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I sat cross-legged on the tatami floor of Kyoto’s Shunkoin temple, desperately trying to locate my tailbone. Reverend Takafumi Kawakami, the black-robed Zen priest seated in front of me, instructed me to push my breath against it with my stomach and pay attention to the texture (crisp), temperature (spring-rain cool), and aroma (ancient wood, sweetly perfumed with incense) of the air flowing through my lungs.
But I struggled. I wouldn’t be able to locate my tailbone at the best of times, and Kawakami’s instructions to let go of any mental image of this body part and to truly feel it didn’t make it any easier. I tried to mentally scan through my nether regions, hoping for some sort of signal from the bottom of my spine, but my attention kept shifting elsewhere: the wisps of incense smoke lingering in the air, the rain tip-tapping on the shoji-paper screens on the windows.
After a while in suspended silence, a copper bell rang to mark the end of my first-ever zazen meditation. Over matcha and sweet mochi, Kawakami (whose family has been taking care of this 16th-century temple for the last 120 years) gave me a primer on Zen, a Buddhist philosophy with roots in India and China. We dove into the differences between wisdom and knowledge, and how the wordy thoughts in our head are mere metaphors for our existence. But beyond those wooly ancient wisdoms, Kawakami looked at the present. “Human culture is increasingly focused on controlling the things around us,” he said. “The pandemic taught us to simply accept—to deal with what life throws at you.”
The experience (booked via tour operator Red Savannah) was a fitting introduction to my stay at Six Senses Kyoto, which opened this April in the city’s temple-dotted Higashiyama ward. Given the brand’s affinity for sprawling resorts embedded into nature, the urban setting of its Japanese debut—a low-slung building along a busy thoroughfare, and not, like many of its five-star peers, on the forest-covered hills on the outskirts of town—took me by surprise. But from the moment I stepped into the stone-floored lobby, the din of the city had all but disappeared.
In front of me unfurled the hotel’s central courtyard, a multi-tiered and neatly manicured jumble of mossy rocks and maple trees crisscrossed by stone paths and a babbling stream on the lowest level. Raindrops created meditative ripples on the pond that flanked the lobby’s breezy indoor-outdoor terrace, while the scent of sandalwood filled the air. Singapore-based BLINK Design Group, who spearheaded the hotel’s interiors, took cues from Kyoto’s Heian period, a golden age of creativity, and translated it into a refined yet delightfully whimsical mix of temple-like simplicity and contemporary design—all done up in blonde woods, bamboo and washi paper.
After being shown to my suite, I was ushered straight to the spa, which, as at every Six Senses outpost, is the hotel’s raison d être. Almost half a floor is devoted to a dimly lit warren of treatment rooms, watsu pool, and gender-separated bathhouses with saunas, steam rooms, and slate-clad hot pools. There s a techy ‘biohacking’ lounge for quick fix-ups with massage chairs and light-therapy masks, and an Alchemy Bar, a Six Senses hallmark, where guests can learn to make face masks with matcha and exfoliating body scrubs from Japanese rice bran.
“We’re blending Zen with modern science,” the hotel’s director of wellness Ayako Fukuda told me as she hooked me up to a high-tech health screening machine with wires stuck to my temples and a pulse meter clipped to my index finger. Line graphs and numbers I couldn’t decipher appeared on the screen in front of me, which eventually resulted in a report that indicated a lack of deep sleep and a surplus of mental stress (no surprises there).
To combat some of the fatigue, Fukuda suggested the signature Ah-Un treatment. It had me paint an ensō circle—a Zen symbol of absolute enlightenment—with black ink on washi paper to clear my mind, and followed with a long-stroked oil massage and a chakra-balancing tuning fork running down my spine. Had I had more time, I could’ve opted for the spa’s omakase offering, a bespoke range of treatments that could include shiatsu massages, body wraps from seasonal herbs, and moxibustion acupuncture sessions with Japanese mugwort to remove negative juju.
That same feel-good ethos extends to the restaurant, Sekki, which is named after the 24 micro-seasons on the traditional Japanese calendar. Here, my days started with throat-scorching shots of house-brewed herbal vinegars (labeled, fittingly, as ‘rocket fuel’) and breakfast dishes heavy on pickled vegetables, fresh fruits, and sourdough. At lunch and dinner, the open kitchen doled out micro-seasonally changing menus that make the most of Kyoto’s plentiful bounty. Think: dukkah-dusted kale salads with tempeh, Tamba pork in miso marinade, and scallops with homegrown Manganji peppers and enoki mushrooms. When I returned to my room after a drink at the hotel s sultry Nine Tails bar that night, the spa team had left a hand-written goodnight note alongside a jar of sleep-inducing bath salts with clay, rose, and lavender oil.
A day later I was on my knees, scrubbing the timeworn floorboards of the 14th-century Ryosoku-in temple in the Gion district. Toryo Ito, the temple’s deputy abbot who put me to work, watched over me as I slowly breathed in and out with every swipe. This wasn’t a punishment, but a Zen meditation (and an activity Six Senses offers its guests). “Zen is about getting rid of the noise in your mind,” Ito said. “If you only meditate sitting down, you often focus on your mind too much. By using your body, you pay attention to what happens around you and inside you.”
We moved on to the temple’s Zen garden, where Ito instructed me to pick the fallen leaves from the gravel beds. Piece by piece, I felt the texture of each leaf between my fingers, and as the gravel slowly cleared up, the connection between a clear mind and a clean environment became apparent. Ito explained how everyday tasks such as cleaning and tea-making could turn into mind-clearing exercises by simply being mindful and intentional about the tiniest details: the temperature of the water, the blossoming of tea leaves, the subtle color changes in your brew. “It’s about engaging your senses and your focus,” he said. “In modern life, we often tend to forget that.”
When I awoke to blue skies on my final morning, I set out to take the Zen lessons from the past few days into the real world. On one of the hotel’s complimentary wooden Coco-Mat bicycles, I zoomed over the banks of the nearby Kamo River, past egrets traipsing through the gin-clear water and old folks on their morning stroll. I assumed that Kawakami and Ito would tsk-tsk at the idea of plotting a route on Google Maps, so instead, I followed my whims, paying close attention to my surroundings. I focused on the cool mountain air brushing my face and the birdsong leaking through the traffic din, doing my best to divert my attention from the jolts of pain flashing through my knees as I pedaled uphill. Random turns led me through quiet neighborhoods and streets lined with weathered machiya townhouses, past homes where bamboo and bonsais poked out from behind earthy plastered walls.
Had I deciphered the meaning of Zen? I’m not quite sure. The more I read about it, the less I seemed to understand. But here, cycling aimlessly through the hilly outskirts of Kyoto and truly taking in every sight, smell, and sound, I felt that somewhere, my Zen masters would be proud.