The vacation that doesn't work, and the one that does
The suitcase is still packed, and somehow you can’t even stomach looking at it. Within moments of landing from a beautiful vacation, are you dreading Monday like you never even left? This is a common experience.
I have spent more than fifteen years studying why this happens, and what I have learned is this: The most expensive hotels in the world, with the most luxurious-sounding offerings, can sometimes increase the toxicity and stress on your system. Meanwhile, nearly everything that makes a vacation truly restorative is generally overlooked, and much of it is freely available, every single day of your life, whether you are on vacation or not.
Luxury Is Not the Same Thing as Quality
My first real education in hospitality was as an apprentice under Sam Beall, the late proprietor of Blackberry Farm in the Appalachian Mountains, a place built on extraordinary service, a distinct guest experience, and food that people talk about years later. That apprenticeship led to over a decade of my life building our own farm- and nature-based hospitality experience in Sonoma, inspired by the Italian agriturismo tradition and shaped by our own obsessions with holistic health, nature connection, and regeneratively produced food and medicine.
That decade taught me the first real lesson: luxury does not equal quality.
While we were developing Be Here, we spent years studying five-star hotels, spas, and restaurants around the world. What we found was that much of what gets called luxury is actually toxic, superficial, and not-so-covertly contributing to the declining state of health in modern life. Beautiful bed sheets laced with forever chemicals. Bowls of fruit left in your room, coated in pesticide residue. Three-Michelin-star restaurants plating dishes engineered with stabilizers, preservatives, and synthesized additives so they look extraordinary and nourish almost nothing.
Somewhere around thirty, running a business and starting a family, I stopped wanting the version of vacation that meant drinking by a pool for a week and coming home with the vacation blues. The bar had shifted. I realized there was a profound difference between feeling good while I was away and actually coming home better. A trip had to actually change how I felt when I got back. It had to change my life! Or it wasn't worth my time and energy to take it.
What Actually Makes a Vacation Work
After we began hosting our own retreats around the world, something surprising happened. Guests ranging from twenty to eighty, from wildly different backgrounds and interests, kept reporting the exact same benefits from our experiences. Not just a good trip. Something more.
I wanted to understand why, so I started paying attention to what these experiences had in common. What I found boiled down into four missing keys, and regardless of budget, including a budget of zero, they are what separate experiences that leave you inspired and revitalized from ones that leave you depleted and blue.
The Four Missing Keys
1) Becoming Mindful of Your Natural Rhythm
Sometimes we need to slow down and reassess the situation. Many of us are waking up with alarm clocks, spending our days indoors in office buildings, returning home to watch television or the internet, rinsing and repeating the next day, without ever stopping to literally smell the flowers. In other words, perhaps more than at any other time in human history, we are living deeply unnatural lives. Constant exposure to artificial light and indoor environments is one of the most overlooked causes of chronic tiredness.
If a vacation keeps you under that same artificial light, stuck indoors, you never actually access the most freely available medicine there is: your own natural rhythm.
Anyone who has spent a day at sea, or camping, or simply outside long enough to watch the sun go down, knows the feeling of being ready for bed early and sleeping more deeply than usual. On our upcoming Belize trip, for example, the entire day is built around this rhythm as opposed to fighting it: mornings guided by movement in the early light, long walks between meals, evenings that wind down with the sunset, and highly curated, nontoxic sleeping environments, including grounded bedsheets.
2) Connecting with Nature
Time spent in a wild ecosystem changes you, and science and spiritual traditions agree on that. But being near nature and being in connection with it are not the same thing. A person scrolling their phone on a beach, or on a bench in the forest, will still get many of the benefits from spending time in clean, vital ecosystems.
And yet, a person walking slowly through that same environment, breathing more deeply, moving their body, and inhaling fresh air, will receive even more benefits.
Further still, a person walking through that environment who is fully present, aware of how rare and sacred this particular moment actually is, who experiences feelings of awe, wonder, and gratitude for all that they are witnessing, will get something more still, something science can’t really measure. If they are so inclined, they very well may have a spiritually transformative experience which completely shifts their life. And I say this from my own experience, because it is precisely what happened to me.
On our Be Slow trips, such as our upcoming experience in Belize, we seamlessly inspire nature connection without having to discuss it very much at all. It is the underlying mood of the entire week, so it can be directly experienced, felt, and internalized. For example, every bite of food you will eat on our trips is grown according to regenerative, chemical-free farming methods. That's not a minor detail in today’s age. It's the difference between talking about nature and metabolizing it.
3) Living Life as a Ceremony
Most of us, even with full pantries and comfortable homes, fall into routines that lose all sense of how strange and miraculous a single day actually is. A well-designed vacation will strip that routine away, inviting new wonder. Suddenly a walk down a sidewalk or the color of an orange feels unusually vivid. That's not the sidewalk. That's you, becoming more present. We build this mindful attention deliberately into our retreat experiences with simple gestures such as a blessing before meals, or a welcome gift chosen to shift you out of your normal mental gears the moment you arrive. Small, intentional moments that turn a day into something closer to a ceremony than a schedule. This practice can easily be woven into your daily life.
4) Cultivating Reverence and Gratitude
There are few states of being that I find more healing, nourishing, inspiring, and restorative than reverence and gratitude. Encountering unfamiliar architecture, landscapes, or cultures tends to open the door to these states more naturally, which is part of why travel works on people even when they can't explain why. During our Be Slow experiences, we cultivate an environment which allows that door to stay open the entire trip, and hopefully remain open when you return to daily life. Reverence and gratitude can soon become daily experiences.
Practicing at Home or Joining us at Be Slow Belize and Be Slow Italy
If you are drawn to these four missing keys, you can practice all four of them at home. Each one builds on and enables the next. Becoming more mindful of our surroundings while observing natural rhythms. We can consciously choose to connect with nature, live our day ceremoniously, and cultivate feelings of reverence and gratitude for what we experience. These are practices that can change our lives.
The four keys in action look simple: Watch a sunset instead of a show. Say something thoughtful out loud before dinner. These things matter, and they're always free.
Bringing all four together can look as simple as sitting outside, or even by a window, for five minutes each day while cultivating the mood of gratitude for what you observe.
If you wish, you may begin and end this practice with a small prayer or expression of gratitude. Those who are inclined may explore leaving a small gift or offering to nature: a beautiful stone, feather, homemade natural art, or a form of nourishment such as fruit, bread, or wine. And you may enjoy keeping a journal of this experience each day for a period of time, so that you may later observe how your experience shifted over the changing seasons.
And if you want an immersion in all four, in the most pristine, enjoyable, and revitalizing settings, then our Be Slow experiences allow for exactly that. Be Slow is the opportunity to live deeply inside these four practices at once, in some of the most gorgeous locations and unique cultures, while surrounded by people doing the same thing, with nothing pulling you back toward the old rhythms that sometimes drag you down.
The reason to come is not the luxury accommodations, the private island, fun adventures, or regeneratively sourced food. This is not an escape or a detox. The point isn't simply to feel good while you're away…the point is to come home better. This is a week built entirely around the four things that truly bring feelings of joy, a sense of groundedness, nourishment on every level, and lasting feelings of well-being.
If that calls to you, please check out our upcoming Be Slow experiences in Belize and Italy.
