At Mountain Waters Retreats, we offer you an enriched learning environment of beauty, sacredness and connection to nature. Our intention is to be the place where the aspiration you feel for growth, change and a deeper connection to yourself, is met by a program you take and by something you discover inside yourself while you are here.
We offer you the opposite of distraction. Stillness, deep learning and a space that welcomes your authenticity, whether that means joy, tears, or some other form of your Awe-some-ness. Mountain Waters is where the longing for embodied presence becomes anchored in experience.
Often this can mean taking the time to looking clearly at what stands in the way of the full expression of your life. People come here to help navigate important life transitions. To shift perspectives, to let go, or press “pause” and turn toward the quieter voice inside, that can guide the way forward.
Our Mission
Mountain Waters Retreats is a nature based learning center where people come together to find inspiration, embrace change, and let go of what no longer serves. We invite our guests to step beneath the busy surface of life and orientate instead toward who they are in essence. So they are better able to respond to the world with presence, right action and embodied engagement. Our Retreat Center is a sanctuary of beauty, stillness, and connection to nature. Built for the healing work of restoring authentic relationship with ourselves, to each other, and attuning to the living earth that supports and surrounds us. Our intention is to empower people, as Gandhi counselled, to become the change they wish to see in the world.
Who We Are
My name is Richard, and together with my wife Yogita, I invite you to join us for a retreat experience that inspires self-exploration, rejuvenation, peace, and well-being.
We have lived on this special piece of land, known as the old Svoboda farm, above Nelson for 24 years. Svoboda means freedom in the Slavic languages of Eastern Europe. It is here that Yogita and I raised our five children. Where I built the structures that have become the Retreat Centre, tended to the forestland, grown food in the Garden. This has been a labor of love, to be rooted and belong to this place in a reciprocal exchange of giving and receiving. I find myself nourished by the land, and by the relationships I’m privileged to develop with our Retreat Center guests, and by the creative process of making everything we do here fold into the beauty of our natural surroundings.
We work to create a culture and environment for the people who work here at Mountain Waters that is rewarding and alive. Our caretaker, James, lives in a tiny house by the massage studio. He is a big part of the care and attention that is brought to the experience of being at Mountain Waters. We want our guests to be comfortable, and at the same time connected to nature, and so we have worked to invite the elements that surround us into every aspect of the experience we offer you. The food grown from the soil built up over the years from what is left on the plate of guests long gone. Our intention all along has been to create an integrative health and wellness experience that supports each of our guests to access their own felt experience of wellbeing.
I find that place myself in nature, lying on the forest floor watching the way the sun filters through the canopy of the forest, or listening to the sounds of Hermitage Creek as it bubbles down the mountainside behind the lodge.
I notice that there is a particular kind of nourishment that our guests receive when they experience the beauty and stillness of our surroundings. It’s as if people get to step off the treadmill of busyness and take the time they need to connect the dots between their inner experience and the way they wish their life to unfold on the outside. I believe that when we stop and pay attention, we begin to notice what makes us feel fully alive.