Vai con (C)alma creates tailor made retreats and experiences in natural paradises. Small groups, places that are alive, and enough time for you to feel yourself again.
Read Our Story
How it started
It began in Pipa, at a sound healing night
Gisella and Oriana met in Pipa, on the northeast coast of Brazil, during a sound healing session. They became friends that same night, in the way that is never easy to explain, and both of them describe it with the same word: it felt like family from the start.
They arrived there from very different lives and from the same tiredness. Oriana had been a manager in China and co-founder of a corporate events agency in Barcelona, years of deadlines, numbers and heavy responsibility, until she left it all behind to travel and start a path that was more her own. Gisella comes from the sea, from Sardinia, from twenty years of following the sun, and she dreamed of turning that into something that made sense beyond herself.
Pipa did the rest. Both of them went through something there they were not looking for: the ceremonies, the chants, the Gong Temple, the people of the village, and an energy that anyone who has been there recognises without quite being able to name it. It was less a tourist discovery and more a good shock. They healed things in that place, and the conversation that came after was inevitable: what if we create this space for other people?
That is how Vai con (C)alma Retreats was born. Not as a centre, not as a fixed place, but as an invitation that travels. AMANA, in Pipa, in December 2026, is the first women retreat of the brand.
Meet Gisella And Oriana
The name
Vai con (C)alma
It is Italian, and it means exactly what it sounds like: go slowly. It also reads with the meaning of “Go with the Soul” as for the pun calm and alma (in spanish and portuguese for example). It is not a promise of transformation and it is not a method. It is a request, one of those you have to make of yourself before you can make it of anyone else.
What moves us
What we believe
Nature really does heal
Not as a pretty backdrop, but as an agent. The ocean, the forest, the silence of early morning and the force of a living place do work that no technique manages on its own. Every retreat of ours happens where nature is still in charge.
Putting down roots is the opposite of running away
The word Oriana uses is grounding. Nobody leaves a retreat of ours with a brand new life. You leave with firmer ground under your feet, which is what makes it possible to decide anything afterwards.
Nobody needs to go through this alone
A small group, always. A protected, honest space where you can arrive exactly as you are. Many people come on their own, and no one spends the week on their own.
The idea
What a Vai con (C)alma retreat is
A retreat of ours is a living experience, not a withdrawal from the world. You practise in the morning and you go out at night. You get to know the place, you hear another language, you dance to live music. The immersion happens with the place, not in spite of it.
There is a name for this that we like: conscious travel. Travelling in a way that leaves you different from how you arrived, and that leaves something good behind in the place you passed through. Wellbeing, local culture and real life in the same week, without having to choose between resting and discovering.
The group is always small, and that is not an operational detail, it is the product. Nobody hides and nobody is dealt with wholesale. Whoever guides knows the name, the reason and the moment of every person in the room and this is what distinguish a retreat of ours from a well built travel package.
Small group, always
A living place, local culture included
Practice with intention, never a loose activity
Room to rest without guilt
The repertoire
The experiences, and what each one does
Not every experience goes into every retreat. The place decides, and so does the intention of that edition. What follows is representative of the house repertoire and the reason why each thing is in it.
01
Yoga
Presence
Bringing you back inside your own body before the day begins. It is not about the perfect posture, it is about noticing that you had gone somewhere else. Close to the ocean it works better, and that is why it almost always happens there.
02
Surf
Balance and courage
The ocean does not negotiate, and that is exactly why it teaches fast. Surf is a metaphor nobody has to explain: you fall, you come back, you try again. Plenty of people find out something about themselves there that they did not know.
03
Dance
Body and freedom
Biodanza, samba, a circle on the beach, the format changes. What does not change is what it does: it gives movement back to a body that spent years sitting still in a chair. No choreography, no mirror, no right and wrong.
04
Art therapy
Expression
You do not need to know how to draw. Art therapy uses the image as a path to what does not fit into words, and what comes off the paper is yours, to take with you or to leave behind.
05
Sound healing
Deep rest
You lie down, you close your eyes, and the sound of gongs and bowls does the work. It is the opposite of effort. For anyone living at high speed it is often the first time in a long while that the nervous system truly slows down.
06
Cacao ceremony
Opening
Cacao in ceremonial dose opens the chest and loosens the voice, and the circle that forms afterwards is usually the moment a group becomes a group. No forced mysticism and no promise of revelation.
07
Ice bath
Limit and breath
A few minutes, a lot of cold, and the discovery that the body holds and the breath leads. Nobody is required to get in. Those who do come out different.
08
Breathwork
What is inside
Breath is the most portable tool of them all, the only one that keeps working after the retreat ends. That is why it shows up on its own and inside almost every other practice.
09
Nature and local culture
The place
An excursion, a trail, the ocean, the village, the food, the music of the people who live there. The part of the week that does not look like a practice, and the part that usually stays with you the longest.
Honest filter
And what we aren't
It is not a closed, silent retreat, introspective from the first hour to the last. It is not an agency package, with a full itinerary and no care behind it. And it is not a wellness product promising a miracle in several days. We do not sell healing. We create the conditions to help you doing your own work, which is a very different thing and a far more honest one.
On now
The retreat happening next
Current retreat
AMANA · Pipa Edition
Pipa, Brazil · December 1 to 7, 2026 · Up to ten women
The first Vai con (C)alma retreat is a women's retreat: seven days in Pipa bringing together surf, yoga, dance, art therapy, sound healing, ice bath and a cacao ceremony, for women who want to come off the autopilot mode.
Discover AMANA Retreat
What comes after
Where we go next
Pipa is the beginning, not the address. Vai con (C)alma was born to happen in several places and in different formats, with retreats that are not only for women and shorter experiences for people who do not have a whole week to give. We are building it at the speed the name asks for.
