The Ayurveda Chapter: Jen’s Story
The same medicine. Twice. Two daughters against the odds. And one chapter in the middle that almost ended it all.
Before Bali, I was in corporate life.
I got to a certain point in my career and I realised – is this it? Is this what all of the struggle has been for? Because I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel, but I thought I’d feel differently than this. And I realised I was on this treadmill, searching for this elusive feeling of contentment that never came, and I was burning myself out in the process.
My ladder was leaning against the wrong wall.
So I left corporate life and took my life savings to Brazil. I lost almost all of it.
I spent the next three months asking myself if this was a sign that I should go back to my corporate life. But I knew my ladder was still leaning against the wrong wall, and I would have been lying to myself if I overlooked that realisation and went straight back to what I had always known. I also knew, firsthand, that women needed a place like the one I wanted to build. Somewhere to escape burnout before it took them down the way it had nearly taken me.
So I arrived in Bali with $10,000 and not a single contact, and I built Escape Haven from the one thing I had left – the conviction that women deserved a place to fill their cup before they hit the wall, not after.
That was almost twenty years ago.
The first five years of Escape Haven were hard work and a little lonely, as the life of an entrepreneur often is. I was operating from conviction and not much else, watching guest after guest arrive in the same state I had been in, leaving lighter than they came. And somewhere in those years – on a holiday in Ubud a few years before we’d opened, actually – I had discovered Ayurveda for myself for the first time. The effect on my body had been so profound that I had eventually built a retreat around it. It is the slowest, most ancient version of what we offer at Escape Haven, and it works at the pace your nervous system actually needs, not the pace you would like to recover at.
And then I met Trent. Then we got married. Then we wanted to try for a baby.
I was forty-two.
A fertility specialist gave us 5% odds if we tried for an entire year.
That was the number. And so I came home from the appointment and I booked us a week of Ayurveda treatments, because by then I knew what Ayurveda could do to a body that had been holding too much for too long. If I was going to ask my body to do something extraordinary at forty-two, the least I could do was give it a chance to come down first. Slow it right down. Let it find itself again.
I was pregnant within weeks. Our daughter Indii was born nine months later.
The chapter I almost did not survive
Eight weeks after Indii was born, I contracted bacterial meningitis.
I spent three weeks in hospital fighting for my life. I could not hold my newborn. I could not stay awake long enough to know whose hands she was in. The brain inflammation lasted longer than the fever did. The numbness lasted longer than that. It was all just a bit of shock, really – that I had spent eight years building a retreat for women running on empty, and there I was, more depleted than any of them, in a hospital bed eight weeks after giving birth to a daughter I had fought hard to bring into the world.
When I finally came home, something was wrong. I would not understand for years that what I was carrying was postnatal depression layered on top of brain inflammation – the language for it came later. The experience of it was already there. I just thought I was struggling to feel like myself again. I thought I was tired. I thought it was the meningitis still moving through me. I thought I would come right.
And here’s the thing I learned, and the thing I cannot stop saying to women who come to see us:
Fill your cup before you hit the wall, not after. I had been saying it for eight years. I had not been doing it.
It is a long road of recovery from burnout. So it is much better to look at how to prevent those sorts of things, because once you have crossed the line into depletion – real depletion, the kind your body remembers – the journey back is not a weekend, and it is not a holiday. It is a road. It is a quiet, slow, often invisible road, and it asks more of you than you know how to give.
When I finally came back to my body, slowly, I made one decision. I was not going to build the rest of my life the way I had built the first part of it. Not the business. Not my marriage. Not the family Trent and I still wanted to grow.
1% odds
A couple of years later, when we were ready to try for a second child, I was forty-four.
The same fertility specialist gave us 1% odds.
He said it kindly, he laid out the medical options. He said it would be a long and expensive road and that we should prepare ourselves for it not to work. And so I went home and I booked us another week of Ayurveda treatments. Because at that point I had been around the practice for long enough to know what it did to a body that had been holding things for too long. I had lived it once. I knew what it could do.
Again, I was pregnant within weeks. Our daughter Lullah is now seven.
I don’t tell that part of the story often. Partly because it is private, and partly because every woman’s body and path is so completely her own. The numbers in our story – 5%, 1%, forty-two, forty-four – they belonged to my body, my history, my particular set of circumstances. They are not a formula. They are not a promise. They are simply what happened to me. Twice.
What I will say is this. Ayurveda does something to a depleted body that I have not seen any other modality do as deeply. It does not push. It does not optimise. It listens. It restores. And whatever conversation my body was having with itself in those two specific weeks of treatments, I trust that the slowing down was part of it.
What Ayurveda actually is
Ayurveda is one of the oldest known systems of medicine on earth. It comes out of India, and it is built on the principle that every body has a constitution – a dosha – and that real healing happens when you eat, move, sleep, breathe, and rest in alignment with what your particular body needs. It is the opposite of one-size-fits-all wellness.
At Escape Haven, our Ayurveda Retreat is built around daily warm-oil treatments, dosha-specific nutrition, breath work, herbal treatments, yoga calibrated to your constitution, and a pace of life designed by people who understood rest a thousand years before the rest of us caught up. It is the slowest, deepest package we offer.
And it is the package I built because of what Ayurveda gave me – long before it gave me my daughters. It is for the woman who has been pushing for too long without quite knowing it. The one whose body is carrying something her calendar does not have room to acknowledge. The one whose nervous system has forgotten what it feels like to be off.
If you recognise yourself in any of that, this is the retreat built for you.
Why I am writing this now
I have not put this story on the website in almost twenty years. I have told it in interviews. I have referenced it in conversations with guests who asked. I have written it in private notes. But I have never given it a proper home in detail on the platform that carries the brand I built, partly because it felt too personal, and partly because I did not want anyone to read it as a promise.
So please don’t.
I am simply telling you what happened to me, in case it resonates. The reason this story belongs here now is that the Ayurveda Retreat has become one of the most quietly powerful retreats we run, and I think the women who would benefit from it most are not finding their way to it. They are scrolling past it because it sounds traditional. Or slow. Or not as exciting as the fitness package, or the surf package, or the bucket list package.
It is slow. It is traditional. That is the point. It’s also our highest rated package for a reason. You feel the difference.
If your body has been holding tension for longer than you remember, this is the retreat built for it.
The chapter I am in now
Indii is nine. Lullah is seven. Our household also includes my stepdaughter Kahlia, who is eighteen and currently living with us, three dogs who somehow fit in one dog carrier on the back of the bike, and a chicken with strong opinions about being left behind on the school run.
Trent and I take Friday date nights. We do sunset cuddle rides on the motorbike. I am in bed by 8pm most nights, and I am no longer apologising for it.
When I dreamed up my life in Bali eighteen years ago, I could not have imagined the fun, chaotic, magical adventure it would become. The best chapters of my life turned out to be the ones I never saw coming. And the medicine that taught my body what rest actually felt like is the same medicine that, in two separate weeks of treatments years apart, helped me grow the family I never thought I would have.
I built Escape Haven so that other women would not have to learn what I learned the hard way. That is still the work. That is still the point.
Fill your cup before you hit the wall, not after.
And so that’s the story.
If you have read this far, thank you for letting me tell it.
Jen x
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