In 2009, I was sitting on a bus in Hong Kong with a friend, who happened to be the editor in Chief of a well-known wellness & lifestyle publication: She casually suggested, “Why don’t you go on a Pilates retreat and write about it?”
I went home, opened my laptop, and started searching. Nothing. I could not find a Pilates retreat.
What I did find were yoga retreat venues asking, “Are you a yoga teacher wanting to host your own retreat? We can make that happen.” And so… I made it happen. In 2010, I hosted my first Pilates retreat in Bali. I had been teaching for barely three years. There was a fair amount of total imposter syndrome and just enough confidence to make it look like I knew what I was doing. Fifteen people signed up.
That was the beginning. Life in Movement was born.
Somewhere along the way, between retreats in Greece and Sri Lanka, I started asking myself a different question. If retreats create focus, continuity, and real connection to the work, why is nobody using that format for teacher training?
It was during a retreat I hosted together with Rael Isacowitz in Portugal in 2017 that further reinforced that thought. Rael spoke so fondly of his time in the 80ies in Australia where he would gather a small group of students in a retreat:
“It was the retreats though where I saw the real growth in people’s understanding of the method and what it could do for them.”
Our conversations became the foundation of our collaboration and also his support in letting me build a retreat format around BASI education courses.
There was no demand at the time. No waitlists. No industry pressure. It just seemed obvious. So in 2019, I brought the BASI Pilates Mat Teacher Training into a retreat format.
The first version was… ambitious. Twelve days in Thailand. Fully immersive. A big ask, financially and logistically. It worked beautifully from an educational perspective.
As a business model, less so.
Most people cannot disappear for nearly two weeks of training, no matter how appealing the beach is. Over time, the format evolved. Shorter, more structured, more accessible. Today, we offer BASI’s Flex program - same modules, same course as you would find in a studio, but with something added that is hard to replicate in an urban setting: the immersion. You stay with the work. You stay with each other. Things land differently. That combination, strong education within a retreat environment, turned out to be the real sweet spot.
When we started, very few people were doing this. Balanced Body’s Page Sieffert, in Costa Rica, deserves a mention here - she has been pioneering a very similar format since 2011 and continues to offer her widely successful Pilates teacher trainings, attracting students from all over the world. Anthony Lett’s Yin Pilates Retreats have also been around for over a decade.
Yet, to this day, and even with the Pilates world ‘on steroids’, teacher training courses outside of the standard studio format are still not widely adopted.
Which raises the obvious question: why?
Part of it is logistics. Retreats are not easy to run. They require long lead times, upfront investment, and a willingness to operate outside your local network. You need people to find you, often internationally, without the safety net of your regular studio clients.
And most teacher trainers have exactly that. A studio. A full schedule. A stable base. Stepping away from that to run a retreat is not always realistic.
Without the usual distractions, there is space to stay with the fundamentals long enough for them to actually make sense. Not just intellectually, but physically. A retreat format gives students permission to ‘revisit’ the mat, a perfect excuse to combine travel with education.
This year, we are bringing mat and reformer training together into a combined retreat format. We’re also bringing in Tracey Mallet’s Booty Barre programmes too. Not because it is the next logical step, but because it reflects what the work actually asks for: integration.
Looking back, nothing in my small business journey was particularly strategic.
It started with not finding something. Then building it anyway. Then asking better questions. Some of the early decisions were inefficient. Some were financially questionable. Most involved a certain amount of “let’s see if this holds.”
But over time, a pattern emerged and I realized that I had built something valuable, something to be proud of. After more than 20 Mat Teacher Training retreats in Thailand, Portugal and Morocco, what stands out is not just that the format works. It is how people show up inside it. Students are more present.
More invested. Slightly less distracted by everything else. Which, in the end, is what most of us are trying to teach every day.
Mareile Paley has been teaching Pilates for almost 20 years, with training rooted in both classical and contemporary Pilates. She began her Pilates education with Core Pilates NYC in 2006 and later became deeply involved with BASI Pilates, where she has been a teacher, retreat host and education partner for many years.
In 2010, Mareile founded Life in Movement with her first Pilates retreat in Bali. Since then, she has hosted more than 70 retreats across the globe, from Mexico and Bali to Europe, Turkey and beyond. What began as a way to bring people together around Pilates has evolved into a model that combines high-quality movement education with immersive experiences, community and a strong sense of place. In 2019, she began bringing Pilates teacher trainings into the retreat format, exploring how professional education can become a richer, more connected and embodied experience.
Originally from Germany, Mareile has lived in New York, Hong Kong, Turkey and Pakistan and is now based in Portugal, where she is building CALM (the Center for the Art of Life in Movement) in Portugal, a regenerative boutique hotel built for Pilates, and designed for people to connect to themselves and each other. CALM brings together many of the principles that have shaped her work: movement as a way of connecting people, caring for ourselves and others, and creating positive impact in the places we inhabit. If you want to visit Mareile, you can book a stay at CALMinho, her private Pilates guest house in a quaint Portuguese village just 30 minutes from Lisbon, for your own Pilates Solo Retreat.
Life in Movement: www.lifeinmovement.co
CALM Portugal: www.calmportugal.com
CALMinho: www.calminho.com