The Glastonbury good life

Spiritual retreats used tp mean hair shirts and iron discipline. Now they can be sybaritic

YOU CAN'T go all the way to Glastonbury by train, and somehow you wouldn't expect to: that would be far too mundane. A place like Glastonbury is a place apart, stiff with spiritual significance - the alleged burial place of King Arthur, the site of a fabulous ruined abbey and a vanished church said to have been built by Joseph of Arimathea. You expect a bit of a schlep to get there.

Or so my friend Bunny Page and I told ourselves as we stepped anxiously down at the tiny, deserted railway station of Castle Cary, the only passengers to do so. We found ourselves in the middle of a broad, grey vista of hills and fields. In the distance, the friendly train chugged off to the distant fleshpots of Penzance. It was windy. Nobody was there.

We were waiting for the appearance of a woman called Serahsee - a name, we later learnt, revealed to her in meditation by her spirit guide. But Castle Cary that day was devoid of guides of any sort. Where was she?

Serahsee ran the Shambhala Healing Centre, a discreet spiritual supermarket where you could be pummelled and pampered, explore previous lives (if you had any), have your energies realigned, or be put in touch with your spirit guide or angel - a breakthrough which, according to the brochure, "will open doors and explore realms you have not thought possible". We had read about Shambhala in Places To Be (Coherent Visions, £5.50), a new guidebook listing all manner of places providing holidays with a spiritual dimension, from Benedictine retreats to b&bs with crystal healing on the side. Increasing numbers of people, argues its editor, Jonathan How, are recognising the need to give themselves time and space to explore the deeper questions.

Places To Be casts its rainbow net rather wider than The Good Retreat Guide (Rider, £11.99), Stafford Whiteaker's older and more established directory. The result is some unexpected entries. Go to Badger's Rest in Cumbria, and you can order a champagne picnic and a balloon trip, as well as take away "your own personalised menu... attractive enough to frame". This sybaritic stuff would surely be despised by the more ethereal Nightingale Light Centre: "a playground of love, healing, inspiration, peace and rejuvenation at all levels". Among the treatments on offer there are "cranal-sacral therapy, body harmony, gem/crystal remedies, counselling, core therapy and rebirthing".

Of all Jonathan How's suggestions, Glastonbury appealed most. It was holy, hip, ancient and powerful - but would we be up to it? Neither Bunny nor I can be called New Agers. We are two average women with mortgages who are worried about our children's university entrance forms. My own spiritual affinities are with the very ordered discipline of Buddhist meditation, while Bunny is a professional sceptic. Would we be fish out of water?

No, said Serahsee, when we eventually made contact. A generously built, expansive woman with long loose grey hair, she had been waiting - mundanely but sensibly - in the station car park. All types came to her Shambhala Healing Centre, she said: accountants, civil servants, Tibetan lamas, burnt-out healers. Some came for a rest or a rethink, others for an intensive period of counselling and treatment.

The Centre, opened three years ago, sits at the very foot of the august Glastonbury Tor. A strong wind came off its steep flanks as we stepped out of Serahsee's car. The house, she said, as she ushered us through the little garden, sat directly on a ley line that linked it up with Karnak in Egypt (where she had just been to lead a large-scale workshop). Not only that, but far beneath its stone courtyard, in the bowels of the earth, was a quartz set in the temple of lost Atlantis. The spot - marked by a large, seven-pointed crystal star in the flagstone - had been recognised as a point of power by psychics from all around the world. I regret to say Bunny and I passed it with never a frisson.

You would expect from this to find Shambhala a spooky, dimly-lit place full of the smell of incense and the sound of temple bells. In fact it is a comfortable and well-proportioned family house, with a friendly communal dining room and accommodation for around 10 guests. It houses them in themed bedrooms - the Tibetan, Egyptian, Chinese Room and so on - which range from the grand to the modest. I picked the little Star Room because I liked its broad views out to the Vale of Avalon. Bunny, who has the heart of a Thirties film star, was drawn to the ice-white Egyptian room with its full-length mirrors and vast bed, large enough for her and several Pharoahs.

Shambhala clearly does not believe the spirit profits from the body being denied. Once spiritual retreats meant being toughened - hair shirts, little sleep, ice frozen in the early morning pail. There still are places where you can opt for spartan simplicity. They are often places with a more directly religous base, like Taraloka, a women's Buddhist retreat centre in Shropshire. Shambhala, however, curls itself around you like a warm rug. Its ethos is comfort - lace-edged pillows on cosy beds, hot-water bottles for the feeble. Little purple stickers on walls and windows announce warmly, "Arms are for Hugging", and the programme is tailored to individual needs. "We're here to be of service," explained Serahsee. Even the centre's "Intensive Three-Day Healing Breaks" are flexible and undefined. It is up to the guest to choose the healing he or she wants. Bunny and I were both over-tired and over-stretched, so we asked for quite simple things. No spirit guides, rapid-eye therapy or radionics for us. We opted for intensive massages - which included elements of Shiatsu and the healing technique, Reiki - and saunas.

Massage on the second night followed a chilly rain-sodden tramp around the town (chock-a-block with candles, amulets and life-size Excaliburs) and was magically preceded by a Jacuzzi. Shambhala's Jacuzzi - in the greenhouse at the front of the healing centre - could accommodate seven relatively friendly people. Bunny and I had it to ourselves. The water bubbled; the steam curled up around the bushy palms, meeting the cold glass separating us from the black, Glastonbury night.

It would take a strange person not to experience pleasure and well-being here. We may not have drunk deep of the essence of Glastonbury, nor had a flash of insight into the folly of our lives and given it all up. But we did climb aboard the train at Castle Cary feeling sparkier and healthier. Where the body thrives, it seems, the spirit has a better chance too.

! Shambhala Healing Centre, Coursing Batch, Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8BH (01458 831797).