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HAVE YOU EVER FELT like turning to your family and saying, "I love you all, but you're driving me mad. I need a break. Make your own meals for a couple of days. I'm off to drink mud and get an enema?"

Photo: Tony Fouhse

Grail Springs is very much in this vein, offering cleansing elixirs from the glacial moors of Austria, detoxifying footbaths, healing mineral wraps and contemplative walks through a labyrinth. Outer beauty appears to be the least of this spa's concerns.

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Entering the building, styled in the Gothic that Marentette found so inspiring when she spent childhood summers in Europe with her grandparents, I meet a sweet-natured receptionist who greets me by name, hands me a key and a bottle of chlorophyll and invites me to get settled in my room.

Getting settled involves investigating the free bath products, checking out the TV to see whether there are any good movies and donning a bathrobe and slippers. Suitably attired, I then putter all about the spa and discover that the entire staff hail from the small surrounding towns. They seem constitutionally incapable of being snobbish. This is important, for my very first treatment involves baring my bum to one of them and allowing her to pump five gallons of water up my … well, I'd rather nobody picture it, actually.

"What if I explode?" I ask the therapist, after 15 minutes of being attached, as it were, to her machine. She laughs softly and allows that I should merely expect a "large release." When this would happen, she could not say. I imagine several alarming scenarios and decide to spend the rest of the afternoon in my room, first bathing in Himalayan Salt Crystals and then reading in my oversized chaise longue beneath a window with a soothing view. Nothing happens by 6 p.m. When supper is served, I scuttle downstairs and bravely consume a salad, salmon and steamed vegetables.

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The next day, I rise to a delicious breakfast of poached eggs, chopped tomatoes and apricot tea, before wandering into Morning Mantra, one of the loveliest experiences at Grail Springs. Marentette begins this exercise on a highly personal note, explaining that she had suffered from a prolonged postpartum depression and had pulled herself out of it after hearing a beloved song on the radio and sobbing as she realized how disconnected she had become.

To help others reconnect, Marentette has devised a simple ritual based on the principles of raja yoga, which considers the evocative importance of words. On the four walls of the yoga room, she has posted the words Gratitude, Humility, Grace and Reverence. As the room is suffused with a haunting piece of music that she'd put on at high volume, we stand before each word, reaching up, then bowing low, twice, while considering what the word means to us. During this exercise, four of the five women I am with burst into tears. Later, Marentette tells me that this surprised her when she opened the spa, the discovery that most of her guests were really here for emotional reasons, even if they didn't know it at first.

I, myself, feel less emotional than flatulent, which I blame firmly on the colonic. Now it is time for further embarrassing emissions, this time from my feet via the Detox Foot Bath. Marentette leads me into a beautiful, sunny room filled with white armchairs and spontaneously invites a local Bancroft man, who'd dropped by the spa to discuss business with her, to join me for the treatment. Thus we sit together sipping tea and smiling awkwardly, while Marentette puts a pinch of salt, a three-amp volt of electricity and a little gizmo into our foot basins. Somehow, this will draw toxins from our bodies over the next half-hour. After a time, the man peers curiously into my basin, where the water is changing from clear to murky; I peer back into his. We joke that we are learning far too much about each other's innards given that we don't even know each other's last name. At the end of half an hour, I am relieved to find that his water is as bizarrely dark and soupy as mine. Clearly, we lead equally unhealthy lives. I wonder, briefly, if any codependent romances blossom over these footbaths. "Hey! You must drink booze too!" Then I pad up to my room to rinse my betraying feet and prepare for an Austrian Moor Mud Bath.

Moor mud has grown popular in North American spas of late. Deposits of organic matter found in Austria's Neydharting Valley have been found to include a great many minerals and nutrients that presumably once benefited wallowing mammoths. Or maybe it's that the mammoths disintegrated into the mud, which is why it's so healthful now. But the science underscoring its healing powers is real, so I lie in it for a good soak and, the following morning, add a pasturized teaspoon of it to my orange juice.

Next up, a very relaxing session of lying on a massage table in the Great Hall, reading a novel, while an infrared lamp beams "Far-Infrared Rays" at my abdomen. Apparently, these rays are a component of sunlight, and the treatment replicates what's healthy about sunshine without the damaging stuff, like ultraviolet rays. It strikes me as a good treatment for winter, but it does make me unbearably hot.

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Finally, although not part of the detox package, comes the fabulously humiliating yet effective Inches-Off Red Carpet Mineral Detox Wrap. I must preface this by saying that there is something about being captured on film by this magazine's chuckling photographer while wrapped like a Scooby-Doo mummy that bites into one's vanity. Still, the hour I spend in this mineral-soaked wrap, doing light aerobic exercise while watching a DVD, shows dramatic results. The young woman who spins me out of the bandages had measured me all over beforehand and now measures me again. "Good job!" she cries, showing me her jotted-down math. I had lost an aggregate of 25 inches along with my dignity. God knows where the fat went, but my dress looks more shapely that evening at supper, where I dine on chicken with peanut sauce and gloat at the photographer.

Back at home, my husband finds me seated in the garden reading a newspaper filled with bad news while drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. "I see you've started your re-toxifying regimen," he says. Of course. Otherwise, what excuse would I have to return to Grail Springs?

Patricia Pearson is the author, most recently, of the novel Believe Me and the non-fiction book, Area Woman Blows Gasket: and Other Tales From the Domestic Frontier, both published by Random House in 2005. She lives in Toronto. Tony Fouhse is a photographer based in Ottawa.

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