Sadie Brenner

I spent twenty years in marketing, which is a useful background for this, because it means I recognise the machinery when it is pointed at me. By forty I was thoroughly burnt out, and I booked a week at a yoga retreat with roughly the ambition of a houseplant: to sit in the light and not die. It worked better than I expected, and it also made me deeply curious about the enormous, glossy, largely unregulated industry I had just handed my money to.

So I kept going, to a lot of them, on purpose. Silent retreats and detox weeks, thermal spas and ayurvedic centres, the genuinely restorative and the frankly ridiculous. I learned that a good retreat can reset something real, that a bad one is an expensive lie-in with a supplement upsell, and that the marketing rarely tells you which is which.

Alchemy Wellness Resorts is my independent guide to telling them apart. I am not a resort and not a booking agent, I take no commission, and I have no interest in selling you a transformation. What I can do is explain, plainly, what each kind of retreat actually involves, what it is genuinely worth, what a week really costs, and the warning signs worth heeding. Ingrid Sollberger, a wellness professional with a clinical background, keeps me honest on the health claims, of which this industry makes a great many it cannot support.