Calm
Aburi ridge · ninety minutes from Accra
Book a stay
A residential retreat on the Akuapem ridge, built to slow the body, quiet the mind and hand you back to yourself.
Taught, not supervised
Our five resident teachers have between eight and twenty-two years of practice behind them. Nobody here is reading a session off a card, and nobody is left alone with a mat and a timetable.
Nine rooms, no keys
Each room opens onto its own verandah with a stone plunge bath and a view down the escarpment to the coastal plain. There is no television in any of them and there never has been.
A week without a handset
Phones go into the cabinet at the gatehouse on arrival and come out on the morning you leave. What replaces them is the reason most guests book again inside the year.
Rest
Restore
Since 2011
Fifteen years on one ridge, doing one thing.
Calm began as four rooms and a borrowed hall behind the Aburi gardens. We have added five rooms since and nothing else — no spa menu, no conference wing, no second house in Accra. The programme is the one Ma Adjoa wrote in 2011, corrected every year by the people who keep coming back.
15
Years on the ridge
9400
Guests since 2011
5
Resident teachers
Dates for 2026
Upcoming retreats
Three residential programmes, each run twice a year. Rates are per person sharing and cover the room, all meals, every session and transfers from Kotoka.
Stillness Week
₵4,200
Three nights
Two sittings a day, a morning walk down to the gardens and an evening sound bath. Written for people who have never sat for more than ten minutes and would like to.
5–8 Jun
3–6 Aug
Deep Healing
₵6,800
Five nights
Longer sittings, daily one-to-one bodywork, herbal consultation and a full day of silence in the middle. The week most guests come back for.
17–22 Jul
11–16 Sep
The Full Return
₵9,500
Seven nights
The complete programme — movement, meditation, bodywork, nutrition and two nights in the forest hut. Twelve places, twice a year, and they go early.
2–9 Oct
20–27 Nov
What a day holds
The programme
Nothing on this list is compulsory and nothing costs extra. The timetable goes up on the board at dinner and you take from it what you need.
Deep tissue & lomi
Ninety minutes, twice a week on the longer programmes. Worked slowly, with warm oil pressed from the shea groves at Damongo.
Sound bath
Bowls, gong and voice, lying down, in the dark. Forty minutes that most guests describe afterwards as sleep they were awake for.
Vinyasa & restorative
A moving practice at six and a still one at five. Both are optional and both are taught in a room of no more than nine people.
Herbal medicine
A consultation on the second morning and a tea blended for you afterwards — moringa, hibiscus, prekese, and whatever else the garden is giving.
Sauna & cold plunge
Cedar sauna at the north end of the ridge, and the stone bath outside your own room. Fifteen minutes hot, ninety seconds cold, three times over.
One-to-one hours
An hour with a teacher, booked on the day, about whatever you arrived carrying. Included on every programme and used by nearly everybody.
In their own words
“I had booked it as a holiday and spent the first two days furious about the phone cabinet. By Thursday I had stopped checking my wrist for a watch I was not wearing.”
Afia Boateng
Registrar · Korle Bu, Accra
The journal
Notes from the ridge
From the garden
What we put in the afternoon tea, and why
Moringa for the iron, hibiscus for the blood pressure and prekese because Ma Adjoa's mother put prekese in everything. A short note on the four plants that carry the blend.
Read
On practice
Why a sound bath is not a concert
The instruments are not the point and neither is the music. What the bowls are for is giving a restless mind one small thing to hold, which is harder than it sounds.
Read
At the table
Three meals a day, no menu, no choices
Everybody eats the same thing at the same time, and it is the part of the week guests argue with hardest on arrival and miss most when they leave.
Read
Come and be still.
Nine rooms, six dates a year, and a gatehouse ninety minutes out of Accra. Write to us and we will tell you honestly which week is yours.