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An embodied immersion in Southern Portugal
In a fractured world, gathering to sit in wonder, share stories, and learn from each other is deep medicine. Village Nectar emerges when we approach belonging as not just a feeling — but a practice.
Community is something we step into, it is something we tend.
Throughout time, humans have gathered in circles to grieve, celebrate, and remember. These technologies of connection — movement, storytelling, song, ritual — are still available to us. In truth, they are embedded within us. We carry this inheritance, this deep wisdom, in our bodies and our bones and
when we call it forth we find we are moving in familiar rhythms that draw us back into communal resonance.
An
This gathering is an invitation to practice belonging.
To create vessels that hold us, to witness and reflect one another, to honor what’s been lost, and to remember ourselves into community. Here, together, we return to the nectar of gathering: the medicine of being with and for each other.
This immersion is for helpers, healers, yoga teachers, therapists, social workers — those who serve,
AND for those who simply seek to rest back into humanness. It is for those longing to soften the rigidity of “us” and “other,” to tend the divides within and between us, and to explore living in communal ease and harmony.
Through movement, storytelling, song, ritual, and inquiry into relational and group dynamics,
we’ll explore many pathways back into connection. This work ripples outward—nourishing not only ourselves but the communities we return to.
embodied movement • yoga • meditation • mindfulness • storytelling • kinship • relational practices • learning to be in and work with groups • communal song, chanting + sound • ritual + ceremony • somatic inquiry • breathwork • dream weaving + dreamwork • nervous system literacy • creative expression • silence + stillness
Who It’s For
This retreat is for humans longing to feel a deeper sense of belonging — helpers, healers, yoga teachers, therapists, social workers, and anyone in service of others who also longs to be nourished themselves. It is for those ready to soften the divides within and between us, to return to communal ease, and to remember what it feels like to be held in togetherness.
What To Expect
Practices that nourish your inner relationship — the way you meet yourself in body, breath, and story. From this foundation, we widen into relational practices and then further into village practices that hold the collective. This retreat is about more than learning from the teachers – it is also a place to witness and honor the wisdom that arises when we connect with one another other. You can expect facilitators who shift in response to group dynamics and create space for shared voices, deep listening, and the medicine that comes from the community itself.
What You Will Receive
For all humans, an opportunity to connect deeply with yourself and with others who share your interest in embodied wisdom, collective healing, and somatic awareness.
For yoga teachers, you’ll receive inspiration and education on somatically based teaching and sequencing–this retreat will also give you 30 hours of CEU’s with Yoga Alliance.
For therapists and other modalities, you’ll receive practical and shareable wisdom in the areas of somatics and nervous system regulation, and how the two are inextricably linked.
This is not a yoga retreat. While asana is a powerful practice that we will certainly explore through, it is just one of many modalities and medicines we will engage with. This experiential retreat offers a diverse range of practices, inviting us to explore ourselves and the world from multiple perspectives.
Community is not merely a gathering of individuals coming together – it is an almost alchemical reaction that happens among all that we are capable of being and becoming.
– Omid Safi
A few of our
ASANA + EMBODIED MOVEMENT
Slow, wiggly flows. Deep, steeped yin. Embodied free and facilitated relational movement practices to explore many ways of inhabiting the body — fluid, intuitive, weird and reverent. Our morning practices will invite exploration and deep listening to the ways in which we each want to be moved. Light on alignment, big on individual curiosity.
SOMATIC BREATH WORK
The breath becomes a bridge between body and psyche, opening a pathway for what’s ready to unfold and integrate. This is not pranayama, but a broader invitation to trust the intelligence of psyche and soma — an experiential journey that supports emotional release, somatic processing, and a deep return to the body’s innate wisdom.
MYTHIC WONDERINGS
Story is our shared primal technology — an ancient way of making meaning, remembering, and belonging. Together, we’ll explore how narrative lives in the body and between us, how myth and memory continue to shape our collective becoming. Through embodied storytelling and ritual exchange, we’ll listen for what wants to be retold and reclaimed—meeting one another in the living current of story.
WRITING + RELATING
Both writing and relating are potent portal doorways—paths that lead us inward and toward one another. Through the alchemy of language, we explore how words can deepen presence, share truth, and forge genuine connection. This is a space to practice communication as both art and inquiry — to listen, express, and reflect in ways that mirror our shared humanness and bring us closer to ourselves and each other.
DREAMS + DREAMWORK
Our dreams are mystical, symbolic, tender, and wild — they emerge from our inner world as a bridge, or a doorway. Together we’ll step into this landscape of dreams, pausing to listen to our dreams as living stories, honoring their imagery, emotion, and metaphor. Through creative practices, we’ll meet dream figures, symbols, and sensations in the waking world, revealing new insights and wisdom. Along with dream circling, we’ll explore the practice of yoga nidra as another pathway into our inner world of imagery and consciousness.
MONTE DA ORADA
Cradled in the wild rhythms of southern Portugal, we’ll be staying at a family-run eco-sustainable retreat centre tucked into seventy-one hectares of protected land. Rooted in permaculture principles, it offers both the stillness of the forest and the invigorating energy of the nearby Atlantic. Just twenty minutes from some of Portugal’s most breathtaking beaches, Orada invites us to live more closely with the elements — forest, ocean, sun, and stone meeting in a single landscape.
The grounds hold a natural bio swimming canal, sauna, and cold plunge, alongside elegant suites, rustic treehouses, bungalows, and tents, giving you many ways to rest into nature’s embrace.
We’ll be nourished each day with vibrant vegetarian meals, crafted with care by the kitchen team and often drawn from the mandala gardens. Each plate is a celebration of the land itself — food as ritual, as medicine, as a reminder of how deeply we belong.
Monte da Orada is located in the Southwest of Portugal, about 3 hrs from Lisbon Airport and 2 hrs from Faro Airport by car / shuttle. We will add you to a Telegram group and share contacts for shuttle services so you can chat and organise rides together.
Included:
Not Included:
Sample Schedule
This is the basic template we will explore from. It will change based on the day and energies.
7:30am
Embodied Practice (asana, somatics, free movement)
9:00am
Breakfast
11:30am
Community Learning
1:30pm
Lunch
4:30pm
Integration + Application
6:30pm
Dinner
8:00pm
Evening Share
Gioconda Parker
Gioconda has been practicing and teaching yoga for over 25 years, and is still learning something new every day. Her enthusiasm for the practice is contagious and her dedication to yoga comes through in every class. Whether you are flowing in her artfully sequenced vinyasa classes, or moving through the layers in yin, her guidance and support keep you resourced, steady and focused. In addition to decades of yoga training, she holds a Master’s Degree in Transpersonal Psychology and is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner.
Cole Chance
Cole truly believes in the medicine in movement, the power of curiosity, the wisdom found in the reflection of community. Teaching in many capacities, from studios, retreats and trainings to festivals and prisons, her offerings fuse flavorful asana and embodiment practices, nervous system and trauma literacy, yogic and Buddhist philosophy, her current studies of eco-somatic and mytho-poetics all swirled up with compassionate self-inquiry of this wild human experience.
Christine Calvert
Christine Calvert is a Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor and a certified Holotropic Breathwork® facilitator. She is a facilitator and teacher of Holotropic Breathwork both in the US and internationally. She enjoys finding ways to weave her personal and professional experience of different therapeutic and spiritual systems such as Shamanism, Somatic Experiencing, Jungian psychology, attachment theory, and mindfulness practices into her work with others. Christine maintains a private counseling and consulting practice in addition to facilitating Holotropic Breathwork® workshops regularly.
FAQs
Set in the lush forests of Odemira, Alentejo, right on the border of the Algarve in southwest Portugal. It is surrounded by raw natural beauty and only a short drive from the dramatic Atlantic coastline. We will send you a pin in the welcome letter!
• approximately 220 km (about 2.5 hours by car) from Lisbon Airport .
• about 140 km (roughly 1.5 hours by car) from Faro Airport
Monte Orada is easily reached from both Lisbon and Faro. We can support you with exploring these options as well as connecting with other to travel-share.
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Photography by Shyann Hibbs & Josh Caple
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