WORDS BY MARK EKE

Reflections on Oxygen, Light and Recovery at AKARI

I have always had a complicated relationship with the idea of ‘more’. More work. More training. More discipline. More progress.

For a long time, I genuinely believed that the answer to becoming better was simply to do more of everything. In my training, that meant the extra set after my workout was technically over. The extra conditioning session on the weekend because resting felt too easy. The extra calories burnt because somehow that number made me feel as though I had moved one step closer to where I should (or thought I should) be.

And, if I am being honest, that mentality has never really existed only inside the gym. I crave perfection in almost every area of my life. There is always another thing I could improve, another habit I could introduce, another version of myself I could be working towards to ‘optimise’ my life.

Wellness, increasingly, seems to speak the same language. There is always another treatment. Another machine. Another protocol. Another metric to track. Another morning routine to perfect.

It was something Katia, the inspiring founder of AKARI, and I kept coming back to during my time there: at what point did wellness become about doing everything? So many spaces now seem determined to offer everything simultaneously. Gyms become recovery centres, recovery centres become longevity clinics, spas become laboratories. More treatments, more technology, more optimisation. Somewhere in that expansion, I sometimes wonder whether we have started losing sight of the reason we came to wellness in the first place. Because surely wellness is not about being able to say that we are doing everything.

AKARI felt different precisely because it wasn’t trying to overwhelm me. There was a quietness to the experience that almost felt confrontational at first. The noise disappeared as soon as I stepped in. The choices disappeared. And instead of being asked what else I could add to my life, I found myself thinking about some of the most basic things already sustaining it.

Oxygen. Light. Rest. Things so fundamental that we barely acknowledge them.

Oxygen

Being inside the IHHT pod brought me back to two completely different experiences from this summer.

I remembered training in the mountains of Lebanon, in Kfardebian specifically, and being frustrated by how unusually difficult everything felt. I knew my body was capable, my fitness hadn’t suddenly disappeared. And yet excercises or combinations that normally felt comfortable required noticeably more effort. For one of the first times in my life, I became acutely aware of oxygen not simply as something happening automatically in the background, but as something deeply influencing how I performed and recovered.

Then I thought about running on the treadmill at the Mariott in Jordan at the Dead Sea. The contrast was remarkable. I remember how strong I felt there – how easily my body seemed to move, how different the effort felt. It was one of those rare running experiences where everything seemed to work with me rather than against me. Neither experience had made me think deeply about oxygen at the time. Funny enough, sitting on that lounge chair at AKARI connected them.

We spend so much of our lives searching for complicated explanations for why we feel the way we do, while one of the most essential elements of being alive is something we barely think about at all. We breathe thousands of times every day without acknowledgement. It’s invisible, automatic, ‘ordinary’. And yet it sits underneath everything. There was something humbling about that realisation.

Light

I expected the red light therapy to be the part I struggled with most. I am not particularly drawn to the idea of being enclosed inside a metallic chamber, and before getting in I was convinced I would feel claustrophobic. Instead, almost immediately, there was this unexpected sense of calm. You’re lying inside what is ultimately a very technological piece of equipment (thank you NASA), surrounded by light, and yet the experience feels strangely elemental. Light. Something equally ordinary. Something we encounter every single day without considering what it is doing beyond what we can see.

There was an almost beautiful contradiction in lying there knowing that something so external (and seemingly simple) – was being used to influence the most intricate processes beneath my skin. And perhaps I am stretching the metaphor, but it made me think about how often we dismiss small things because they don’t feel dramatic enough. We almost always expect transformation to announce itself. We expect progress to hurt,  for change to require some monumental act of discipline – we expect things that make the biggest difference to feel big. But as time passes (and I push 30), I am learning that they rarely do. Sleep doesn’t feel revolutionary. Breathing doesn’t feel revolutionary. Resting doesn’t feel productive.

Doing one small thing consistently doesn’t give you the same satisfaction as completely overhauling your life overnight. And yet these are often the things everything else is built upon.

The Space Between

There is another word I kept thinking about at AKARI: belonging. Not belonging in the sense of membership or community, necessarily, but the feeling that comes from being somewhere that asks nothing from you. There is something powerful about entering a space and not feeling as though you need to perform within it. You don’t need to become somebody else there. You don’t need to prove how seriously you take your fitness and wellness journey. You don’t need to do everything. You are simply given the space to be.

Sometimes a space gives you permission to soften. Sometimes it reminds you of a version of yourself that gets buried beneath meetings and catch-ups, expectations and the constant pursuit of improvement. Sometimes belonging is simply finding somewhere quiet enough that you can hear yourself again. That might have been what I needed most when I parked in One Central and made my way up. Because the irony is that some of the biggest changes in my relationship with fitness have happened when I stopped believing that more was always better.

For years, I thought the extra training was what would transform me. Eventually, I realised that much of the progress I had been chasing was happening somewhere much quieter. It was happening when I slept. When I recovered. When I allowed my body enough time to adapt to what I had already asked of it. When I stopped treating rest as the absence of work and started recognising that rest was actually part of the work.

That lesson has gradually extended far beyond training. I am still ambitious. I am still disciplined. I still have an instinct to push further than I probably need to. I don’t think that part of me is disappearing anytime soon. But I am becoming much more interested in restraint. In asking myself whether something is genuinely serving me before adding it simply because everyone around me seems to be doing it. And in remembering that taking care of ourselves was never supposed to become another arena in which we compete.

Maybe wellness doesn’t need to be an accumulation of things. Maybe it is subtraction – removing some of the noise. Paying attention to what is missing and returning to the things so basic that we forgot they mattered. Oxygen. Light. Rest. Space.

AKARI reminded me that sometimes recovery isn’t about becoming more. Sometimes it is simply about creating enough quiet to return to what was already there.