Residents and community guests can join in-house classes and self-practice sessions with the founder of RisingSoul & Retreat Space, Rowena (Row), alongside other resident or guest yoga coaches. Rowena also holds an Ayurvedic massage qualification and brings 10 years of experience supporting young people and adults who have experienced trauma, addiction, and harm within the home or family. Individual sessions can be arranged to support healing and self-awareness.
My first introduction to yoga came through my mother, who attended classes when we were children. At 17, I experienced the devastating loss of my father, which was a deeply confusing and painful time. When I was 20, I travelled to Nepal to trek in the Himalayas for charity and was introduced to the profoundly spiritual nature of the Buddhist mountain communities. Our Sherpa guides shared their self-practice of Tai Chi, and through that experience I discovered presence, self-awareness, and a sense that everything unfolds as it should.
That journey changed my life. It helped me come to terms with my father’s death in a way I had not been able to before, and it sparked a lasting curiosity about the religious and spiritual traditions of the East, which I later studied.
Ten years later, after a serious horse riding accident, I returned to yoga for very different reasons. Following surgeries and a course of steroid injections so I could continue my career as a professional equestrian rider, I began practising daily and using yoga as a form of pain management.
In 2017, I retired from competitive riding and started to think about what might come next. This led me to India, where I was awarded a scholarship to complete my yoga teacher training and qualify in Ayurvedic massage. There I came to understand the depth of yoga’s teachings and realised it was far more than something done once a week in a village hall. It is a way of life, a belief system, and a path toward self-awareness and spiritual salvation.
In 2019, I travelled to China for a work project. During that time, personal events prompted me to question everything I thought I knew and believed. I began a path of self-discovery and spiritual awareness, developing self-practices and listening to teachings that helped me begin to dissolve my ego, my mind, and my identification with pain in the body.
After leaving China, I travelled alone through Thailand and Cambodia, where I encountered the teachings of Eckhart Tolle. His work has deeply inspired me and continues to influence every part of my life. While in Cambodia, I met a woman who set me on a journey across the country to Kep, where I enrolled in a yoga retreat that inspired me to create this project.
I am deeply grateful to everyone who has been part of my journey so far, and I look forward to sharing my experience and understanding of spiritual awareness with all who seek it at the RisingSoul Retreat.
This season, you can also join a variety of yoga, aerial, poi, and other theatrical-based classes.