Embodied Self – Women’s Retreat 2025
A somatic and breathwork journey into
self-discovery, feminine essence,
and the shift from survival into thriving
Embodied Self 2025 is now fully booked!
Next retreat: 7–11 October 2026 at Quinta Marugo, Portugal (5 days).
Join the waitlist now for
early-bird price + free transfer from Lisbon.
When trauma softens, what comes next?
This is not a large retreat or a quick escape, but a rare and highly personal experience. With only a handful of places, you’ll receive the kind of depth and attention usually reserved for private therapeutic work — held within the inspiration of community. Guided by somatic breathwork and archetypal maps of the feminine. An intimate and highly tailored experience designed for women ready to move beyond healing into true embodiment.
Awaken Your Authentic Self!
Step away from the noise and rediscover your Heart, Body, and Soul.
27 November – 30 November 2025
Why Therapeutic Somatic Retreat for women
Many women arrive at a point where healing trauma alone is not enough. The nervous system stabilises, yet something deeper calls: the need to feel fully alive in the body. To explore feminine essence and sexuality not as performance or goal, but as a source of vitality, clarity, and inner power.
This retreat is designed for women who are already familiar with body-based work and are ready to go further — into the feminine ground of the womb, pelvis, and breath. Through guided practices you’ll learn to listen to the messages of the body’s core — the organs, the womb space, the cervix — places often ignored in daily life but essential to our wholeness.
energy activation
Emotional release
embodied self awareness
Why Somatic therapeutic Breathwork?
Breathwork goes beyond traditional therapy by engaging both mind and body. While traditional talk therapy focuses on thoughts and emotions, transformational breathwork includes the body’s energy systems, where many memories, stressors, and emotions are stored. Through deep breathing, movement, acupressure, and meditation, you can release what no longer serves you.
A Unique Immersive Experience
This retreat is a process of insight and inner transformation. Our program is a unique combination of guided experiential processes (archetypal workshops, morning practices, and conscious conversations), somatic practices (therapeutic breathwork, movement, and embodied exercises), and space to pause (time to rest, reflect, and connect with nature).
Across four days, you will journey through the archetypes of The Mother, Maiden, Wild Woman and Queen, each offering a distinct lens into safety, vitality, freedom, and clarity.
Unlike many retreats, we truly are an intimate offering. This retreat is intentionally limited to just 7 participants, creating an intimate, high-quality environment for deep personal transformation. It also enables us to tailor the experience to your individual needs and allows you to have one to one time with your facilitator. This personalised approach results in more internal resonance for you. Every voice is heard and celebrated at our retreat. You will co-regulate with each other, you will belong and feel supported.
This retreat doesn’t begin and end in four days. We’ll start with a free discovery call, so you feel clear this is the right space for you. During the retreat there’s room for personal support within the intimacy of a small group. And afterwards, you’ll receive online practices and integration support, so what you experience here can continue to unfold in your daily life.
This retreat will be guided by Joanna Januszewicz who is a certified breathing coach, and somatic integrative trauma therapist whose approach is based in the teachings of Hakomi, Gestalt, IFS and somatic psychology, attachment and developmental theory, affective and interpersonal neurobiology, psychodynamic psychotherapy and body-mind integration, including bioenergetics, breath analysis and deep bodywork. We understand the importance of safety and trust in doing this type of inner work.
This immersive retreat is a time for deep insight and inner work, as well as a time for rest, reflection and restoration. Letting the body decompress and reorganise back to its natural biorhythm. You will take a deep break from your busy life and immerse your senses in the world of embodied self-awareness. You will walk in nature, rest in peace, easefully learn and expand your understanding of yourself. We encourage journaling throughout your stay and have crafted the programme to allow for much self-reflection and slowing down.
This is the place to allow your-full-self to be taken care of, to be healed and nurtured. You’ll experience the calming rhythm of nature, combined with the supportive energy of the immersive retreat. Your senses will be awakened, activated and nourished by the natural surroundings, the organic spaces to learn and grow in, the body-nourishing dining experiences and the safety of your new home for four days.
This retreat brings together a carefully crafted blend of workshops, somatic practices, and therapeutic breathwork. The integrative design goes beyond mental insight alone — it allows you to feel, release, and reconnect through the body itself. By combining nervous system regulation, archetypal exploration, and breath-based transformation, you’ll move past old loops and return home with a deeper sense of clarity, vitality, and well-being.
Location/retreat venue
We can’t wait to host you at Casa Paço D’Ilhas, our magical retreat venue nestled in the hills of Ericeira, Portugal. With its rustic charm, stunning ocean views, and peaceful gardens, this space is designed to inspire connection and tranquility.
Imagine unwinding in the lush gardens, enjoying farm-to-table meals, and gather by the firepit for unforgettable moments.
You’ll have exclusive access to the yoga shala, outdoor terraces, and cozy communal spaces, all designed to create an intimate and unique retreat experience.
How to Get there
For those arriving at Lisbon Airport (LIS), getting to Ericeira is easy. You can take a direct bus from Lisbon to Ericeira with an hourly service, making it a budget-friendly option for travelers. The total journey takes about 1 hour 30 minutes.
If you prefer, we can also arrange a private transfer for you from the airport starting at €50, for a more comfortable ride.
Rooms Available
Shared room / Shared House – double occupancy
Enjoy your space of a private room or mini house, with a friend or another participant.
Private Room or House with Private Bathroom – single occupancy
Experience full privacy with your own room and en-suite bathroom.
All prices are per person for the duration of the retreat. Room availability is limited and allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
Food
We invite you to indulge in the mesmerizing flavors, crafted by Justin and Jelle. With a passion for authentic cuisine and a commitment to pure, honest ingredients, they’ve created a culinary experience that is both unique and nourishing. Their food philosophy emphasizes that a healthy mind thrives in harmony with a healthy body, and this is beautifully reflected in every dish they serve. From the well-catered breakfast buffet, featuring a daily special, to wholesome lunches and fusion dinners, the talented kitchen team prides itself on exceeding guest expectations.
All-Inclusive Content
During 4-day retreat
This women’s retreat offers a structured, therapeutic journey into the body and psyche. Guided by somatic therapy, breathwork, and interpersonal neurobiology, the program explores how survival patterns shape your emotions, behaviours, and relationships — and what it means to move from survival into thriving.
Across four days, you will experience an archetypal arc of the feminine:
- The Mother – safety, belonging, inner-feminine healing
- The Maiden – curiosity, vitality, innocence
- The Wild Woman – breaking patterns, reclaiming freedom, boundaries
- The Queen – sovereignty, inner-authority, wholeness
Through daily somatic practices, breathwork journeys, and integrative sessions, you will reconnect with parts of yourself that may have been abandoned, repressed, or over-adapted — and begin to embody a more authentic, balanced, and grounded self.
This retreat will help you:
- Recognise survival states in the body and learn how to shift into thriving
- Release stuck emotional patterns and restrictive roles
- Explore relational and systemic imprints that shape your inner world
- Reconnect with feminine essence and integrate inner feminine and masculine polarities
- Anchor new experiences of safety, freedom, and embodied sovereignty
The entire program is designed to be both deeply experiential and therapeutically grounded, giving you tools you can integrate into your daily life.
post-retreat
Continue your journey of growth and integration with 1-month online Integration Program (online platform: retreat activities to repeat and reinforce what you have learnt, therapeutic breathwork training and customized somatic interventions)
Retreat Daily Program
Sample day
During the 4-Day Transformational Breathwork Retreat
Your Journey from Emotional Awareness to Deep Inner Healing and Embodied Wisdom
- Arrive and orient into a safe therapeutic container, creating the foundation for nervous system regulation.
- Learn about archetypes and the retreat framework, preparing to explore different facets of the feminine self.
- Experience Body–Mind Mapping to trace somatic imprints of survival states and notice where you may abandon yourself.
- Explore and experience the Four Pillars of Safety – physical, emotional, sexual, and spiritual – as the groundwork for healing.
- Close the day with Inner Mother Healing Practice and a deep Transformational Breathwork Session for emotional release and integration.
- Begin with Morning Embodiment Practice (breath, movement, and light somatic release) to awaken the body.
- Engage in Five Senses Desire Mapping, a breathwork practice to explore what your feminine essence longs for.
- Meditate and explore Mature vs Immature Feminine patterns and how they show up in daily life.
- Experience Yoni Reflexology Breathwork – a practice for releasing past imprints, restoring polarity, and reconnecting to fresh vitality.
- End the day with Safety in Pleasure & Sensuality somatic practice and a Therapeutic Breathwork Journey to expand into innocence, glow, and embodied joy.
- Start with Conscious Conversations and reflections from the previous day.
- Explore The Four Shadow Selves (Lost, False, Disowned, and Rejected Self) – psychoeducation + reflection to understand hidden parts.
- Embark on The Journey to the Underworld – a guided somatic breathwork meditation to recover the lost self.
- Step into Boundaries as Freedom – a deep somatic meditation and breathwork practice for reclaiming power and space.
- Integrate with Inner Union – a systemic healing practice to restore balance between inner feminine and masculine.
- Close the day with Therapeutic Breathwork to release repression, shake off survival patterns, and reclaim freedom.
- Explore The Science of Thriving, connecting body-based regulation with flow, vitality, and prefrontal integration.
- Experience a Closing Breathwork Journey designed to anchor thriving as a nervous system state.
- Conclude with a final circle and integration practice, honouring sovereignty, wisdom, and embodied presence.
- Optional closing lunch and conscious conversations at the beach.
Meet Your Instructor/Trainer
joanna januszewicz
BREATHING COACH AND INTEGRATIVE COUNSELOR
Joanna is a Portugal-based certified breathing coach, mental health practitioner, and body-centred psychotherapist.
The desire to discover the power of breath brought her to pack up her suitcase and travel the globe to learn unique methods of using breath for healing purposes.
In India, Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, Holland, and Austria, Joanna trained and learned different modalities, all of which she uses in her practice. Her approach is to combine the mind, body, and spirit for holistic healing.
Joanna also trained in advanced Somatic Bodywork for trauma release and self de–armouring, which she incorporates in her practice to help clients notice physical sensations that stem from mental health issues and use that awareness to work through painful emotions.
She travels worldwide as a breathing coach and facilitator, providing trainings to individuals, guiding clients to transform their experiences and, equipping them with the tools needed to experience greater self-awareness, a clearer mind, and a deeper connection to their bodies.
Q&A
Possibility to come earlier or book an additional integration stay, get a therapeutic massage or other activities. For the extra bookings please contact the venue directly: www.casapacodilhas.com
What are somatics? The Greek word ‘soma’ means body. Somatic experiences are practices that are body-oriented, where the focus is on the whole self (mind and body). Western traditions keep us circling in our heady conceptual self-awareness (as opposed to embodied self-awareness) and over time we’ve developed this unhelpful distinction between mind and body.
The world of somatics has discovered that staying in conceptual self awareness – in those areas of the brain – will never solve the problems you might face in life. You have to invite the whole body into the conversation.
Our bodies speak to our brains – bottom up thinking we call it – via different types of nerves. Actually most of the information we use to react, understand our environment, relate to each other and grow as people is bottom up thinking.
In somatic practices, the body is seen as a living laboratory. By learning to interpret bodily sensations we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves.
If we get to know our sensations and signals in the body, become more attuned to this we can tap into the subtle clues our bodies are sending us. That gut instinct for example – what it’s telling you about what you really want and need in life.
Neuroscientific studies have even shown that our experiences leads to changes in the brain’s structure and functioning, affecting areas responsible for memory, emotion regulation, and stress response.
Integrating this type of new understanding of yourself (in your body) takes effort and exploration. Once we can do that exploration though we will have laid the groundwork for living more congruent lives, dealing with actual issues in the here and now rather than ruminating on the untrue rubbish our minds keeps us stuck in. We can instead find joy and pleasure, connect with each other and all that other good stuff we yearn for in life.
As complex organic beings the understanding is we all have the natural ability and processes to perceive, learn, reason, solve problems, and adapt to our environments. Our ‘organic intelligence’ results from the interactions between our brain, nervous system and physiological and psychological factors.
Our natural biology works in ON and OFF – heart squeezes and releases, we are awake or asleep, we breathe in and out. And much much more on a complex and subtle level we aren’t aware of.
We have a natural biorhythm that in our ON ON ON world has been slowly forgotten, buried, forced out of rhythm. We are addicted to ON and to internalised struggle. Away from the here and now.
We are tired so we pump caffeine into ourselves. We’re can’t focus and yet we sit for hours at our desks squeezing more productivity out of ourselves. A headache is coming on and we take a pill and go out to dinner at a loud restaurant.
We push and squish and force our bodies to stay ON. We dampen the nuanced, subtle but ever present signals of our bodies. We ignore the signs and flags that our biology is yelling out to us.
We have this natural innate resource to return to our natural biorhythm. We just need to pause, slow down and listen to our bodies. Let them lead for a while. Trust in its wisdom.
It’s understood that embodied self-awareness (instead of just the heady conceptual self-awareness) is made up on 8 stages – resources, slowing down, verbalisation, co-regulation, boundaries, self-regulation, re-engagement, letting go.
During this retreat you will learn these stages in an experiential way to bring you into a better relationship with your body and launch you further along the path of embodied self-awareness.
Breathing as Healing
Breathwork is a powerful healing tool, whether used as a standalone modality like Conscious Connected Breathwork or integrated into somatic psychotherapy. For some, deep-seated tension and emotional rigidity require more than talk therapy – they call for an embodied approach that opens the door to altered states of consciousness, where true transformation begins.
How Does It Work?
Transformational Breathwork activates the subconscious mind, bringing hidden insights and emotions to the surface. As your breath opens the energy channels in your body, you release suppressed emotions, physical blocks, and harmful beliefs, paving the way for genuine transformation.
Whether you’re releasing emotional baggage, healing past trauma, or clearing inner obstacles, this retreat offers a pathway to access your full potential for emotional, physical, and mental well-being.
This retreat is open to all, regardless of experience. Whether you are new to breathwork or an advanced practitioner, you will find a space for healing, growth, and inner exploration.
- All the somatic sessions over the course of the 4 days
- 6 wholesome Meals, snacks, desserts, coffee, tea, water (dinner on arrival evening, breakfast, lunch, dinner on 2nd, 3rd day and breakfast on 4th day )
- Full accommodation for 4 nights at Casa Paço D’Ilhas, Portugal
- Free access to yoga shala, outdoor space, pool, coffee, tea, drinks at Casa Paço D’Ilhas during 4 days of the retreat
- Welcome / Goodbye drink and snacks
- Pre and post retreat support from our team
- Wifi connection
- Parking
- Luggage storage
- Airport transfer
- Travel insurance
- Flights costs
- Additional activities not included in the itinerary
- Additional treatments
- Travel costs to Casa Paço D’Ilhas, Portugal
We know that life can be unpredictable. At the same time, hosting a retreat requires significant preparation and upfront investment in our venue, team, and resources. We kindly ask for your understanding in respecting the following policy:
60+ days before the retreat (before 27 September 2025): Balance payments are refundable. Please note that deposits are non-refundable.
30–60 days before the retreat (27 September – 27 October 2025): 50% of balance payments are refundable.
Less than 30 days before the retreat (after 27 October 2025): All payments are non-refundable.
Late arrivals, early departures, or inability to attend: No refunds or credits can be offered.
We strongly recommend that all participants purchase comprehensive travel and health insurance (particularly if travelling from abroad) to cover medical emergencies, travel disruptions, or cancellations.
Your commitment makes it possible for us to create a safe, supportive, and nurturing retreat experience for everyone.
This retreat will be conducted in English, ensuring accessibility for participants from diverse backgrounds to engage in a shared journey of self-discovery and transformation.
Yes! After the retreat, you’ll receive 1-month access to our Online Platform. Inside, you’ll find:
- Access to retreat integration activities and resources
- Additional somatic practices and breathwork meditations
- A library of online courses, including Mindfulness, Positive Psychology, Somatic Inner Child Work, and more
This integration package is designed to support your continued growth and embodiment after the retreat.
We currently do not have an Early Bird special, as we are already offering a discounted, budget-friendly price for the retreat.
We recommend securing your spot now to take advantage of this unique opportunity!
Please aim to arrive between 3.00pm-4pm on 27th November 2025. Day activities will start shortly after.
Connect with us and prepare yourself for a magical and transformative retreat to discover who you truly are!
Participant Reviews
“A truly transformational and enjoyable experience! Therapeutic breathwork is the best modality I have tried so far to release pent-up emotions and tension from my body. Joanna is definitely my favourite facilitator of all. Can’t wait for the next edition! ” Daniela
“This is a retreat like no other just fantastic. Joana are amazing doing what they do. Amazing Experience feeds your soul. The homemade food was delicious. Thanks a lot for this great experience! I can only recommend this retreat, will uplift your spirits and put a smile on your face 😊 I am planning to come back for another visit!” Thoma
“Thanks for all beautiful people and for this deep journey. This retreat was really therapeutic, thanks to everyone for the sharing and a special thanks to the facilitators 
It was a big change here 
I trust the path too 
” Inês
Breathwork and Emotional Release Retreat
It is a unique retreat that brings together integrative therapies and healing techniques from bioenergetics and breathwork to somatic coaching and somatic psycho- therapy and consciousness expansion.
At our retreat, you will learn and practice breathwork and psycho-somatic therapies as well as immerse in body wisdom to wake up the Presence in you and to connect with the true power of nature within.
You will understand the power of emotions and subconscious programming and how they can deeply impact our mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. We offer a safe and supportive environment for you to explore and release any suppressed emotions, trauma, or pain that may be holding you back from living your fullest life.
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