I ran twelve private Reformer Pilates retreats in twelve months. I want to tell you what I actually learned, because it was not what I expected.
I expected to learn about logistics. About which villas work and which don't, about how many Reformers fit in a garden, about the difference between a chef who can cook for twelve and a chef who can cook for twelve and make it feel like a dinner party. I did learn all of that. But the more interesting things I learned were about people.
What Happens When You Take Someone Out of Their Life
The thing that surprised me most was how quickly people change when you remove them from their normal environment. I have been teaching Pilates for thirteen years. I know what happens in a studio. People arrive carrying the weight of their day, their week, their year. It takes time to settle. The first ten minutes of a class are often about letting go of whatever they walked in with.
On retreat, that process is compressed and deepened in a way I had not fully anticipated. By the second morning, people move differently. Not because they have had more sessions, but because they have slept well, eaten well, and woken up without the usual list of things to do. The body relaxes in a way it simply cannot in a Tuesday evening class after a full day of work.
I saw this in every retreat. A group of colleagues who arrived slightly formal with each other and left as something closer to friends. A hen party that started with the energy of a big night out and ended with people asking me about private sessions back home because they had discovered something they wanted to continue. A group of women who had known each other for twenty years and told me on the last morning that they had talked more honestly over those four days than they had in years.
The Pilates was the container. But the container held more than movement.
What I Learned About the Algarve
I have lived in the Algarve for eight years. I thought I knew it well. Twelve retreats in twelve months taught me I had barely scratched the surface.
I found a chef who grows his own herbs and vegetables and cooks with them the same day. I found a beach that requires a twenty minute walk through scrubland to reach, and that is always quiet because most people do not bother. I found a sound healer who works in a way I had never encountered before and who left three separate groups of women sitting in silence for a long time after she finished.
The Algarve that most visitors experience is beautiful. The Algarve that you access through eight years of relationships and curiosity is something else entirely. That is what I am offering when I design a retreat. Not the tourist version. The version that takes years to find.
What I Learned About Myself
Running twelve retreats in twelve months is a lot. I will be honest about that. There were months where I questioned whether the pace was sustainable. There were retreats where I was tired before I started and had to find the energy from somewhere.
What I learned is that the work itself is the energy source. Standing in front of a group on the first morning of a retreat, watching people arrive and settle and begin to trust the space, gives me something I do not get from anything else I do. It is the most alive I feel professionally. That is not a small thing to discover about yourself at this stage of a career.
I also learned that the retreats work best when I stop trying to make them perfect and start trusting the process. The best moments were never the ones I had planned most carefully. They were the ones that emerged from the group, from the setting, from the particular combination of people and place and timing that you cannot engineer in advance.
What Comes Next
I am not running twelve retreats in twelve months again. That was a particular year, a particular experiment, and it taught me what I needed to know. What comes next is fewer retreats, better designed, with more space around each one so that I can give each group everything it deserves.
If you are thinking about a retreat, whether for a group of friends, a corporate team, a hen party, or something else entirely, get in touch. Email [email protected] and tell me what you have in mind. I will come back to you personally.
Victoria x
Ready to Try It?
Book Into Class