About husma
Husma Retreats was founded by Alex & Martina while running their own yoga retreat center on the beach in Sri Lanka (Green Peace Inn - Yoga | Health | Retreats) for over 7 years. The intention behind creating a new project was to make it more international, to bring their retreats to other countries, and to have a stronger focus on life-changing breathwork and yoga practices. All their knowledge from holding various retreats and completing training courses from around the world comes together in husma retreats.
In Sinhala (the native language in Sri Lanka), husma means "breath", which is the core focus of all husma retreats.
Alexander Keil
Alex has been practising Vipassana Meditation since 2009 alongside many years of Yoga. In this time he has acquired different Yoga Teacher Trainings and completed an additional Breathwork Teacher Training under Anthony Abbagnano from Alchemy of Breath Institute and trained with other breathwork schools (BioDynamic Breathwork(BBTRS), Wim Hof and Dan Brule).
Alex's unique approach to discovering the power of the breath, emotions, mind, and everything our bodies consume is truly intriguing. With over 14 years of meditation practice, which he considers the foundation for almost everything, he has attended numerous retreats, workshops, and courses worldwide. He is now combining these learnings and will be sharing from these traditions, which have been further developed through his own practice.
He also knows the challenges of a busy and stressful life, having run his own web and IT company for more than 10 years after studying computer science and business informatics.
Alex worked for a few years in hospitality and as a chef for a restaurant in Germany, specializing in dishes for people with food allergies. His passion for healthy food is always part of his retreats
Martina Drechsel
Martina is pregnant and will only teach the retreats until September 2024. Our friend Jess will be her replacement for all retreats in Sri Lanka from November 2024 till April 2025. Alex will be the main teacher.
Martina’s purpose in life is to share, support and give. Her intention is to empower people through breathwork and yoga so they can rise up and see their own purpose and truth. She is a 400hr Hatha yoga, 260hr Synergy yoga, and 100hr Yin yoga teacher. When she is teaching, she creates a safe and sacred space that her students can find stillness in thematic yoga sequences to reconnect with their body, mind, and soul, and feel the balance between strengthening and relaxation with breathing awareness.
She invites her students into their own greatness, offering resources to manage daily life while having some fun along the way ;-). In 2017 she fell in love with breathwork and began to discover Conscious Connected Breathing in her teacher training with Alchemy of Breath. For Martina, breathwork is one of the powerful tools where she experienced a massive shift in herself and saw happen in others. She realised the breathwork practice brings awareness to our life and the decisions we make. Awareness is the first step in CHANGE.
Isayaka is a student of life, a very experienced yoga teacher and a medicine Medicine Womban (Women) carrying cacao, kambo, mellipona, song and prayer in devotion to the good of all life. She shares the practice of embodied yoga from an intuitive place of deep personal study that has spanned 12 years of traditional Hatha yoga, Yin Yoga, meditation, Bhakti/devotion, vinyasa flow, womb yoga, traditional Chinese medicine, tantra, philosophy, free form movement, ecstatic dance, somatics, trauma release therapy, mind-body centring and somatic psychotherapy. She has a passion for movement & is grateful to her body as one of her greatest teachers in this life. She bows to all the teachers on her path, and believes you cannot repay a teacher in 10000 lives.
Her classes are carried by her love of music and through movement, music, poetry, imagination, sound and song, through which we can inner-stand so much of the mystery. She invites you to get lost and found and find new embodied pathways of relating to life through the practice. Moving with the cycles that weave us all, Isayaka embodies earthy wisdom and believes all things lead back to simple truths that the earth herself reveals to us when we move at her pace and listen with reverence. Her own business “Wild Medicina” is an outpouring of the teachings and practices that have supported her journey towards wholeness.