My first spa experience was a beauty treatment of the sort young girls imagine privileged grown-up ladies have at their disposal. It was an introduction to elitist secrets of the flesh, each secret having to do with the application of mud, for the cleansing of pores or the firming of thighs. Times have changed. The spa experience is now a process as mental as it is physical. For entry into the modern woman's soul, you need a different concept.

At the top of a steep, winding road, on forty acres in the mountains of Ojai, California, the fragrance of coastal sage wafts into the car with such pungency, I'm not sure whether it's making me ravenously hungry or just excited. I'm moments away from Sage Hill, the brain child of owner Rita Rivest, private fitness trainer and former program director of the famous Rancho La Puerta Spa in Tecated, Mexico. A woman with a vast knowledge of exercise (her earliest message on my answering machine: "It's Rita, your stretcher") and a keen sense of what ails us, Rita envisoned a new kind of getaway, one with a spiritual component as meaningful as the physical one. So she created Sage Hill last November—not exactly a spa but a small, homey (it's in Rita's home) walking and hiking retreat for women.

Rita believes that all guests are as intense as the scent of her sage and that their unique needs must be satisfied. This is why Sage Hill accepts no more than four women at any one time (six if they come together as a group): There's only so much of Rita to go around, and her attention and wisdom are the centerpiece of the program.

I get out of the car. The heart-melting beauty of the Ojai Mountains is laid out before me in layers of deep green that recede into the skyline and end at the Pacific Ocean. Although it's seven miles away, the water looks surprisingly clear and close. I learn that besides the sage that grows here in abundance, there's also sumac, wild walnut trees, eucalyptus, lavendar, wild lilac and Asian willow.

After a delicious lunch of carrot-and-ginger soup and mesclun salad with warm chevre, the other guest (the only one besides me) and I are served no desserts, not even ones made with sugar substitutes and egg whites. Rita likes to minimize guests' sugar cravings right away, and the best way to do that, she says, is not to offer sweets, even artificial ones. Freshness and well-balanced meals are the point, we are told, not calories (a word which, like the term spot-reducing, seems to have gone the way of all flesh). There's a feeling of abundance here, not of abstinence.

Later, walking through the yoga room, past a closetful of sneakers and hiking shoes, I discover that there are no saunas, no herbal wraps. No facials, even.

Within hours, Rita has done an emotional and physical assessment of me: I am strong but sensitive to foods, to noise, to everything; I need sleep; I eat too much sugar. I need a lot of downtime. Rita gets me, and quickly.

She has a keen eye and ear for what she calls my "stuff." She grabs onto an emotional component: "You don't share your neediness; here, you should. I like needy people." She arranges for me to see a practitioner in Chinese medicine to fine-tune my stressed-out self. I'll have between-meal snacks to keep my blood sugar up (goat's-milk yogurt sprinkled with nuts and seeds is one I got attached to), but my glycemic levels (read: sugar load) down. "You need a lot of stretching," she says feeling my chronically tight muscles, "and you need sleep." So she recommends a program of hiking, stretching, meditation and rest, "to enhance the body and give it power."

Rita adjusts each program to fit the person's fitness and stress levels. Because the other guest and I are in similar shape, Rita takes us both out that afternoon on a three-mile hike, before and after which we stretch for a half hour. Then, a snack and a massage. After that, zone therapy, a gentle, probing foot massage. Salmon for dinner. Then reading and bed.

The second day we walk six miles on mostly flat terrain. The third day, four miles, but with more hills. Each day we stretch and have a massage. By the fourth day, I feel limber, loose and far stronger than I did when I came.

Hiking is a prosaic kind of exercise. But what is it about putting one foot in front of the other over and over and over again that feels so astonishingly good? I find I cannot overthink when I'm walking; I don't obsess as I might if I were sitting in a chair. Miles go by and all I'm aware of is this step, this flower, this breath—a kind of focus on the present that is the essence of meditation. Soon I find the rhythms of my mind and body become synchronized. My breath deepens, my shoulders relax, my vision actually improves. Everything in me feels purposeful yet peaceful. And when this happens—this sense of being a finely tuned mind, body and heart machine, at one with my surroundings—a feeling of extraordinary gratitude floods me. Some hikers say they feel new appreciation for the beauty around them; others, a connection with their loved ones, the universe or their gods.

Does the body's rhythm bring movement into the mind, relaxing and energizing both at once? Or is it more the case that the beauty of the surroundings—these sacred Ojai Mountains and this trail—can be observed fully only by a body and mind in motion?

It doesn't hurt to come back every afternoon to a massage therapist who is deeply attuned to your body. Each day, as she quietly lets herself in, I am thrilled to see her, knowing the pleasure that's in store for me. The anticipation of pleasure gets keener throughout my stay. By the time I leave Sage Hill, I feel I'm inching closer to what yogis search for through their practice and athletes talk about when they're in the "zone": that union of body, mind and spirit. Oh, I'm not there, not yet, but I can tell from my overall peacefulness and absence of worry about the future, or anything else, that I'm closer to that sought-after state of harmony than when I arrived.

And all without a single mud bath.