Discover Himalayan Wellbeing As A Way Of Life At Dwarika's Sanctuary
The renamed resort above Dhulikhel builds its new retreats around rituals woven into Nepali life.
The wellness conversation has lately turned to longevity: biomarkers, wearables, and clinics that promise to measure the body into better shape.
Yet, many of the pillars that modern longevity borrows from, including yoga, meditation, and Ayurvedic therapy, come from the Indian subcontinent and the Himalayan valleys around it. Within these cultures, they were rarely thought of as health indulgences at all.
That is the case Dwarika’s Sanctuary sets out to make.
The 40-room retreat sits on a forested hillside above Dhulikhel, a historic town on the old trading route to Tibet, and about an hour’s drive east of Kathmandu’s airport.
Regular visitors to Nepal will know the retreat as Dwarika’s Resort, which already holds a Michelin Key. Under its new name, it has introduced a programme of three-night retreats this year.
The framework is Pancha Kosha, a Hindu teaching that reads a person as five layers, running from the physical body through energy, mind, and insight to bliss.
In practice, this means consultations with the resident Ayurvedic doctors, yoga on decks facing the Himalayas, breathwork in a house built from Himalayan rock salt, and a meditation walk through a maze modelled on Pashupatinath, Kathmandu’s great temple to Shiva.
Dwarika’s Sanctuary has introduced a programme of three-night retreats this year.
The most telling sessions, however, are the least spa-like.
Guests can join the resident priest each morning for a Navagraha ritual, a Hindu rite honouring the nine celestial bodies of Vedic astrology.
A short drive away at Namobuddha, they share an informal lunch with the monks and talk with the khenpo, the monastery’s resident scholar, about how the monks live.
René Vijay Shrestha Einhaus, chief executive of The Dwarika’s Collection, says many of the practices the world now calls wellness “have never been treatments” in Nepal.
Where It Began
The retreat begins, sensibly, in Kathmandu, at the original Dwarika’s Hotel.
In 1952, the chief executive’s grandfather, Dwarika Das Shrestha, came upon carpenters sawing up a carved wooden pillar for firewood. He spent the next four decades rescuing the Newari woodwork his city was throwing away.
A night or two among those salvaged windows, doors, and eaves, carvings that might otherwise have been burnt, gives the Sanctuary’s rituals their soul.
Dwarika’s runs six organic farms across Nepal that supply the Sanctuary’s three restaurants, and guests can walk through terraced fields to Darimbot Farm to help with the harvest before sitting down to a lunch cooked by the farmers.
A combined stay, Kathmandu followed by the three-night retreat, starts at about US$3,802 for a solo traveller and US$4,750 for two sharing an entry-level room in peak season.
That makes it a feasible long weekend from Singapore, and one that sends guests home knowing where their yoga class came from.