I have spent years working in wellness. I have helped open wellness-centered properties, studied different approaches to healing and recovery, worked alongside practitioners and spent an enormous amount of time trying to understand what actually helps the body regenerate.

Somewhere along the way, however, my thinking began moving in the opposite direction from much of the wellness industry.

Instead of asking what else we could add, I started asking why we needed so much intervention in the first place.

Wellness has become increasingly sophisticated in what it can offer. We now have hyperbaric oxygen chambers, red and near-infrared light devices, infrared saunas, cold therapies, sound therapies, IVs, supplements, advanced diagnostics, biohacking equipment and increasingly elaborate programs designed to improve sleep, reduce inflammation, accelerate recovery and regulate the nervous system.

I have explored many of these ideas myself. I have also spent years studying nutrition and supplementation, particularly in relation to regenerative medicine protocols such as stem-cell treatments and ozone therapy. Over time, even my own healing philosophy became simpler. Supplementation, which once occupied a significant place in it, largely fell away.

The deeper I went, the more interested I became in a different question: what is the body already capable of doing when we stop interfering with it and give it the conditions it requires?

That question ultimately changed the way I think about hospitality too.

We keep rebuilding pieces of nature indoors

One of the strangest realizations I have had after years around wellness environments is how many of our interventions are technological attempts to isolate something nature already provides.

We manipulate light because light affects human physiology. We manipulate heat and cold because temperature changes affect physiology. We manipulate oxygen, sound and sensory input because the environment surrounding the body matters. We purify indoor air because breathing clean air matters. We design circadian lighting because the body responds to the changing light of day.

None of this means these technologies are inherently useless. Some have legitimate clinical applications and some people may benefit from them enormously.

But I began seeing a pattern.

We were taking individual components of the natural environment, separating them from the whole, engineering them into a treatment and placing the treatment inside another highly engineered environment.

Often that means a person is lying beneath an expensive light panel or inside a sophisticated chamber while still enclosed by walls, artificial lighting, electrical equipment, mechanical ventilation and all the sensory regularity of a modern building.

Even good architecture remains architecture.

The natural world does not organize itself into perfectly straight corridors, repeating ceiling grids and identical right angles. It is irregular, layered, moving and constantly changing. The branches outside the window never form quite the same pattern twice. Light moves through leaves. Shadows shift. Wind changes direction. Water refuses to travel in a perfectly straight line. The horizon creates depth that a wall cannot.

There is an entire field of biophilic design attempting to bring some of these qualities back into buildings, and research suggests that natural elements, views and nature-inspired patterns can support stress recovery. Studies of fractal patterns—the repeating but irregular geometries found throughout nature—have also reported reductions in physiological stress associated with viewing certain naturalistic patterns.[1][2][3]

I believe this work is valuable.

But to me it also reveals something fundamental.

We are trying to make our buildings behave a little more like nature because human beings respond differently to nature.

And there is a limit to how closely the imitation can ever resemble the original.

A forest is not one therapy

This is where I began questioning the wellness model more deeply.

Think about what happens when you lie on the ground in a forest.

You are not receiving a single isolated intervention.

Sunlight is moving across your skin and changing by the minute. Your eyes are taking in irregular shapes, depth, movement and enormous variations in green and brown. You are touching the earth. Temperature and humidity are changing around you. You are hearing wind, birds, insects and leaves rather than a manufactured soundtrack. You are breathing air containing compounds released by plants and trees.

Research into forest environments has identified naturally occurring volatile organic compounds from trees, often described as phytoncides, including alpha-pinene and beta-pinene. Human forest-bathing studies have reported changes in stress hormones and natural killer cell activity after time spent in forests, although researchers appropriately caution that the effects of nature exposure are complex and cannot be attributed to a single compound or mechanism.[4][5][6]

That complexity is exactly what interests me.

A forest does not give us light therapy and then send us down the hall for sound therapy.

The light, air, scent, visual field, temperature, terrain, sound, microbial environment and movement all arrive together.

Nature is not administering modalities.

It is creating an environment.

I don’t believe we will ever manufacture something more complete than that environment, regardless of how much the machine costs.

This is where restorative hospitality began for me

When I originally imagined restorative stays, I wasn’t thinking about putting another wellness center in the middle of a major city.

The entire point was to leave.

I imagined places just beyond our population centers where someone could retreat into a fundamentally different environment: a small lodge surrounded by forest, a guesthouse beside a river, a farmhouse in open country, cabins in the mountains, a property overlooking a lake or somewhere along a quiet coastline.

These were not necessarily places people would visit for a treatment weekend.

I imagined people staying for two weeks, three weeks or a month.

Long enough for the pace of ordinary life to fall away. Long enough to sleep until the body no longer demanded twelve hours of it. Long enough to walk without having somewhere to go. Long enough for sunlight, darkness, weather, silence, food and movement to begin organizing the day again.

Nature was never supposed to be an amenity attached to the experience.

It was the center of it.

Hospitality was there to protect and support the conditions the place was already creating.

We have confused access to nature with immersion in it

Hospitality often describes a property as nature-oriented because it has a forest view, trails nearby, access to outdoor recreation or mountains visible in the distance.

Those things are wonderful, but restorative hospitality asks something more fundamental.

What happens when you actually step outside the room?

Can you walk directly into the landscape or do you first cross a parking garage and a six-lane street? Can you hear natural sound when the windows are open? Does real darkness arrive at night? Can you see stars? Is the horizon visible? Are the forms around you varied and organic, or is nature something framed behind glass while the guest remains almost entirely inside a controlled building?

There is a difference between looking at nature and being surrounded by it.

Biophilic interiors may help. A beautiful window looking onto trees may help. Natural materials, curved forms, irregular patterns and thoughtful daylighting may all make a built environment more humane. Research supports incorporating nature into indoor environments when access to actual nature is limited.[1][2]

But those things should not lead us to believe we have replaced nature.

They are acknowledgments of how much we need it.

The body is already a regenerative system

My thinking about regenerative medicine followed a surprisingly similar path.

For years I studied diets and supplementation protocols because I wanted to understand how best to prepare the body for treatments such as stem-cell injections and ozone therapy.

If someone was going to invest in regenerative medicine, I wanted to know: what nutritional state would reduce inflammation? What would create the best metabolic environment? What would give those treatments the greatest opportunity to work?

That research led me deeper into fasting.

One of the studies that caught my attention was work from researchers at the University of Southern California examining prolonged fasting and hematopoietic stem cells. In animal models, repeated periods of fasting lasting 72 hours or longer lowered IGF-1 and PKA signaling and promoted changes associated with hematopoietic stem-cell self-renewal and regeneration. Preliminary human data in people receiving chemotherapy suggested that fasting also affected the immune system and might reduce some chemotherapy-associated damage.[7]

More recent human research continues to make the picture interesting. A study of healthy adults practicing Ramadan fasting found an increase in circulating hematopoietic stem/progenitor cell populations during the fasting period.[8] Human studies are also beginning to demonstrate changes in measurable autophagic activity with different forms of fasting, although the timing, tissue specificity and clinical significance of human autophagy remain much less settled than wellness culture often suggests.[9][10]

I initially approached all of this from the standpoint of optimization.

If stem cells were going to be injected, when would the body be most receptive to them? Would it make sense to arrive at treatment after several days of fasting, when insulin and glucose signaling had shifted, inflammation may be lower and the body’s metabolic state had changed dramatically?

Then another question began bothering me.

If fasting itself is already activating endogenous repair and regenerative pathways, why am I thinking only about how to optimize the intervention?

Why not continue asking what the body will do when given the opportunity?

That does not establish that fasting replaces stem-cell therapy, and the science does not currently justify that conclusion. There are clinical situations in which regenerative medicine may have a role that fasting simply does not reproduce.

But philosophically, the question changed everything for me.

I had spent years asking how to make interventions work better and eventually found myself increasingly fascinated by what happened when the intervention was removed.

And if someone is several days into a fast, resting deeply while the body is undergoing a profound metabolic shift, what do they actually need from hospitality at that moment?

Probably not another appointment.

They need a comfortable bed.

Quiet.

Water.

Fresh air.

Sunlight.

Somewhere beautiful to walk when they feel like walking.

And nature.

That realization is much closer to the origin of Sanctuary Found than any spa treatment menu could ever be.

Restoration is not another schedule

This is also why I have become uncomfortable with the way wellness travel often treats exhausted people.

Someone arrives because their life has become too demanding, and we immediately give them another schedule.

There may be meditation, breathwork, yoga, consultations, treatments, cold exposure, workshops, fitness and carefully timed meals. Each activity may have value independently, but collectively we can end up recreating the very dynamic the guest came to escape: someplace to be, something to accomplish and another standard against which to measure themselves.

Restoration does not need to work like this.

A genuinely depleted person may arrive and sleep for the first three days.

They may not want to attend anything.

They may not want to socialize.

They may spend an entire afternoon sitting beside a river doing absolutely nothing.

That is not a failure to engage with the program.

In a restorative environment, that may be the program working perfectly.

Restoration requires time

We have also compressed recovery into the timetable of tourism.

Two nights. Three nights. A long weekend.

But the body does not know the checkout time.

Sometimes the first several days of stopping simply reveal how exhausted someone has become. Restlessness may appear before calm does. Sleep may deepen before energy returns. The desire to fill every hour can take time to disappear.

This is why longer stays were part of my original vision for restorative hospitality.

A week allows someone to settle.

Two weeks begins to change the rhythm of life.

A month allows someone to stop experiencing a place purely as a tourist and begin living according to its rhythm.

That is a fundamentally different kind of travel.

And I think we need far more places designed to accommodate it.

Restoration doesn’t need to look like wellness

Perhaps this is the most encouraging part.

Restorative hospitality does not require an enormous capital investment in technology.

The property may be a farmhouse, an old inn, a lodge, a handful of cabins or a simple guesthouse beside a forest.

Its greatest assets might already be there.

Land.

Trees.

Darkness.

Silence.

Water.

Space.

What hospitality can do is stop getting in the way of them.

Design still matters enormously. We can choose natural materials, create visual softness and variation, bring daylight deep into rooms, make it easy to open windows, protect darkness at night and design interiors that take cues from the irregularity and complexity of the natural world instead of treating every surface like a commercial box.

But the building should support the relationship with place rather than attempt to become the place.

The room gives the guest somewhere deeply comfortable to sleep.

The land does something the room never can.

What restoration is not

After years of working around wellness, I no longer believe restoration is something we can simply package into another treatment.

It isn’t a biohack.

It isn’t an itinerary.

It isn’t a room full of technology designed to reproduce individual pieces of the natural environment.

And it isn’t another task for an exhausted person to perform correctly.

Restorative hospitality begins much further upstream.

It asks what happens when we change the conditions around a person.

When they can sleep.

When they can breathe clean air.

When natural light organizes the day and darkness organizes the night.

When the sensory environment stops demanding constant attention.

When food becomes simple.

When nobody expects productivity.

When there is enough time.

And, above all, when the human body is returned to an environment it recognizes.

After years spent studying how to improve wellness interventions, I keep arriving at something increasingly uncomplicated.

We do not need to do nature better than nature.

We need to create places where people can return to it.

References

1. Yin J, et al. “Effects of biophilic indoor environment on stress and anxiety recovery: A between-subjects experiment in virtual reality.” Environment International. 2020;136:105427. The study found greater stress and anxiety recovery in simulated indoor environments incorporating biophilic elements compared with a non-biophilic office environment.

2. Pérez-Urrestarazu L, et al. “Nature in the Office: A Systematic Review of Nature Elements and Their Effects on Worker Stress Response.” Healthcare. 2023;11(21):2838. This systematic review found evidence supporting outdoor access and natural elements as strategies associated with reduced workplace stress, while noting limitations in the existing research.

3. Taylor RP, et al. “Relaxing Floors: Fractal Fluency in the Built Environment.” Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences. 2020. The authors discuss experimental research associating exposure to certain fractal patterns with reduced physiological stress and improved cognitive outcomes.

4. Li Q, et al. “Visiting a forest, but not a city, increases human natural killer activity and expression of anti-cancer proteins.” International Journal of Immunopathology and Pharmacology. 2008;21(1):117–127. In this small controlled comparison, forest exposure was associated with increased NK-cell activity and decreased urinary adrenaline, effects not observed during a comparable city trip.

5. Li Q, et al. “A forest bathing trip increases human natural killer activity and expression of anti-cancer proteins in female subjects.” Journal of Biological Regulators & Homeostatic Agents. 2008;22(1):45–55. Researchers detected tree-derived phytoncides including alpha- and beta-pinene and reported changes in NK-cell activity and stress-hormone measurements following forest exposure.

6. Kassavou A, et al. “Effect of nature exposure on perceived and physiologic stress: A systematic review.” Complementary Therapies in Medicine. 2020;53:102514. The review evaluated controlled research examining nature exposure and physiological or perceived measures of stress.

7. Cheng C-W, et al. “Prolonged fasting reduces IGF-1/PKA to promote hematopoietic-stem-cell-based regeneration and reverse immunosuppression.” Cell Stem Cell. 2014;14(6):810–823. The strongest regenerative stem-cell findings were demonstrated in mice; the study also included preliminary human chemotherapy data.

8. Abdel Hadi L, et al. “Intermittent Fasting During Ramadan Increases the Absolute Number of Circulating Progenitor Stem Cells in Healthy Subjects.” Stem Cells and Development. 2025. In ten healthy men, researchers reported increases in circulating hematopoietic stem/progenitor cell populations during Ramadan fasting.

9. Espinoza SE, et al. “Effect of fasting-mimicking diet on markers of autophagy and metabolic health in human subjects.” GeroScience. 2025. This randomized pilot study measured autophagic flux directly in human peripheral blood mononuclear cells and found changes during a six-day fasting-mimicking intervention.

10. Lauc G, et al. “Systemic metabolic, hormonal, and glycomic remodeling during a 72-hour fast in healthy adults: a pilot study.” Croatian Medical Journal. 2026;67(3):226–237. Five healthy adults completed a 72-hour water-only fast, producing substantial changes across metabolic, inflammatory, hormonal and glycomic markers.

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Originally published on Substack.