My Journey Towards Lasting Recovery

At Kamalaya’s Yantra Hall, the day starts with a mantra. Barefoot and still only half awake, I sit cross-legged on the floor as spiritual teacher Adi leads the morning chant, his voice cutting through the quiet of the tropical morning.

On Tuesdays, the focus is Shiva, and the ritual carries some of that deity’s charge: clearing, renewal, the force needed to break old patterns and make room for recovery.

By the end of last year, I was ready for that. Living in steamy, densely-populated Bangkok, with a 9-year-old boy to guide through life and an ever-replenishing to-do list to tackle is interesting, but not always energising. What’s more, a brush with rickettsial meningitis, along with ongoing sleep problems, had left me depleted, foggy and flat.

What became clear at Kamalaya was that there would be no single answer. Recovery here meant looking at the problem from multiple angles, then treating it that way too.

Reading body and mind

One of the first frameworks to make sense of what I was feeling came through Traditional Chinese Medicine. Built around the movement of Qi, the vital energy or life force, and the body’s network of meridians, TCM is less concerned with isolating one symptom than with reading the wider pattern. During my initial consultation, my practitioner identified what she described as a “soggy pulse”, suggesting depleted energy and dampness in the system, a pattern often linked to fatigue and sluggishness. It was sobering, but it rang true.

Another perspective came at Kamalaya’s Cognitive House, where a detailed assessment of my brain health pointed to fatigue and strain of a different kind. Different treatments and practices arrived at much the same conclusion: I was depleted. That mattered, because it meant the program was not built around one grand fix. Instead, it responded with a layered mix of consultation, therapy, movement, nutrition and rest.

Support from multiple directions

Over the course of my Resilience & Immunity program, that approach unfolded in practical ways. There was a wellness consultation and body analysis to establish a baseline, followed by nutritional guidance, herbal supplements and remedies, and a range of treatments designed to support recovery on multiple fronts.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy focused on oxygenation and repair. Vagus stimulation, mindfulness training and personal meditation worked on the nervous system, while yoga, breathwork and other daily activities helped restore a little more coherence between body and mind. Other

details mattered too, from the wellness cuisine and herbal support to the daily rhythm and the simple discipline of sleeping, eating and moving well.

That was the real strength of the experience. Healing was not treated as an abstract ideal or a luxury add-on, but as a process reinforced from multiple directions at once. Some elements addressed the physical aftermath of illness. Others targeted stress, fatigue and the accumulated wear and tear of poor sleep. Others simply helped restore a sense of steadiness and care at a time when both felt in short supply.

Recovery, step by step

None of this felt instantaneous. There was no single breakthrough moment when everything suddenly clicked into place. Instead, I began to feel the cumulative effect of many interventions working together. My energy started to lift. The mental fog eased. I felt more rested, more clear-headed, more like myself. Not fixed, exactly, since residual symptoms of meningitis can linger for months. But I could feel that I was moving in the right direction.

Back in Yantra Hall, after the Shiva mantra had risen and fallen through the morning air, I found a moment to reflect on my circumstances. Healing, I realised, rarely comes down to one answer. It depends on putting the right conditions in place.