Retreats —
Portugal
Portugal offers something rare: light, landscape, and a pace of life that makes genuine rest possible.
Earth Body Cloud retreats offer time to inhabit these practices more fully than is possible within a workshop or clinical consultation. Designed around the seasonal rhythms of the Portuguese landscape, they bring together Chinese medicine, movement, medicinal plants, artistic practice, sound, and shared meals within a carefully paced environment that supports sustained attention, restoration, and creative inquiry.
Rather than following a fixed programme, each retreat develops through the relationships that emerge between participants, place, season, and practice. Mornings may begin with tai qi overlooking the landscape, followed by shared breakfasts, clinical or creative sessions, herb walks, studio-based laboratories, periods of quiet reflection, or individual treatments. Evenings often conclude with sound-based practices that invite listening, integration, and collective rest.
A distinctive aspect of these retreats is the dialogue between medicine and artistic research. Participants may move between pulse diagnosis and drawing, plant observation and field notation, movement and score-making, discovering how different practices illuminate one another when experienced over time. The emphasis is not on mastering techniques, but on cultivating new forms of perception and relation that can continue long after the retreat has ended.
Plant walks and herbal foraging
Rest, conversation, and shared time
The landscape of the Setúbal coast
Retreats are particularly suited to women navigating perimenopause and menopause, creative practitioners seeking embodied research time, and anyone wanting a genuinely different relationship with their own body and knowledge.
The season determines what can be encountered, the landscape shapes how we move through it, and the questions each participant brings become part of the retreat itself. Over several days, shared practices cultivate a quality of attention from which new ways of seeing, making, and understanding can quietly emerge.
Tai qi at sunrise — movement practice as the first language of the day, before words.
Plant walk or herbal session — learning to read the landscape through Chinese medicine eyes.
Bodywork sessions — meridian work, cupping, moxibustion, or individual herbal consultation depending on what each person needs.
Shared meal and Vital Forms creative practice — writing, drawing, or music-making with carefully chosen prompts.
A sonic session — tuning forks sounded along meridian pathways, drawing the retreat to a close through collective resonance rather than words.
Weekend retreats
Friday evening to Sunday afternoon. Currently offered at selected venues in the Lisbon and Setúbal area. Suitable for those travelling from within Portugal or nearby.
Residential immersions — Silver Coast
Longer residential programmes on Portugal's Silver Coast are in development — landscape, plants, deep rest, and the full practice over several days. Dates to be announced.
Bespoke retreats
Small group retreats designed around the needs of a specific group — practitioners, women at a particular life stage, or creative collaborators. Please get in touch to discuss.
International participants
Portugal is an easy destination from the UK, France, and Germany. The residential Silver Coast programmes are designed with international participants in mind — arrive for the week, leave changed.
Dates and venues are announced via the Ars Medica newsletter and Earth Body Cloud Instagram. To be notified when the next retreat opens, or to enquire about a bespoke programme:
Bespoke retreats for small groups available by arrangement.
Get in touch