Psychologies Magazine

Renew Mind, Body and Soul

Sally Brampton

I love travelling on my own, perhaps because I find anonymity and the sense of freedom that comes with it so heartlifting. I particularly love it when I travel with a purpose, and what better purpose is there than relaxing by a pool in breathtaking surroundings with mountain air and intensive exercise thrown in?

The Dionysos Estate, which hosts the Method Putkisto workshop, is a series of pretty cottages clambering up a steep hillside, overlooking the sea and a sandy cove, where the hotel owns a lovely beach club. Perched on the Bozburun Peninsula, it’s designed to blend into the landscape, so from a distance you wouldn’t even know the hotel existed.

Method Putkisto is a combination of yoga, pilates, the Alexander Technique and physiotherapy. Marja Putkisto, who devised it, runs the classes herself. She developed the technique while working at The Sibelius Academy (the Finnish University of Music) and the Finnish National Opera as a movement and dance teacher. The intention is to strengthen core muscles around the sacrum (lower back) and diaphragm, and to stretch and lengthen the area around the chest and back.

Exercise classes take place for two hours every morning and evening, on a wooden platform in the open air. I learned to walk with my eyes level with the horizon instead of the hunched scuttle of the city dweller. The moment you lift your eyes, your chin, neck and shoulders lift, too. I also began consciously to lift my ribcage and increase the space between the ribs and pelvis, which immediately improved my posture. I spend far too many hours a day hunched over a computer, so I suffer constant pain between my shoulder blades. It turns out there is a solution to alleviate this pain – lying on the floor with a football-sized ball between the shoulder blades and taking your head and arms back over it. Again, that opens up the ribcage and, for me at least, began to ease some of the tension I carry permanently in my face. As the tension began to soften, I began, oh miracle, to look younger.

At the start and end of the week we had photos taken of our posture. I thought, complacently, that I had pretty good posture, but the ‘before’ picture shows me with my jaw jutting forward and my shoulders thrown back and, in the ‘after’ photo, I am standing in a straight but relaxed pose.

Back home, I find myself almost automatically correcting my posture, and have incorporated some of the Putkisto techniques into the yoga routine I attempt, haphazardly, to follow daily.

The method is slow, sometimes excruciatingly so, and not for aerobics bunnies. As a holiday, though, it’s great. I came home standing taller, breathing easier and with a couple of new friends.

The Method Putkisto Course at The Dionysos Estate is held twice a year and costs £1450 per person, including flights, transfers, seven nights half board and all instruction, with Exclusive Escapes.