio on Sicily’s northern coast, just an hour or so from Palermo. Sant’ Ambrogio has a population of about 200 but a mere seven kilometer drive will land you in Cefalù, which has become wildly popular since those visits of my youth. It was already well on its way to being a vacation hotspot—I recall it swarming with mostly German tourists—but now I wouldn’t consider going there in July and August, which were our usual vacation months.

That summer we took a train around the periphery of the island, stopping to stay where the spirit moved us. I don’t remember how it happened—I think we just followed the crowds—but one day we found ourselves hopping a ferry headed for Lipari, one of what is usually referred to as the Aeolian Islands, a volcanic archipelago in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Some of us went for the scenery and to have a new experience, but the older people were looking to bask in the healing mud baths, the source of which was the volcanic pumice quarry.

As soon as we debarked, people began peeling off their clothes and wading into the chalky waters. It didn’t take much before my sister and I started slathering ourselves with mud. Oh, if I could only upload those photos! But it was long before the digital age. Each time we’d look at each other we’d guffaw and slather some more. The whole place smelled of matchsticks and for a solid week, no matter how many times we washed ourselves, as soon as our skin dried it turned the same pale white of the mud.

That was my first experience with man’s rush to yield to nature’s healing properties, even though I was thankfully free of desperation because at 19 nothing much ever hurts.

So last week I decided to spend a few days at the (relatively) nearby hot springs in Arkansas, to check out the old bathhouses on the strip located right across the street from Hot Springs National Park called Bathhouse Row. Most of those old bathhouses are closed down now, though not for long since they've been cleaned up. One is still operational; the Buckstaff, has been running steadily since 1912. I tried to get in for an old-time bathing experience but the lines were long and their hours are short.


So I went to one of the many others instead, the old Arlington Hotel bathhouse. Let’s just say it’s seen better days. Not much of an effort has been made to spiff up the place (unlike the Buckstaff, which has all the charm of an old bathhouse but none of the creeping inevitabilities that a facility regularly hitting steamy temps in excess of 100 degrees would have. I got dunked, scrubbed, wrapped and patted down just like the ladies before me did as long as 140 years ago. The rooms were clinical and stark and no creature-comfort efforts were made.

There are over 100 hot springs in the US alone, mostly on the coasts, and if you’ve never been I encourage you to visit one, just to see what counted as medicine to our forebears. It’s sobering, for sure. But guess what? The bathhouses are experiencing a resurgence of interest as we march willingly back to the days of natural remedies for preventive and disease care.