About Arivela
Experiences that can change your life, within reach of more people
There are moments that change a person: a retreat, a breath journey, a circle where something opens for the first time. We think experiences like these should be open to more people, not only the ones who happen to know the right person. Arivela brings them into one place: yoga, breathwork, conscious dance, meditation, retreats, trainings, and quiet one-to-one guidance, held by independent facilitators, not by us. It started as a rough prototype in Rishikesh in March 2026, and it's still small.
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How this started
From Indonesia, through India, back home
It didn't start with an idea, but with a retreat: The Path of Love, in Indonesia. I walked in like someone who thought he knew himself fairly well. A few days later something broke open in the middle of the day, with no warning: feelings I hadn't even known I was carrying. And the strange part was this: the moment they surfaced, everything else got louder too. Joy, grief, all of it a little more awake, a little closer.
I wanted to know where that led, so I carried on to India. There I did a course called Who Is In. Seventy-two hours, one room, eleven other people, and the same question over and over with no break, put to ourselves: who is in there, in me? Three days of nothing but that.
It wasn't my first time with something like this. I'm from Berlin, and I have a lot of friends who guide exactly these kinds of retreats and workshops; over the years I'd often been there myself. But this time it went deeper, and then deeper still, until at some point I was sitting in Rishikesh and realised something had started, a strong process, the kind that doesn't stop again any time soon.
Since then I know what experiences like these can do to a person: they loosen something you haven't been able to reach for years, and afterwards you stand differently in your own life. And since then one simple thing has driven me: that it isn't only the few who happen to know the right people who get to feel this, but far more people. That's the motivation behind everything that came after.
Because in Rishikesh I noticed something else. Flyers everywhere, by the stack, and most of them ended up doing real harm to the environment. And behind them the same problem I knew from Berlin and from Koh Phangan, where I used to spend a lot of time: the offerings are all there. It's finding them, and making any sense of them for yourself, that's strangely hard.
So I started asking. I listened my way through the community in Rishikesh, what the people searching need, what the people offering feel is missing. And in March 2026 I built the very first version right there, rough and small, straight out of those conversations.
It landed well, and that gave me the courage to bring it home, to Berlin. There I kept listening: first to friends who host themselves, then to more and more people from the community. With every conversation the picture got clearer, from both sides, the ones looking and the ones offering something.
Today there are four of us, three friends and me, and we keep growing Arivela bit by bit, always close to what the community reflects back to us. We do it alongside our jobs, in the time that's left over, and we pay for it ourselves. It's still early. But it's growing, quietly, and on purpose.
That more people get access to experiences like these, that's the motivation behind everything that came after.
Why we keep at it
What Arivela is, and what it isn't
The plain version: every event, retreat and training you find here was made by someone else. Arivela just gathers them in one place, so they're a bit easier to come across than they used to be.
An invitation, not a promise
We can't tell you a class will do anything for you. What we can do is make it findable and set it down next to the others, and then it's yours to take or leave. The rest is between you and whoever is holding the room.
Met on equal footing
Most of these events go better when people show up as they are. We'd like Arivela to stay open to anyone who's curious, on the same footing, whatever your background, skin colour, gender identity, who you love, or what you believe.
The hosts are the substance
We don't run, sell or rank any of this, and there's no quiet scoring of which offerings are worth your time. The people who teach and guide them carry all of that. We mostly just keep the list in order.
That's about the whole of it. The events are the part worth your attention. Go have a look at those.
The people
The few of us who make this real
There aren't many of us, and this is all of us. It's not a bigger company hiding behind a small page.
Florian
Builds Arivela
Berlin, by way of Rishikesh
For me it all started with a journey of my own, with a few retreats that moved more in me than I'd expected. The thought that something like this should be easier to find was one I couldn't shake afterwards. I can write code, so I built the rough first version myself, in Rishikesh, instead of writing a pitch deck nobody would read. Most free evenings I'll end up fixing one more small thing on the site rather than trying to explain what I do.
Bella
Holds the welcome
Berlin
I've been around the conscious scene here for years, mostly on the floor at other people's events rather than running my own. The part I care about is the first few minutes, when you walk into a room full of strangers and aren't sure where to put your bag. And I want hosts to feel like people we actually know, not entries in a database.
Alex
Asks whether we actually need it
Berlin
My job is mostly the unglamorous question: do we really need this, or does it just feel like getting somewhere. I'd rather keep Arivela small and clear than watch it grow in every direction at once. The skepticism is the friendly kind, the sort that keeps a thing honest, not the sort that talks it out of existing.
Rainer
Knows everyone in the room
Berlin
I'm the least online of us and the most likely to actually be at the event. I still turn up in person, keep up real friendships with the hosts, and stay in the group chats where a lot of this already happens day to day. When something starts to feel off somewhere, I'm usually the one who hears about it first.
Not only here
One world, many homes
The same warmth turns up in very different places, often without knowing about each other. Someone deep in the Rishikesh scene rarely hears what's happening around a kitchen table in Lisbon, and the other way round. It isn't one city's secret. It's everywhere people come together and let themselves be fully seen for a moment.
We're trying to make the warm thread between these places visible, so you can find it, wherever you happen to be.
A few things we can promise
Things you can hold us to
Free to list, free to find
It costs nothing to put an offering on Arivela, and nothing to browse. That's the arrangement, and we'd like to keep it that way for as long as we can.
The experiences aren't ours
They belong to the independent facilitators who hold them. We didn't make them, and we don't take a cut.
A small team, and no algorithm deciding what you should want
There's no machine quietly nudging you toward what we'd rather you saw. You look around and you decide. And we stay small enough that you can see exactly who's behind it: the four of us, three friends and me, doing this alongside our jobs and out of our own pockets.
An open door
Have a look around
See what's on near you. And if you teach or guide something yourself, you can add it so the next person looking has a chance of finding it. Or just write and say hello, or ask something. There's a real person reading the inbox.