From top left to bottom right: the sundeck at Lefay Resort & Spa, Lago di Garda, enjoying the lake by boat, daily meditation can make a big change, holistic therapy and acupuncture for treatment and a beautiful landscape to rest your eyes and mind
LAKE GARDA: There are many ways to regain energy and refill you batteries, especially after an intense time of working or travelling. We had a chat with Professor Maurizio Corradin at the Lefay Spa at the beautiful Lake Garda. Of course the landscape and mild weather help to be open to reconsider your daily way of life and to make some changes for the better.
What makes traditional Chinese medicine different from the modern western approach?
Chinese medicine, like other medicines of the Far East, puts the main focus on health, while the Western medicine puts it mainly on illness. Let me try to explain this. In Western medicine you have some thousands of medical cases which are framed up by the different illnesses and where a person becomes a patient. A patient with a flu, hepatitis, cancer and so on. That means that health is simply the absence of those illnesses.
On the other hand, for Chinese medicine health is a state of complete mental and physical well-being. Minor alterations of this state of well-being are the field of interest, like insomnia, anxiety, intestinal problems etc. By using the diagnosis of the pulse and of the tongue or the skin, a doctor can detect alterations even in the absence of symptoms. So health is considered as the complete well-being of a person.
What exactly is the Lefay method?
The Lefay SPA method is a combination of various techniques which have a common aim: awareness or, if you want, “health in awareness”. The method is based on techniques which come from Chinese medicine, like Tuina massage, acupuncture and Moxibustion, as well as from the preventive Western medicine.
Relying on Chinese medicine, is there any tip that you can propose to our followers to do every day or once a week to relax themselves?
Among all the other pieces of advice I could give, there is one which is really close to my heart: Put your mind and your body in the same dimension. In a few words: live in the present! Of course everyone gives this kind of advice, but meditation, which brings together body and mind, is of immense importance for the medicines of the Far East, but nowadays also for Western medicine.
How do you lift yourself up when you are not doing well?
Personally I try to follow the advice of my previous answer, even if things around me or inside me are not going well. As someone who loves to eat and drink, I try to eat not only the food I like, but also the one which does me good. Another important point is physical exercising. As I always say: a big meal makes me happy for one hour and feeling guilty for 23 hours, but a 6-mile-run makes me suffer for one hour and feeling happy for 23 hours.
What is the best way to remove bad thoughts?
As I said before: Use meditation to put your head in the present. Then there is a sort of game I like to play with myself. If a problem afflicts me, I ask myself if the problem is real or if I am inventing it. If the problem is real I try to imagine myself from 1000 meters above. Now I see myself as an ant. So I ask the ant: Is the problem really a big problem (like someone dear is very ill, or some existential problem) or does it only SEEM to me a big problem because I am observing it too closely? Because in our life there will be not more than two or three real big problems.
How can I get rid of the tiredness when I have to work hard and no time to recover?
What kind of tiredness are we talking about? Often the tiredness we feel after a day of work is false. I try to explain myself better: Of course, if I work on a field for 10 hours in the sun or if I run 20 km by foot or if I am a fisherman working on the boat the whole day I will be tired. But most of us are sitting the whole day, so we cannot be tired in the sense of physical tiredness. And at the end of the day we lie on the sofa and we feel even more tired. Believe me, if instead you will take a walk in nature, trying to be aware of the colours, the sounds, the scents, which is like a meditation, you will feel regenerated!
What is the indication for you that a person is happy (physically and mentally)? Do you have to be fit and living in a really healthy way to be happy?
A person feels well when the conscious part which we control (the mind and the muscles) are collaborating with the unconscious part (which we do not control). We all live at the border of two worlds (the outer world and our inner world). Both worlds do not belong to us. But we can try to nourish ourselves in the outer world (walking, exercising, music) and not to intoxicate ourselves with habits which do us no good (lying on the sofa). If you take care of yourself you will become your best friend. At Lefay we call it the “alliance with yourself”. Try it!
Interview by by Lara Moukhtarzadeh
Booking and reservation at: Lefay Resort & SPA Lago di Garda