My new best friend is an entrepreneur from Omaha. She claims she’s 67. She looks 52. She thinks it’s her 10th or 11th time here but has lost count. She has two grown kids. Her daughter is an electric-car engineer in Detroit. I don’t remember what her son does. I’m sure she told me, but I was internally fretting about the next topic of conversation should this one run out. Both her kids are adopted. She did it all on her own.
I tell her I’m a single mom too. Or rather, a divorced one. Is that the same thing? Not quite, but she’s not offended. I tell her how my marriage imploded. We’re wearing matching robes and eating a buttery black-cod dish that somehow clocks in under 1,000 calories. There’s no alcohol involved. Ten minutes into baring our souls, we realize neither of us remembers the other’s name. We re-introduce ourselves. Pam. My best friend’s name is Pam.
I hadn’t heard of the Golden Door when I was tasked (or journalistically gifted) with this trip, but that’s on me. It’s famous. Situated outside of San Diego, the all-inclusive wellness spa has existed since 1958 and welcomed guests including Elizabeth Taylor, Martha Stewart, and Oprah. Its Web site promises things like “rejuvenation” and “transformation” and “five acres of bio-intensive gardens,” which seems tailor-made for our current self-care moment. A week’s stay costs about as much as a semester of college (upwards of $10,000).
Here’s what I assumed would happen when I showed up: I would stay in a luxe room, eat multi-grain oatmeal and baked fish, and sit by the pool and read my book in between fitness classes and massages for three days. Maybe I’d lose two pounds?
A couple of weeks prior to my visit, I had a pre-arrival phone consult with a Golden Door coordinator. She told me what to pack. (The only necessities are a swimsuit and shoes with tread; they provide workout clothes and a dinner robe.) She asked if I wanted 1,200 calories a day or 1,600 calories. I paused, waiting for the next option. It didn’t come.
What I didn’t know is that this place is social. Intensely social. Like wear matching kimonos and eat dinner together social. Wake up at 5:30 a.m. to go on pre-dawn hikes and talk about our hopes and dreams on mountaintops together social. Form little friend groups and plan which Pilates classes to go to social. I also didn’t know all the guests would be women, and that there’d only be 35 of us. Or that almost every one of those 35 women was going through Something. Something big. Often it was loss. Grief. Depression. Injury. Divorce. They weren’t here to spend three hours a day on an elliptical machine and go to lectures about how the body metabolizes sugar. Or at least, not just that. They were here to process their Something. With a bunch of other humans who had major Somethings too.
I found this terrifying. I’d mentally prepped myself for physical challenges—like a trainer making me do more than four burpees—but not for group therapy of any sort. And I was definitely unprepared for the mortifying junior-high experience of walking into a dining hall, approaching a group of females, and asking, “Is this seat taken?”
This is not to say anyone was unfriendly. It was perhaps the warmest group of women I’ve ever met. The notion that everyone was there to “heal” rocketed stranger intimacy by a factor of about a million. (See: me and Pam the first night.) Women cried openly. In front of people they’d just met. At dinner, at lunch, on hikes, in workshops, in the Jacuzzi inside the bathhouse. By the end of my first day, I started to feel bad I hadn’t cried yet. I was the daffy lady who came for calorie restriction and exercise, without an existential crisis to work through. I was the shallow one.
For the first 24 hours, I clung to Pam like a barnacle. (Sorry, Pam!) If Pam was going on the three-mile hike in the morning, I signed up for the three-mile hike in the morning. The idea of being the straggler newb no one wanted to talk to was my primary anxiety.
My secondary one was going hungry. When the hiking crew met up at six a.M. in the lounge, I stuffed mini muffins into the pockets of my tracksuit. Before each hike we stood in a circle and swiveled our hips in the pre-dawn darkness as the guide read an inspirational quote. “The bigger the challenge, the bigger the opportunity for growth” or “Nature is the purest portal to inner peace.”
Then we’d start up the hill in little groups making polite small talk. How did you sleep? My legs are so sore already! By the way down, the tenor of the conversation had changed. I’m learning to be O.K. with living the rest of my life alone. It took me years to get over the guilt of not giving my son a sibling. With each hike, the time it took to go from small talk to real talk got shorter.
Every day at 10:50 A.M. there is a “broth break.” It’s vegetable broth, and it’s become the stuff of legend. During the first dinner, old-timers talked about it like it was a loved one. The broth! Wait ’til you try the broth! Some had tried to replicate it at home with V8, but it just wasn’t the same. I couldn’t fathom how warm savory water could be that memorable. That is, until my first morning at 10:50 a.m., when I arrived at the pool having finished the three-mile morning hike and a total-body strength class, as well as 15 minutes of sun salutations, and a nice attendant handed me a warm cup of tomato broth along with assorted powders to scoop in—turmeric, chili, and … I believe the attendant said estrogen. Though later I discovered it was just flaxseed, which naturally increases estrogen in the body.
With each hike, the time it took to go from small talk to real talk got shorter.
Regardless, the turmeric, chili, estrogen-promoting tomato broth was the most sublime thing I’ve ever drunk. Early on, the marriage of fitness and spiritual well-being this place was going for felt fraught to me. Getting a hot bod is a very different endeavor than overcoming a terrible divorce or the death of a loved one. But it turns out that everything—including emotions—is closer to the surface when you’re exhausted and hungry. A massage speaks to your soul. Broth brings you joy.
The other word you will hear here over and over again is “Deb.” Deb is short for Deborah Szekely, the founder of the Golden Door. Did you know Deb is 101 years old and still does Pilates every day? Isn’t it insane that all this [gestures at the estate] was one woman’s vision? Did you know she brought this giant bell back from Japan herself? It’s more than 300 years old. Deb is, by all accounts, amazing. Deb is who we all want to be. A woman with purpose. A woman dedicated to healing the world. A woman who can still do an excellent butt bridge in her second century on earth.
You’re not required to socialize at the Golden Door. You can opt for a Bachelor contestant’s “I’m not here to make friends”-style vacation, eat in your room, skip the morning hikes. You can create your own schedule. And I’m sure some guests do that. (It’s hard to imagine Martha Stewart sitting down to a group lunch with a bunch of ladies discussing the best hypoallergenic cat breeds, but, who knows, maybe she does.)
But the majority of the women here are here to be around the others. In fact, most of them are returning guests who formed such close friendships the last time they came, they now come back every year with those friends. One woman I chat with has come every year for 20 years; another is on her third week here this year. As much as the introvert in me was tempted to, opting out of the communal parts felt like missing the whole point. We come to this place to be around the other women going through it. Yes, that was meant to be read in Nicole Kidman AMC Theatres voice.
By my last day at the Golden Door, I had added other ladies to my friend group. (Shout-out to Laura, Jessica, and Carol from La Jolla, who very sweetly offered to take my picture for “the article” every time we found ourselves before a scenic vista.) I had embraced teary women, read Louise Glück poetry in the bamboo forest, walked a labyrinth and, as instructed, imagined it was the journey of my life. I’d done a Watsu massage, where a petite woman cradled me in her bosom and floated me around a warm pool under the stars. It felt like ballroom dancing in space. But I hadn’t cried.
But then that night, after dinner, I went to a “Breathwork & Crystal Bowls” class. We laid down on mats across the room, a towel over our eyes. The instructor, Danielle, demonstrated how to take two breaths in—one through the belly, one through the chest—and exhale out the nose. Three minutes into the breathing, I lost sensation in my arms. My chest felt like it had pins and needles. My heart seemed to be pure static electricity. It was exhilarating and terrifying.
A moment later, I burst into tears. Huge, heaving sobs, actually. In front of Pam and Laura and 20 other women. I couldn’t stop. I wept for 45 minutes straight. Through the very lovely crystal-bowl playing. Until the end of class. I felt bananas. In a good way.
I tried describing what had happened to Danielle after class. It was my heart chakra, she said. That’s where I was feeling the sensation. Something had broken through. What had broken through? Despite residing in Los Angeles, I do not speak in terms of chakras or energies or things that can’t be found on WebMD. Danielle shrugged. Sometimes we don’t even know what needs to be released until we move through it.
Maybe I was a woman going through Something after all. I just didn’t know how to name it.
Lauren Bans is a Los Angeles–based television writer
