The Art of Unwinding
Retreats
The Art of Unwinding Retreats brings together a carefully curated team of experienced practitioners, each chosen for the depth of their expertise and the genuine care they bring to their work. Together, they offer a rare combination of clinical knowledge, therapeutic skill, and heart-centred practice. This is a programme designed to support the whole person: body, mind, and spirit.
Our founder Aoife's vision was shaped by over a decade working within Juicy Oasis, the acclaimed wellness retreat founded by bestselling author and health advocate Jason Vale, one of the most respected names in the industry. That foundation, combined with years of continued training, personal practice, and her own healing journey, drives her commitment to assembling a team that goes beyond the surface. Every practitioner here brings something real, something earned, and something genuinely transformative.
Whether you arrive needing rest, movement, healing, or simply the space to breathe, you will be held by people who know their craft deeply and who care about what happens to you long after you leave.
Aoife Brewster
Founder, Author & Retreat Host
Aoife Brewster is the founder of The Art of Unwinding Retreats and author of The Art of Unwinding. Her work is rooted in her own healing journey and a deep belief in the importance of slowing down, releasing inherited patterns, navigating life's inevitable challenges, and finding our way back to a more authentic version of ourselves.
With nearly 30 years of experience as a therapist and over 17 years working within the wellness and retreat industry in Portugal, Aoife has walked alongside thousands of people on their path towards greater health and self-understanding. For 12 years she served as one of the Head Therapists at Juicy Oasis, the celebrated retreat founded by bestselling wellness author Jason Vale, where she was part of the senior therapy team and brought several of her specialist therapies to the retreat programme.
Over time, her work has grown beyond traditional bodywork into something richer and more integrative. Drawing on breathwork, sound, meditation, therapeutic movement, and trauma-informed practices, she creates experiences designed to support deeper levels of release, self-awareness, and renewal.
A guiding principle running through everything Aoife does is that prevention is always more powerful than cure. Rather than waiting for the body or mind to reach a point of crisis, she helps guests build the awareness, tools, and daily practices that sustain their wellbeing long before that moment arrives. Woven through this is a profound and personal commitment to quality of life as something every person deserves to actively protect and nurture. This is about learning to live well, every day.
A particular focus of her work is the relationship between mind and body in chronic pain and long-term health conditions. She is passionate about helping guests cultivate a pain-free body, or, where that is not possible, a wiser and more compassionate relationship with the conditions they carry, so that life can be experienced with greater ease, freedom, and genuine vitality.
As host and curator of The Art of Unwinding Retreats, Aoife brings all of this together to create grounded, nurturing spaces where guests can peel back the layers, restore their equilibrium, and step forward with more presence, resilience, and self-understanding.