Aching joints were giving me midlife malaise, so I turned to Gwyneth Paltrow’s pain guru. From olive oil shots to confronting buried emotions, here’s how YOU can find relief too

Elpida, the charming massage therapist, looms over me, latex-gloved fingers ready to plunge into my mouth and tackle my tight jaw muscles. ‘Just one thing… don’t bite me,’ she says!

Oh heck. If that’s not a red alert that a treatment is going to be challenging, I don’t know what is.

Still, this inside-out massage is revered as a game-changer for habitual tooth-grinders like me.

I’d come to this luxurious Greek spa to explore the work of a Hollywood wellness guru who sees pain as a helpful gateway to healing the mind as well as the body, so I was totally up for it. I was curious to know more about Vicky Vlachonis, this celebrity body-fixer with the penchant for pain who had devised the spa programme.

I hadn’t heard of her and I bet you haven’t either – but we’ve all heard of her clients. She’s a long-time friend of Gwyneth Paltrow, who she met through Stella McCartney 20-odd years back and has treated ever since.

Her website is peppered with praise from the likes of Elton John and Katy Perry, and the lead investor in her new olive oil business is none other than Beyonce. Friends in high places? This is the stratosphere!

Alas, Vicky wasn’t around at Cape Sounio, a super-luxe hotel on the southern tip of the Athens Riviera, to talk me through her Elevations of Wellness programme.

But when we do manage to meet for our photoshoot, in London, in the discreet luxury of the Mandarin Oriental hotel, she’s so friendly and normal that I couldn’t help blurting out: ‘How are you not a diva?’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe because I’m Greek?’ she laughed.

Vicky is blonde, fresh-faced and lightly tanned, with a complexion that just glows – thanks, she says, to her special olive oil and eating a Mediterranean diet.

Another big surprise is her voice. It’s warm and rich and authoritative and sounds… completely English.

It turns out that, growing up in Athens, she went to an international school, then came to London as a teenager to study at the British School of Osteopathy and stayed for nearly 20 years before relocating to Los Angeles.

As for her attitude to pain – she’s all about releasing it, not causing it – but she does think pain is a good thing.

How so? I ask. ‘Because of what it can teach us,’ she replies. ‘You need to interrogate the pain. What is that pain in your neck trying to tell you? Or who is the pain in your neck in your life.’

Vicky believes most of us are carrying pain of some sort. Emotional pain and physical pain share the exact same brainwave patterns and hormonal cascades, she says. These pain signals have the power to embed themselves in tissues and synapses of your body and brain, long term.

During her time working on London’s Harley Street, treating dancers and celebs (and, I suspect, royals, though she doesn’t talk about this), she found she could offer people much more help than mere back-crunching.

This grew into her three-phase programme to help people free themselves from pain, which she lays out in her book, The Body Doesn’t Lie, and which forms the basis of the treatments at Cape Sounio.

In her effusive foreword for the book, Gwyneth talks about how Vicky has become the indispensable curer-of-all-ills for herself, her family and her friends: ‘She has taught me to face the pain, feel it, and then let it go,’ Gwyneth writes. ‘We call her Clicky Vicky, the Pain Gangster, Fixer Vixer, but whether she’s carefully placing her acupuncture needles or working out a trigger point, she goes beyond the hurt to find the truth.

‘Sure, there’s always the superficial relief but these sessions are really about the deeper work. Vicky will ask: is this friend happy in her relationship, does she need to slow down?

‘Over the years, Vicky has taught me that the answers to such questions are in the pain.’

Wow. I’ve read the book – just as relevant today as it was when it was written in 2014 – and know Vicky’s method involves reflecting on life and what may have brought pain on, finding a way to release it, perhaps with professional help and a lifestyle overhaul, then radiating your new, pain-free self in the world. But how much of this can I possibly achieve in just three days of treatments?

There’s plenty of time for reflection when you’re basking in the lap of luxury. The Cape Sounio hotel has just had a thorough revamp and from the front, the main building looks both monumental and minimal, with its clean lines and with huge classical-style pillars.

Yet from a distance, its pale stone facade blends neatly into the ancient pine forest behind it, into which are tucked the resort’s many stealth-luxe private villas. All of it has a cracking view across the bay of the remaining pillars of the Temple of Poseidon, a legendary landmark that has been here for centuries.

It’s awe-inspiring, as are the impeccably-mannered staff who all look you in the eye, say hello in your own language and treat you like one of the average high-net-worth guests even when, as I did, you pitch up in a T-shirt crumpled from all-day travel and dragging a backpack rather than a designer tote.

I start with an early morning swim around the pretty bay, then head to the spa. This, too, is tucked into the trees on the hillside, with floor-to-ceiling glass looking out over the Aegean to that temple. It has an outdoor gym, a hydrotherapy pool and copies of Vicky’s book on the side-tables.

Magda, the manager, shows me round, then, over a cup of herbal tea, takes me through a thorough mind-and-body consultation (health, lifestyle, diet, exercise, sleep…) to decide which treatments will help my quest to reflect, release and radiate.

She wouldn’t throw you in the deep end with a jaw-release massage unless, like me, you’re a spa junkie with more than 30 years of testing esoteric treatments under your belt and an appetite for agony in aid of improvement.

Over the decades, highlights include an excruciating (but brilliant) Hellerwork, where the deeply-knotted fascia all over your body are relentlessly prised apart, via fire-cupping. Glass vials heated over a flame are clapped on to your back to suction up the tissues and release tight muscles (ouch!).

Also Chavutti Thirumal, a south Indian massage done with the soles of the feet by a masseur hovering above you and holding a rope for balance (the heavier they are, the more pulverised you feel).

Plus Danish ‘saunagus’ where you alternate scalding sauna sessions with plunges in the freezing sea.

But before my first treatment, Magda has an olive oil shot for me – and yes, you read that right.

Not just any old olive oil, mind, but Saint Supply, Vicky’s own brand, squeezed from green, early-harvest Greek olives grown in an ancient grove high in the mountains and bottled within three hours to preserve its potency. This is how Vicky likes to start her day, and spa-goers are encouraged to follow suit.

It feels smooth and slick and perfectly OK, until ten seconds later there’s a fiery rush of peppery afterburn up my throat, hot like ginger. ‘Good grief!’ I splutter. ‘What was that and why is it good for me?’

The afterburn, I learn, is thanks to the high concentration of polyphenols, plant chemicals that act like antioxidants in the body. These can help gut and heart health and take down inflammation.

It’s not all guff, either. Gut health is one of Vicky’s special interests. She’s an ambassador for the Division of Digestive Diseases at UCLA and keeps a close eye on the latest cardiology research into high polyphenol oil.

Oil despatched, I’m treated to an excellent, unknotting massage and spend the rest of the day relaxing in the shade by my villa’s private pool then, later, mindfully eating delicious salads, grilled fish and a giant slice of honey-soused baklava at the seafront restaurant.

I’m meant to be self-reflecting. I’m well aware that emotional pain, anger and resentment, if stuffed down and not acknowledged, has a way of resurfacing as physical ailments.

Life has been both uncommonly stressful and an emotional rollercoaster for the past few years – losing my beloved dad, my children leaving home and the end of a long marriage, while busier than ever with work.

Work is my preferred distraction, my drug of choice, so I bury my head in it, keep smiling and carry on. I get a lot done but my body is increasingly striking back. My persistently glitchy neck was joined last year by one shoulder that doesn’t like moving backwards, and now one knee, and then the other, has become painful, swollen and achy enough to wake me up in the night.

‘Do you eat your emotions, or drown them in drink?’ asks Vicky’s book (No). ‘Do you lose yourself in working all day and all evening, never taking time to take care of your body, to rest and replenish?’ (Oops). ‘Do you spend the night staring at the ceiling, then use caffeine to get through the next day?’ (Yes). 

‘Do you stay away from the gym or yoga class, blaming your bad back or your injured shoulder, when you know that movement and exercise are exactly what you need?’ (But it all hurts too much!) How am I going to let all this go?

My evening ‘treatment’ was a guided hike up to the Temple of Poseidon with Elena, the resort’s movement specialist, which turned out to be more a lesson in mindfulness than a nice stroll.

Elena had an agenda, talking through the importance of getting out into nature, learning to detach from life’s myriad distractions, feeling the different textures of the sand, or grass, or rocky path that we were walking over. Up on the clifftop, Elena and I sat and meditated as we watched the sun set.

On day two, my ‘release’ phase began with movement, something non-negotiable in Vicky’s philosophy. She loves Tibetan yoga – a sequence of five specific poses each repeated a dozen times or more – and does it every morning.

But I’ve tried it before and really don’t care for it, so Elena took me through a blissful hour of yoga, Pilates and other rolling, stretching, fascia-releasing movements which, oh joy, we did lying down on the shaded spa deck.

Then there was the jaw-release massage. I had tried this one in London years ago and thought I knew what to expect but the pain, as Elpida’s fingers probed slowly, carefully, along the edges of my gums, was acute. Breathtaking. Elpida, bless her, kept stopping to check I was OK and give me a breather.

I know I could have just said ‘Enough!’ But… what would Vicky say to this sort of feeling, I wondered? She’d say: ‘Interrogate it!’

It might sound mad but I felt the only hope of doing that was to carry on, to lean into the pain. ‘What are you?’ I asked this new blinding agony, as Elpida moved on to the bit where my upper and lower jaws meet. Suddenly a mass of images flooded into my mind, clips of memories, all of acute emotional distress.

The bottom-falling-out-of-the-world intensity of teenage break-ups, the times my children ended up in hospital and there was nothing I could do to help, the neatly shrouded body of my father being loaded gently into the undertaker’s van… now I couldn’t breathe for the tears.

Elpida paused. ‘Nearly there,’ she said. Release? It was more like catharsis. Who knew I’d stuffed all that into my jaw?

Afterwards, I felt amazing, if wrung out, and floppy with relief. My face looked quite different, having lost the perennial tension around the jaw. Wow!

After that, the sessions of osteopathy and neuro-reflexology, where pressure is applied to ‘reflex points’ on the feet to release tension in my back, were a breeze and left my brain and body so relaxed I spent the afternoon staring into space barely able to string thoughts together.

It’s incredible to have this sort of experience but what Vicky wants us to understand is that changing the uncomfortable bits of our lives is not all about having expensive treatments.

There is so much we can do for ourselves with a bit of thought and self-compassion by bringing simple daily habits into our lives. I return home uncommonly serene.

Can a handful of treatments really change your life? If I’d been told that before my visit to Cape Sounio, I’d have scoffed at the idea. But these ones? Let’s say I’ve developed a whole new respect for what the right combination of treatments can do.

Also, my shoulder and knees are coming along nicely. I can put my left forearm behind my back again, plus the swelling and pain in my knees has reduced so I can almost sit down kneeling, with my backside on my heels, which I haven’t been able to do for six months.

I’m still taking the olive oil shots, too. If it’s good enough for Gwyneth and Beyonce…

• Alice Hart-Davis visited the spa at Cape Sounio as a guest of Grecotel 
• The Body Doesn’t Lie, by Vicky Vlachonis, HarperCollins; Saint Supply olive oil is not yet available in the UK but find out about it at: saintsupply.com
• Vicky Vlachonis and Alice Hart-Davis were photographed at the Mandarin Oriental, London, by Neale Haynes