The Casa Anandi Retreat
Is this you?
You wake at three, and the day starts without you.
Not every night. But enough nights that you have stopped counting, and enough that you have started planning around it.
The pattern
Two shapes. You will know which is yours.
You know the shape of it. You fall asleep without much trouble. Then somewhere between two and four you are awake, and the mind is already going. Not anxious exactly, just on. Working through tomorrow. Rehearsing a conversation. Solving something that does not need solving at three in the morning.
By six you have fallen back into something shallow. By seven you are up, and you go and do the day anyway, because you always do.
Or your shape is a different one. You never quite go under. You drift in and out all night, aware of the hours, aware of the light changing. You get up having spent eight hours in bed and been repaired by none of them.
From the outside, nothing is wrong. That is rather the problem.
The reframe
One thing rarely fixes it, because it is rarely one thing
You have almost certainly tried things. The magnesium. The app. The cool room, the early alarm, the fortnight without wine. Perhaps a weekend away that helped for four days.
Some of it you did not keep up, and that is worth being honest about. Most people give a new routine ten days before drifting back to what they were doing before.
But some of it you did keep up. Carefully, for months. And it still did not hold.
That is the part worth paying attention to. It is rarely one thing that has gone wrong, which is why one thing rarely fixes it. Magnesium alone, a cooler room alone, an earlier night alone. Each is a single adjustment to a system being pulled in several directions at once.
Sleep sits downstream of everything else in your day. Your body sleeps when it has something left to recover with. When there is nothing left, it stops.
So the question is not why you cannot sleep. The question is what your body has been carrying, for how long, and what it has been doing to keep you upright while you were busy elsewhere.
That is answerable. It has to be looked at properly, that is all.
What this is
Five days inside the Inner Stability Method. The point in the work where the environment itself has to change.
Everything before it and everything after it happens inside your own life. This is the part that cannot.
Why the assessment comes first
There is no separate retreat to book here
The Casa Anandi Retreat is one phase of a longer piece of work. It begins with a full assessment. Ninety minutes, in conversation, going through your history, your patterns, your days and your nights in more detail than anyone has asked you for before. From that I write your report and build a protocol for your system specifically.
We go through that report together. Depending on when you begin, that happens either before you travel or in the first days at Casa Anandi. Either way you never read it alone and wonder what to do with it, and either way it becomes the spine of the five days.
I don’t design a retreat around a guest I haven’t assessed.
Alison Anandi
A week built around five specific systems is a different thing entirely from a week built for whoever books.
The difference is the assessment.
Why you cannot see this at home
The pattern you are inside is the one you cannot see
At home you are always managing something. The day starts before you are ready, the demands arrive, and you meet them, because you always have. By the evening, what you can feel is the effort. What is happening underneath it stays out of view.
Five days somewhere that asks nothing of you shows you something you cannot see at home. What your body does when it is finally left alone.
That is the information all of this is built on, and it only appears once the effort stops.
How the work is done
Sleepology by Anandi®
The method is built on thirty-five years in wellbeing, twenty of them teaching breath, and grounded in both sleep physiology and Ayurvedic principles. It looks at three systems together rather than separately: the nervous system and its capacity to settle, the rhythms that govern when your body expects to do what, and the gap between the recovery you need and the recovery you are getting.
Breath is one of the main instruments I use, and one of the most direct routes into a nervous system that will not settle. It is also, usually, part of what you take home and keep using.
Underneath it sits the Inner Stability Index, the framework I use to map how the parts of your twenty-four hours relate to each other. It shows where your system is holding, where it is leaking, and what it has been quietly working around.
Three markers tell us whether the protocol is doing its job.
Night awakenings
Not only whether you wake, but how, when, and what your system is doing when it does.
Heart rate variability
Trend data from a wearable, because an overloaded system misreports itself.
Daytime clarity
Your ability to think, hold energy, and move through a day without running on adrenaline or collapsing at the end of it.
You will have a baseline before you arrive and the same measures afterwards. This is the part that makes the work checkable rather than hopeful.
The house
Casa Anandi
A stone farmhouse in Le Marche, set in an olive grove outside Treia.
Every decision in it was made by someone who works with nervous systems for a living. A hotelier would have made some of them differently.
The rooms
Stone walls, terracotta ceilings, old beams. They are calm and uncluttered and very comfortable, and the beds were chosen with more care than most hotels give them. After twenty years working with sleep, the bed was not going to be an afterthought.
There are no televisions in the bedrooms. A room with a television in it is a room you will still be awake in at midnight.
The practice room
Full of light. Light is the strongest signal your body clock receives, and a room full of it does something the practice alone cannot.
The pool
It sits in the olive grove facing the evening sun, and unlike most farmhouse pools it is long enough to actually swim in.
The food
There is a chef with us all week, cooking with what is local and in season. This is Le Marche, where food is taken seriously. You will eat well. The one rule is timing: dinner is early and light, because eating late is one of the most common reasons people wake at three in the morning.
The shape of the work
Most retreats are designed around the days you are there. This one is designed around what happens after you leave.
Sixteen weeks, of which the five days are the middle.
Before, the assessment
A ninety-minute session, in conversation rather than a form. It can happen any time up to a fortnight before you travel, and many people begin months earlier. Afterwards I write your report and build your protocol, and we go through it together.
The five days at Casa Anandi
Your report is the spine of the week. We work with it in person, in a room of five, in an environment with the load off, which is when things become visible that were not visible at home.
After, ninety days
Three recalibration sessions of forty-five minutes each, spread across the integration period. The first two review what is shifting and refine the protocol as your system changes. The last is a closing review. You go home with the protocol, the resources, and a way of reading your own system that you did not have before.
The shape of a day
What the days are actually like
Morning. Practice before anything is asked of you.
No phone, no conversation, no news first. The system is most open in the first hour, and what happens then sets the tone the rest of the day runs on.
Breakfast, then the teaching
The workshop sits mid-morning, when the mind can take things in. This is where you learn to read your own system rather than simply be worked on. It is also what makes the week portable.
The afternoon. Individual work.
Every afternoon I work with each guest one to one, going through her own report. It is the reason the room is five and not fifteen. Around those sessions the afternoon is open, and it is yours: the pool, the gardens, or sitting quietly with what came up in the morning, which is often where the real work happens.
Early evening. The day comes down.
The evening practice takes the system down rather than up.
Then we come together to close the day
What has surfaced, what you want to ask, sometimes a practice. It depends on the week. The point is that nothing is left hanging overnight. An unanswered question at ten o’clock has a way of becoming a three o’clock one.
Dinner, early and light
And the third day is silent. By then the system has come down far enough that silence arrives as a relief rather than an ordeal. It is usually the day nobody expected.
What is deliberately absent
No treatment menu. No packed schedule. No optional extras or upgrades.
A luxury wellness resort offers more. This offers less, precisely chosen.
Who this is for
This is for you if
- You are capable and accomplished and have been the reliable one for a long time.
- You are functioning perfectly well from the outside and know something underneath has stopped cooperating.
- Something has made it undeniable — a marriage ending, a business sold, a parent’s death, a body that has changed its terms.
- The methods that carried you for thirty years have stopped covering the gap.
The retreats are women only. In a room of five doing this kind of work, that is a design decision rather than a policy.
Not for you
It’s not for you if
- You are looking for a break. There are more comfortable ways to take one.
- You would like to be looked after for five days. You will be very well cared for, and you will also be working.
- You want a fixed set of rules to follow. The protocol is built to be adjusted as you go rather than followed to the letter.
Sometimes a conversation makes it clear that private work would serve someone better. That is a fine outcome.
Who I am
Who is doing this work
I am Alison Anandi. Thirty-five years in wellbeing, twenty of them teaching breath, and the creator of Sleepology by Anandi®. I have written two books on breath and sleep, and I have been running residential retreats since 2008.
I lead all of this personally. The assessment, the report, the protocol, the five days, the sessions afterwards. There is no team behind me delivering a version of my method, which is both the constraint and the point.
Casa Anandi is a private residence. When I bought it there was no roof and there were no floors, trees were growing out of it, and it belonged to the spiders and the snakes. I built it out of a pile of rubble.
A realistic outcome
What you should actually expect
You will not leave fixed. Nothing that took years to build comes undone in five days.
Many people sleep by the third night, and that matters more than it looks. It tells you the problem was never your willpower. It was the load you were carrying. Take the load off, and the body remembers what to do.
The third night is where the evidence starts. The result is what is still true six weeks later, at home, on an ordinary Tuesday.
And it takes longer than people expect. A wind-down is not one quiet evening. It is an unwind, and it can take a month before it starts to hold. Your system has spent years learning to stay up. It does not unlearn that over a weekend, and anyone promising otherwise is selling you something.
What changes in the five days is that you finally know what your system is actually doing, and you leave with something built for you rather than for people in general.
What has happened for others
Two patterns, and what the assessment found
She had been managing it with medication for years
What she arrived with. Years of disrupted sleep and a substantial dose of zopiclone. The medication had become the thing standing between her and a sleepless night.
What the assessment found. The medication was managing the symptom. Underneath it sat the things that had never been looked at together. How and when she was eating, the shape of her days, and a period of her life she had not fully put down. None of it was hidden. It had simply never been assembled into one picture.
What changed. She left with a route to reducing her medication, agreed with her doctor, and the first reduction began that week. Six weeks later she was on half the dose she arrived with, eating differently, and steadier in herself. She intends to reduce further. That is where she is, not where she finished.
A picture I see often
What she arrives with. Waking early every morning, exhausted, nothing left for the day. She has stopped expecting it to be otherwise, and has begun to assume this is simply what her life feels like now.
What the assessment finds. Two things, neither complicated. She is eating too late, so her body is still working when it should be settling. And she has no way of taking her mind from busy to quiet, so her system runs hot into the night with nothing to bring it down.
What changes. When she eats. And having something that reliably takes her system down at the end of the day. That is usually the shape of it. Not one heroic change. Two or three ordinary ones, aimed at what the assessment actually found.
I thought last year was amazing, but this year was even more incredible. Thank you. The most authentic experience humanly possible.
Keeley Poore — returning guest
This is the most impressive retreat I’ve been to, and I’ve been to a lot. It’s four retreats in one: yoga, Ayurveda, sleep, philosophy and lifestyle. Such deep wisdom and knowledge with such an incredible amount of love. I loved, loved, loved it.
Jane Eggington
I left Alison’s retreat able to breathe more deeply and relax more fully as a result. I know that it will help me sleep better. I highly recommend Alison’s teaching to anyone anywhere.
Judy Boyce MD
It differs from other retreats in that it is so unique and also intimate because of small numbers.
Margaret Mackie
Residential retreats since 2008.
Dates, places and investment
Three retreats in 2027, five guests each
20–24 May 2027
Five days, four nights.
24–28 June 2027
Five days, four nights.
9–13 September 2027
Five days, four nights.
I take fifteen retreat guests a year at Casa Anandi, across three retreats, and work with six private immersion clients, wherever they are in the world. I lead all of it personally, and the work is not scaled beyond what I can hold properly.
Alison Anandi
The investment
£4,995 for the full process, including the £1,200 diagnostic.
The Inner Stability Method is £4,995 in total. It begins with the Inner Stability Diagnostic at £1,200, which is the first payment; if you continue, the balance is £3,795. Nothing is paid twice, and nothing is generic.
The £4,995 is not the price of five days. It buys sixteen weeks of individual work: the assessment, your written report, a protocol built for you, five days at Casa Anandi, and three sessions across the ninety days afterwards.
Some people do the diagnostic and stop there, and for many that is enough. There is no obligation to go further.
Book a retreat within 90 days of receiving your report and the full £1,200 is credited against it.
What is included. Five days and four nights at Casa Anandi, all meals, all sessions and practice, and your individual work with me.
What is not. Flights and transfers.
How to begin
The work begins with the assessment
The Casa Anandi Retreat is phase one of the Inner Stability Method, and phase one is the diagnostic. Starting it now means you would be ready for May.
Begin with the Inner Stability Diagnostic
If you are not ready for the whole process
Start with the diagnostic on its own. It stands up as a piece of work in its own right, and if you go on to a retreat within ninety days the full £1,200 is credited against it.
And if the timing is wrong, or none of the three 2027 dates work, join the interest list below. I will write when new dates open, and occasionally about the pattern underneath all of this, so you can decide in your own time whether it describes you.
Private immersions
Limited to six clients a year, delivered wherever you are in the world, and beginning with a confidential enquiry. Write to me directly.
Le Marche
Where it is
Treia is a hill town in Le Marche. Casa Anandi sits in the countryside outside it. Far enough out that nothing reaches you, close enough that the region is there when you want it. Markets. The coast an hour away. Restaurants worth the drive, and theatres in the old towns.
The countryside is what does the shielding.
Almost everyone notices it on arrival. Something drops before they have unpacked. That is the place doing its part, and it is a real part.
What makes it hold is everything else.