8 Reasons Why You Need a Retreat in Bali - and Can Win One

Reading this and wishing it was you? It could be. We're giving one reader this exact week at Escape Haven. Details at the end.

We'd been in Bali for a couple of weeks. A family trip, off the back of a work trip, which also meant that I was working. Every chance I got. Building the Beauticate Shop: laptop by the pool, in bed at night, anywhere I could. It was lovelier than working at home but by the end of it, instead of feeling rested, I was completely wrung out. The way you only are when you've been doing too much all at once, for too long.

So my lovely husband Damien did the most generous thing a person can do. He told me to go. To peel off for a few days at the end and let someone look after me for once. I went to Escape Haven, a women's retreat in Canggu, on their Ayurveda package, and I arrived in the state most women arrive in. Wired, depleted and running on fumes.

Somewhere around day two, soft and horizontal and being handed yet another coconut, I started thinking about all of you. About how many women I know who are running on exactly the same empty tank and would never in a hundred years book themselves in. So I made a list. Eight reasons you deserve this too, each one drawn from something that actually happened to me there. Here they are.

It was dark when I arrived. I stepped through the gardens, the pool opening up lit and very still in front of me, and a beautiful Balinese woman came out of the night to embrace me and put a coconut in my hands. Her name was Manik. Before I'd found my room key, I was being fed. A Vietnamese spring roll. A skewer of cold fruit. Nobody hurrying me anywhere.

My room was named after a Hindu goddess. Soft green walls, palm fronds, a shell light fitting turning slowly in the aircon breeze. Fresh flowers in a vase, a potted orchid in the bathroom. And on the bed, in hundreds of frangipani petals, someone had spelled out the word Welcome Sigourney. It would have taken hours. I thought about someone I'd never met spending their morning laying out petals so the first thing I read at Escape Haven was my own name.

That's the reason most women come, founder Janine Hall will tell you so herself. Not for the pool, but to be looked after. At my first breakfast a woman called Lauren, here on her third visit, told me about her first time. When they showed her to her room, she turned and said…

"Is this all for me?"

Then she burst into tears.

I have chronic neck and shoulder pain and arthritis, and I've learned to live with both the way you live with a noisy neighbour. By pretending they aren't there. Within twenty minutes of my welcome massage, Ngurah had found every niggly bit without me saying a word. He didn't ask where it hurt. He already knew. It was the best massage I had in Bali, and I'd been in the country a fortnight with a lot of massages behind me. I would see him every day for the next four days for bodywork and Reiki, built around my particular issues.

That night I floated to the sauna to melt some more. Back in my room there was a card on the pillow. "Whatever you resist, persists". I sat with that one for a while.

Everywhere else you're processed. A number in a system, a slot in a calendar, handed the same thing as everyone before you. Here, the hostesses knew my name from the first night. They knew which foods I didn't like. They'd WhatsApp me each evening with my schedule for the next day, adjusting it as they went, asking if I'd had one too many facials or whether I wanted harder pressure next time.

Later in the week I had a one-on-one yoga session with Ailise, one of the most senior teachers on the island. She read through my MRI results for my arthritis, then watched how I moved. She built me a twenty minute morning yoga routine, just for my arthritis and my stiff neck, that I could do at home or travelling with nothing but a mat. I still do it most mornings. That's the part nobody tells you about a good retreat. The best thing you bring home isn't in your suitcase.

This was the best Ayurvedic experience I've ever had, and I don't say that lightly. I've been to Kerala, the home of Ayurveda, and stayed at Somatheeram, and nothing there came close to this. Partly because Dr Raj, Escape Haven's resident Ayurveda doctor, is from Kerala himself. His father worked at Somatheeram, the very place I'd been. He is, in other words, the real deal.

I sat down with him and within minutes he was telling me things about my own body I'd been ignoring for years. The reflux. The poor absorption. The leaky gut. He prescribed a flask of warm coriander and fennel seed water to sip through the day. Guava. Food cooked with grated coconut and curry leaves. Buttermilk thinned with water. He applied eucalyptus to settle me. And then he stopped and looked at me.

"I also want to say something about your pitta," he said. "Your mind."

I was, at this point, quietly unravelling about a work situation. Someone I'd trusted who had let me down. It surfaced in the consult and I cried, there in the consult, and Dr Raj didn't flinch. He taught me a breath. In through the teeth, hold and out through the nose. "This may calm your body and mind," he said. "I think we can do this." He was right. I still use it.

Ailise ran a workshop on dreams and manifestation that I expected to be lovely and found quietly devastating. She opened with Gabor Maté and his book The Myth of Normal. The research that found the people most likely to develop chronic illness, the cancers and the autoimmune conditions, are the ones who spend their lives putting everyone else first. Overwhelmingly, of course, women.

Then she asked us questions. Not the what should you do with your life kind. Softer, stranger ones. What did you love doing as a child. Who do you envy, and what does that tell you. "If the answer takes everyone else into account," she said, "you're in your head. If it's true for you and you alone, that's your heart." I wrote more in that hour than I had in months.

Everything is made in-house, from scratch, by a team Janine calls therapeutic chefs. Almost the whole menu is gluten-free, dairy-free and sugar-free, and I didn't notice until she told me, which is surely the highest praise one can give a kitchen. The desserts were delicious. The breakfasts actually restored you rather than just photographed well.

Although one of them did both. The floating breakfast, a tray of beautiful things set adrift in the pool, is as memorable and as grammable as it sounds, and I am not ashamed to say I photographed every angle of it before I ate a bite.

Staff chased me across the lawn to bring me a healthy dessert by the pool. Someone delivered snacks to my daybed. When was the last time anyone did that for you? "The menu is built so you can take it home," Janine told me over a stunningly beautiful and delicious lunch. This is not a detox that collapses the moment you land at Sydney airport. It's a way of eating that loves you back.

Escape Haven is the only women's retreat on the island with a permanent wellness team, says Janine. No revolving door of practitioners who never learn your name. Twelve therapists, two full-time trainers, an Ayurvedic body specialist who's been there fourteen years. Every room is named after a goddess and built around her character, colour and all. The aesthetic is a blend of Moroccan and West Indies, which sounds like it shouldn't work but it absolutely does. It feels like somewhere out of a novel I can't quite place. Warm. Familiar. A home I would have if I could.

Janine Hall didn't arrive here by accident. She ran fashion show productions at David Jones, and Selfridges in London, in a past life, pre Bali. Her grandmother was one of Australia's first retail entrepreneurs. She burned out and came to the island for some respite. She hated her first Ayurvedic treatment so much she compared lying on the table to a fish being slapped about at the markets. Then one morning at breakfast the fog lifted, and she sat there thinking, "How long has it been since I felt this calm?"

She decided to build the place she'd needed. Eighteen years on, she has just opened a sister retreat, Mana Sanctuary, a new wellness and longevity haven in Bali for both men and women.

Everything here circles back to the same question. What can you take home? Dr Raj's flask and his breath. Ailise's twenty minutes and her jar of affirmations, one pulled each morning in front of the mirror and said three times. Once to say it. Once to hear it. Once to believe it. Ngurah's bodywork.

There were the wow moments too, the ones built to burn a hole in your memory. One morning we rose before the sun for a bike ride through the rice paddies, with Kadek from the security team leading the way on a motorbike and the whole pack of us pedalling behind him like his ducklings. He stopped, patiently, to take photos of every one of us as the sun came up and spread its golden fingers across the paddies.

I had to cut my own trip short and fly home early, which means I missed the grand finale, and I'm still a little heartbroken about it. On the last day there's a cacao ceremony down on the sand at sunset, bamboo chairs and big purple gourds set out like a wedding. Back at the Haven, everyone puts in their requests for their favourite disco songs and dances through a yoga class before falling into the pool. I'll have to come back for that. I fully intend to.

"If a retreat doesn't survive the reality of home life," Janine reminded me, "then it was just a beautiful holiday."

"Our job is to create change that lasts long after you leave," she says.

I arrived wired, depleted, running on fumes. I left soft. And months later, in my own kitchen in Sydney with the kettle going, to make fennel tea, and the school run looming, I caught myself breathing in through my teeth the way Dr Raj showed me. Hold. Out through the nose. The noise dropped. The morning steadied.

It survived. And thrived. And now most mornings, so do I.

Escape Haven Bali: The Practical Bit

Escape Haven is in Canggu, on Bali's south-west coast, about an hour from Denpasar airport depending on traffic. It takes women only. Packages run across yoga, surf, fitness and Ayurveda, and the Ayurveda one is the reason to come if your body has been quietly filing complaints you've been ignoring.

Book it if you are depleted rather than unfit. This is not a bootcamp and nobody will make you feel bad for lying down. Book it solo, too. Almost everyone does, and the shared table at breakfast does the rest.

If your partner wants in, the co-ed sister property Mana Sanctuary is the one to look at instead. And if you're building a longer Bali trip around it, Sanur is the calm counterweight to Canggu, and Nusa Lembongan is a short boat ride away.

Closer to home, Gwinganna is the Australian equivalent worth knowing about, though the Ayurvedic side of Escape Haven has no local match.

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Escape Haven is in Canggu, Bali, and takes women only. Its sister retreat, Mana Sanctuary, is open to men and women.

Sigourney was a guest of Escape Haven.

Win your own week at Escape Haven

Everything you've just read, we're giving to one reader.

One winner will receive a 6-night Escape Essentials retreat for one woman at Escape Haven in Canggu, Bali, in a private Heritage Room, valued at $4,200. Six nights of being properly looked after, with all your meals, spa and wellness treatments, 18 signature experiences from yoga and breathwork to the sunset beach cacao ceremony, and airport transfers. Flights not included.

To enter, head to our Instagram. Follow @beauticate, @sigourneycantelo and @escapehaven, comment ESCAPE and tell us why you need this escape, and tag two friends who need it too.

Entries close 31 October 2026. Open worldwide to anyone 18+. Entering subscribes you to email updates from Beauticate and Escape Haven, unsubscribe anytime. Full terms and conditions here.