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I’ve been to Hawaiʻi many times and visited other islands, but Lānaʻi is the one people talk about with deep lore. I’d always wanted to see it for myself, and I’d been obsessing about Sensei Lānaʻi, A Four Seasons Resort. It’s a wellness retreat in the upcountry of the island, and the seclusion and specificity were exactly what I wanted. So I reached out about planning a trip, and worked with their wellbeing team to build an itinerary that met me exactly where I was: exhausted, but full and inspired. It also made room for my fiancée, who was in a similar place in their work life.
I was six months into a new job as SVP of Brand & Content at R29Unbothered, and those months had been a satisfying whirlwind, full of new skills and the strange relief of finally being inside an industry I’ve loved from the outside for years. They had also been six months without a single day off, and it was showing up in small, unglamorous ways. I’d been carrying the same book from room to room for weeks, reading the same page four nights in a row and retaining none of it. I’m also dealing with some ongoing health stuff, chronic pain that has quietly reorganized my life. I needed to find my baseline, or at least remember I had one — and I had a feeling Sensei could help.
My wish for this trip was specific: I wanted to surrender to nature, stay off my phone, finish the book, and come home knowing more about my body than I knew when I left. I was excited to find out. So my fiancée and I made our way to Lānaʻi.
What I Packed
• A few vintage silk and linen pieces that I could transition in and out of.
• EltaMD UV Daily Hydration+ SPF 50. I don’t leave the house without it, let alone the state.
• Augustinus Bader The Ultimate Soothing Cream. The single thing that has done the most for my literally soothing my dermatitis.
• Marie Veronique Balancing HypoTonic and Barrier Restore Serum. These two products have changed my skin and hold up in any climate.
• My Clyde Swim Bucket hat In Black. Basic enough to live in all day, which is what the property asks of you.
• The Bond-Eye Sofie Triangle and Serenity Brief, both in black
• My HealthyLine TAJ-Mat, the twenty-by-twenty travel size. It’s the heaviest thing in my bag but I have to have it when I travel, just in case I have a pain flare up
• A Terrible Strength: The Hidden Crisis of the Black Womb and Your Survival Guide to Healing by Dr. Kemi Doll. I hadn’t been able to put it down, so I needed to take it with me.
The Days
Day 1
We landed and were fed before anyone asked anything of us. There’s a Nobu on the property, and dinner that first night was the prime tenderloin tobanyaki, with caramelized onions, shiitake and asparagus, all of it deglazed in sake and yuzu soy and still moving in its hot ceramic dish when it reached the table. Nobody handed me an intake form. Nobody asked me about my goals. We ate, and then we walked back through the gardens into the quietest dark I’d been in for a long time. There were critters everywhere, frogs and lizards moving through the leaves, and the whole property had this nighttime ambient noise running underneath it. It helped us both drop in.
Day 2
The next morning I walked out of my room and did what became my daily practice for the rest of the trip, which was to slow all the way down and take in the flora and fauna on the property.
Tropical flowers in bloom everywhere. The colors you move through on that walk do their own kind of healing work before you ever get to the spa or sit down for a wellbeing session.
Then I had what became my breakfast ritual meal the whole trip, this delicious Japanese breakfast with perfectly brined salmon.
Then I sat down for a private wellbeing session that paired breathwork with biometrics, which meant they clipped a little node to my earlobe and tracked my heart rate variability while I breathed, so I could watch my own nervous system move in real time. I’ve been meditating since I was seventeen. I had never had proof. The practitioner watched the numbers come in and told me that I drop into a parasympathetic state easily, faster, she said, than most people she works with. That was comforting to hear as a longtime meditator. I had never seen the quantitative impact my practice has on my physiology, and I loved finding out. We spent the rest of the day at the pool, doing nothing, on purpose.
Day 3
The next day we rode horses through the wilderness of Lānaʻi. The stables were beautiful, saddles and tack oiled and knolled like a still life, everything set exactly in its place. My horse was named Spirit and he was exceptionally gentle with me. I loved taking in the energy of the island with equine support, and hearing its history from the ranch hand leading the ride.
Then we had Lomi Lomi massages, side by side. Lomi Lomi is an indigenous Hawaiian massage practice, rhythmic and deeply connective. The closest analog I’ve found is Thai massage. Both are built on momentum rather than stillness. There is rocking, there is stretching, there is very little lying flat and receiving. You move with the practitioner. This is also the practice that made me a person who gets massages at all: in college in South Africa, the bodyworker I saw was a Pacific Islander who specialized in it. Being returned to it two decades later, in the place it came from, allowed me to be reflective about my own journey, and left me in reverence of Hawaiian culture and their unique somatic intelligence.
Day 4
On day four I went clay shooting, which I had never done in my life and turned out to be pretty good at, which was a surprise. Here’s what I didn’t know: shooting is a full body, hyper focused experience. While you’re tracking a target there is simply no room in your head for anything else, and it’s an immediate off switch.
Later that afternoon I tested my VO2 max. If you haven’t come across it, VO2 max is the measure of how much oxygen your body can actually take in and put to use when you’re working hard. It’s the cleanest proxy we have for cardiovascular fitness, and it happens to be one of the better predictors we have of how long and how well you get to live. The test itself was simple. I walked on a treadmill for about eight minutes breathing into an oxygen device, starting off very slow. Because of my chronic pain, they put me on an incline instead of having me run. The chronic pain has cost me cardiovascular fitness, and seeing that arrive on a screen was less painful than I had braced for. The trainer was matter-of-fact about it, which was exactly what I needed. Honestly, I think this was one of the key pieces that helped inform my baseline. Even though I look strong and feel strong, my cardiovascular capacity is really affected right now. Learning my VO2 max helped me understand that there is still so much room for me to get back to a better baseline.
Day 5
I saved Watsu for the last day, because it’s one of my favorite somatic practices. At Sensei Lānaʻi they call it aquatic bodywork. It’s shiatsu performed in water, with weights on your legs so that you float rather than hover, and I am deeply in love with it. It always feels like a return to the most primordial support there is. We did ours in one of the spa hale, the thousand-square-foot structures tucked into the gardens with their own pools. It turned out to be the right way to say goodbye to the property, release the trip, and get myself ready to go home. A beautiful ritual to close on.
What to Know
Before you go
• The remoteness is the whole proposition. You get there on a thirty-minute semi-private flight from Honolulu on Lānaʻi Air, which is included in the stay, and once you’re on Lānaʻi, you’re on Lānaʻi. If you want to be out and about, this isn’t your trip.
• The property is eighteen and over, which is a good part of why it stays as quiet as it does.
• Sensei sits up at Kōʻele in the upcountry, while beach access is down at Hulopoʻe Bay at the sister Four Seasons, about thirty minutes away on a shuttle that runs hourly. The two properties feel like different climates, so pack for both.
Wish I’d known
The wellbeing programming is more rigorous than the setting lets on. The grounds are lush enough that you could mistake this for an escapist trip, and then your VO2 max arrives on a screen. If you go the fitness optimization route, be prepared to blend a serene, nutritive environment with hard information about your body: your cardiovascular capacity, your biometrics, how you actually meditate. For some people that’s too much of a juxtaposition. For me it was exactly what I needed. And if you want something even more restorative and less data driven, they have a rest and sleep focused program.
Oh, and my book. I finished the last few pages on the flight home.
About the Writer
Erica Chidi is SVP of Brand & Content at R29Unbothered
Sensei Lāna’i hosted a portion of this stay. All opinions are the author’s own.
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