03 — What happens here
Three pathways, one land
Everything that happens at Prisma D'Água cultivates three things: a clear mind, an open heart, a free body.
Every retreat, residency and programme is measured against them.
Three pathways run through the land. Each one leans on a pillar, and each one touches all three. You can follow one, or let them cross.
Ancestral Remembering
Embodied knowledge and cultural memory · leans on Clear Mind
How did the people before us know what they knew — and how does that knowledge keep living in a body today?
Here we learn songs, rhythms and dances from the people who carry them. We work with plants. We listen to elders. We document, then practise, then let the practice change us.
We study how knowledge passes between generations — through movement, oral tradition, plants, craft, ritual and the care of land. Not to copy tradition, but to understand where it came from, recognise what it carries, and see what it can teach a contemporary practice. Plants are the first ancestors, so the ethnobotany work lives here too.
Lineages: Experiences: Arroboboi, Onã, Spagyrics, Syntropic Agroforestry
Sovereign Hearts
Relationship, nourishment and inner listening · leans on Open Heart
When the body is allowed to heal and the mind goes quiet, what does the heart say — and how do we live with each other from there?
Here we cook and eat together. We sit in silence. We practise listening without defending, saying a boundary, repairing after a conflict. We fast, we rest, we nourish.
We study vital energy and nourishment, and the heart as the organ that governs the rest. Stillness instead of effort. And the harder part: how people stay in relation across generations and across difference — how belonging is built, broken and mended.
Lineages: Daoist heart cultivation · Traditional Chinese Medicine and dietas · Emei and Wudang · Contemplative practice · Food as medicine
Prisma Medium
Embodied movement, art and consciousness · leans on Free Body
What does the body know that the mind hasn't heard yet — and what happens when we move from there?
Here we dance and we train. We dive. We ride. We build. We make work in the studio and we show it. Every movement is treated as sacred, and the days are organised so that it can be.
We study movement, artistic practice, perception, health and embodiment — the relationship between a body, its environment and its consciousness. This is where science and spirit meet through a moving body, and where Graham technique is put in dialogue with Brazilian body practices.
Lineages: Martha Graham lineage · Somatics, Body-Mind Centering and osteopathy · Free diving · Kinomichi · Gyrotonics and equestrian practice · Parkour in nature
How deep you go
Encounter — a few hours to a day. Immersion — two to five days. Residency — one to four weeks. Deep practice — you keep coming back.
The rhythm
The land sets the calendar. Dry season and rains, planting and harvest, fire and flowering decide when each pathway opens.