Join Vidyamala and Padmadarshini for our annual hybrid retreat — working to balance your nervous systems for greater ease, expansiveness and ability to flourish.

🗓 Dates: Friday 18th - Friday 25th September
🎟 Tickets: From £795 in-person or £195 online. 
✳️ CPD: Yes, plus we're a BAMBA-approved organisation
🙋‍♀️ Suitable For: Anyone who has practiced mindfulness & meditation for about 6 months.

Join us in person or  online 

Illuminating, inclusive and nourishing. An amazing retreat with lots of insight, first class presentation material, excellent content, experiential learning — and a sense of belonging and fun! Once again Breathworks demonstrates why they are the mindfulness organisation to be part of. 

— Anonymous Online Retreatant, 2024 

Overview

Once a year, we bring the Breathworks community together for our longest and most immersive retreat. We welcome you to join us however you can — whether that's in person at Adhisthana (Herefordshire, UK) or from the comfort of your own home. Our excellent tech team and facilities mean that you'll enjoy a fully immersive experience, wherever you are.

This is your invitation to carve out a week to nourish yourself and your practice, going deeper than a day or a weekend allows, and to do it alongside others also engaging in this work.

This year, we return to a community favourite theme: Balancing the Nervous System. We’ll revisit the foundational practices from previous years, building a toolkit of techniques to soothe or stimulate our systems for optimal wellbeing. We’ll also be opening up a new avenue of exploration – getting to the crux of why this work is important.

This is a rare chance to spend a week learning from Breathworks Co-Founder Vidyamala Burch OBE, a leading voice in mindfulness and pain management. This year, Vidyamala is joined by meditation and somatic movement teacher Padmadarshini Cole. Together, they create a retreat environment that feels supportive, warm and genuinely enjoyable.

Balancing the Nervous System

Both Vidyamala and Padmadarshini have had a long fascination with the body's nervous system — and with a question that sits beneath all of this work: what is the point of working towards a more regulated, balanced state?

Yes, we want to feel calmer, healthier, more able to meet life's inevitable challenges. That's a good and valid motivation. But there's something more. What becomes possible when we move out of our habitual fight/flight/freeze responses and begin to rest in something more open? What is the quality of boundless awareness and love we can begin to taste when we are more regulated? 

These are the questions this retreat will explore.

We'll begin by laying out the territory — working with both the familiar sources of nervous system activation and the quieter, more subtle ones: the limiting beliefs and gentle self-judgements that keep us quietly stirred up, often without our realising. In the second half of the week, we'll go deeper — exploring what it is like to rest in something more fluid, open, loving and mysterious, and how to find your way there both on retreat and in daily life.

You'll leave with a personal toolkit of practices for life, and perhaps something harder to name: a closer acquaintance with what it feels like to rest vividly in both yourself and with life.  

What You Will Learn

This retreat will help you come to a closer understanding of the mind-body connection, and how learning to regulate the nervous system can help you to thrive. You will practise restorative meditation, gentle somatic movement, breath work and more, complemented by daily talks drawing on science and Buddhist psychology. All teachings will be delivered in a secular, accessible way, making them suitable for all faiths and none.

This year, the retreat also introduces new material on how to rest in open, expansive and loving flow states — building on the foundations for those returning to this retreat theme, and opening new territory for those joining for the first time.

You guys are the dream team. You create the best space possible to hold people who need to feel safe exploring difficult or delicate life experiences. The way you think of everything is a marvel. Thank you everyone involved in making it happen. 

— Anonymous In-Person Retreatant, November 2025 

What to Expect 

The retreat has a gentle, considered rhythm, designed to help you go deeper in your practice and fully benefit from this experience. The schedule includes:

🛎 Guided meditation practice (typically 20-30 minutes)

☀️ Gentle mindful & somatic movement adapted for all bodies 

🗣 Talks & presentation on the daily topic from your experienced retreat leaders. These are informal and relaxed.

💬 Small discussion groups, offering a familiar space to talk through the practices, ask questions, and hear how others are finding things.

💤 Evening breath work to soothe your system ahead and promote restful sleep.

🤫 Periods of warm silence that build gradually throughout the week, allowing you to go deeper in your practice.

📖 Free time for you to make the retreat your own — nap, rest, read, walk, journal — whatever feels nourishing.

Everything on a Breathworks retreat is invitational. We encourage you to listen to your body and adjust to your needs. You can speak with our experienced retreat team (both online & in-person) at any time if you need guidance or support.

Who Is This For?

As a guide, we suggest this retreat is for anyone with at least 6 months of meditation or mindfulness experience.  Please do not rule yourself out if you haven't had a perfectly consistent formal meditation practice — if you work to weave awareness and compassion into your daily life in other ways, and feel comfortable with guided meditation of up to 30 minutes, we warmly welcome you to join us.

Living with a health challenge? You won't be alone! In fact, many of the Breathworks retreat team live with painful or difficult bodies themselves, and will be on hand (both online and in-person) to help you adjust to best serve your needs. 

It was very supportive for me to be part of a group which included other people living with health challenges, as I have often been on retreats before where I was the only one who needed to adjust, rest, lie down etc. It was a relief to be in a retreat environment where all was welcome, and so many wonderful teachings were explored

— Fionnuala, 2025 In-Person Retreatant

What is a Hybrid Retreat?

Not everyone can make it to Adhisthana Retreat Centre in person. Our hybrid format means you can participate from home, sharing the exact same teachings and practices.

Our experienced tech team and high quality set-up means the online experience is not a 'lesser' option. You will be fully immersed and included, with dedicated online retreat assistants supporting you along the way.

We've found that those joining online and those in the room quickly feel like one group, and in-person participants often love the added sense of connection with people joining from their homes around the world.

I really enjoyed seeing all the retreatants both in person and online. I felt touched by Breathworks' efforts to continue to enable the homebods (for whatever circumstances) to get a look in! It felt very familial and warm. Fantastic efforts of all the tech folk involved!

— Anonymous 2024 Online Retreatant

Learn more about what your retreat experience could look like by clicking the links below: 

Meet Your Retreat Leaders

Both teachers were excellent - very clear, well organised, patient and warm. They complement one another in their approaches, experiences and skills, and feel I have learned so much from both of them.

— Anonymous In-Person Retreatant, 2024 

Cost & Financial Support

	Standard Rate	Concessionary Rate	Bursary Rate (Limited)
In Person (includes 7 days accommodation & food)
Single room	£1,195	£995	N/A
Shared room (share with one other)	£995	£795	N/A
Single room for health or accessibility needs	£795	N/A	N/A
Online	£395	£295	£195

🎓 Discounts for Accredited Breathworks Teachers

If you are an accredited Breathworks Teacher, you are eligible for 10% off your place (bursary places not included). If you are paying in full, please select a ticket below and use your discount code at checkout. If you are requesting a payment plan, you will be able to indicate you are a teacher here and the team will apply the 10% discount when setting up your monthly payments. Please note, you cannot use your teacher discount in combination with the early bird discount. 

🌱 Payment plans

Spread the cost with interest-free monthly instalments - request a payment plan here. If choosing the payment plan option, you do not need to checkout below, as this is only for those wishing to pay in full. Please note: 50% of the retreat fee must be paid before the event begins. We are pleased to share that payment plans can now be used with both the early bird 5% discount and the accredited teacher 10% discounts.

❌ Need to cancel?

If you need to cancel, you can get a refund (minus a £100 admin fee) or transfer to another event up to 7 days before the start date. Unfortunately, we can’t offer refunds within 7 days of the start date. For details on our cancellation policy for retreats, please click here. 

For full details on our two joining options and to book your place, please click the links below: