The Skeptic, the Beach Towel, and the Retreat That Filled Itself
How a hardcore yoga skeptic with chronic back pain and no mat built Cheeky Yoga Club…
and what happened at Casa Fuzetta when she had six weeks to go, three people booked, and nothing left to try.
Ask most yoga teachers how they found yoga and you will get a story about a calling.
Kat Achtelik’s begins with her rolling out of bed onto all fours, because that was the only way she could get herself vertical.
She was twenty-six. Maybe twenty-seven. The lower back pain had become severe enough that standing up was no longer a movement but a manoeuvre. And the irony was not lost on her; she was surrounded by yogis, and she had spent years telling them exactly what she thought of the whole business.
“Yoga? Just boring stretching. It’s definitely not for me.”
That was Kat a decade ago: the founder of Cheeky Yoga Club, and by her own cheerful admission, a hardcore skeptic.
This is the story of what changed. And of what happened later, at a house in Olhão, when everything she had built came within six weeks of falling over.
The Woman Who Wouldn’t Buy a Mat
She had heard that yoga might help with lower back pain. She was so reluctant, so committed, as she puts it, to not committing, that she wouldn’t even buy a mat.
She did it on a beach towel instead. Sliding around, in her description, like a frog on a leaf.
Half an hour on YouTube, before the office.
And that half hour let her go through the entire day pain-free.
“Holy shit! What’s happening here?”
So she kept going. Every day. After a fortnight she got bored and switched to a different video by the same teacher.
Which is where it actually happened.
The Teacher Who Read Her Mind
The new video put her into one of those pretzel poses. Deeply uncomfortable. She couldn’t breathe. She was lying there on her beach towel thinking: why on earth are we doing this?
And the teacher, on a screen, pre-recorded, with no possible way of knowing, went, as Kat tells it, as if she could hear her bloody thoughts: maybe you’re uncomfortable right now.
Yeah!!!
Maybe you’re thinking, when am I going to get out of this?
Yeah!!!
And then: how do you expect to be in control of your thoughts and your emotions in real life, when shit hits the fan, if right here, right now, inside your own body, you can’t find peace?
Mind blown. That was the moment she was hooked.
Kat came to yoga to fix her back. She stayed, in her words, for the insane emotional and spiritual journey that followed.
She never did set foot in a yoga studio. She went straight from her living room floor to teacher training; in India, traditional Ashtanga, which, as she notes with some understatement, is not for the faint-hearted.
Why It’s Called Cheeky
Here is the thing about a convert: they remember the door.
Kat had spent years on the outside of yoga, finding it intimidating, self-serious and, as far as she could tell from Instagram, largely concerned with folding yourself into shapes.
She has a name for this. The bendy pony show. Search the yoga hashtag, and you’ll see what she means: acrobatics, contortion, and a very clear message about who all of this is for.
She knew exactly what that felt like from the wrong side of it. So when she built her own platform, she knew what it had to be: crazily accessible, inclusive, encouraging, and funny.
None of which is a criticism of traditional yoga. She trained in it. She respects it. It is simply that somebody has to hold the door open.
“At every retreat there’s someone who has never done a single yoga class. And they tell me Cheeky Yoga is what convinced them to give it a go.”
The Friend Who Bailed and the Deposit She Left Behind
The first retreat wasn’t even Kat’s idea.
A friend suggested they run one together. Then various things happened, and the friend pulled out, taking the friendship with her. Kat paid her half of the deposit. She borrowed the money from her dad to do it.
She could be resentful about that. She isn’t, and her reason is worth sitting with.
“I would never have had the courage to book Casa Fuzetta by myself.”
Ten people came. Every one of them a friend, there to support her, except one.
Franziska, from Germany. A stranger who had found the retreat through a search.
Franziska has come back to every retreat since. All three of them. One year she brought her husband. When she couldn’t make the next one, she sent her brother in her place.
Three Bookings, Six Weeks, and a Phone Call
In January 2020, before her first retreat had even happened, Kat booked her second.
She had no track record. No idea whether the first would work. She had not yet stood in front of a single group.
“Courage, arrogance, call it whatever. It was impulse. Excitement. Joy.”
She booked it for September 2021.
Which is how she found herself, eighteen months later, in the middle of a pandemic, watching her guests dance what she calls a salsa: 2 steps forward, 3 steps back. “I’m definitely coming. One hundred per cent. I’ll pay today.”
Then silence.
Portugal was changing its entry requirements weekly. Six weeks out, Kat had three people booked and paid. Not a quarter of the house.
She is a solopreneur. It was her money, her dad’s money, and her name on all of it. She had a panic attack, and she rang Tara to cancel.
On the other end of the phone, Tara was having her own pandemic.
“If you looked at my booking calendar for those two years, it went from a sea of green to a sea of red.”
For eighteen months, every call and every email had been somebody cancelling. Tara had no real reason to believe this retreat would fill. Privately, she didn’t think it could be done.
What she said out loud was something else. She spent half an hour on the phone. Kat calls it a therapy session; being practical, being grounded, finding a way to de-risk it, and telling her to do it anyway.
“I felt like we were a team. Like she was on my side. Which is priceless.”
Tara’s reasoning, in her own words: it’s money, we’ll figure it out. You’ve done everything you can. I know you. I trusted you.
So Kat did the only thing left to do. She stopped trying to force it. Okay, universe, you do what you have to do. Whatever happens is happening for a reason. That’s all I’ve got.
A few weeks later, the retreat sold out. With a waiting list.
Three people became seventeen.
“We changed nothing on the marketing. Nothing happened. The energy just came together.”
Ask her what shifted and she will tell you plainly. It was the only change there was. The energy. From fear, to trust.
There is a detail here that Tara doesn’t dress up. Other retreat leaders rang her in the same state, in the same period, and she let them go. On paper they could have pushed through too. But something in their voices told her they were too vulnerable to be pushed, that they didn’t have the resilience she could hear in Kat. So she didn’t try.
Intuition isn’t a soft skill at Casa Fuzetta. It’s the operating system.
What Happens on the Third Day
People book a yoga retreat believing they are coming to stretch.
Kat has a different word for what tends to arrive: broken hearts. Something to heal. It is the main theme, she says, and it is almost never on the booking form.
It doesn’t happen on the first day, or the second. It is the third day, reliably, when people begin to open.
She helps it along with what she calls synergy circles. Everyone gathers in the big ground-floor living room with a notebook. She asks questions; they write the answers. Guided journaling. Then she puts them into groups of three or four. Nobody has to share a word of what they wrote.
“This is when the magic happens. People start crying. People pour out their darkest secrets.”
And then, this is the part that separates a host from a teacher; the responsibility falls to her to close it. To give the emotional closure that lets people walk back out of that room still feeling safe.
She learned that the hard way. Her second retreat had seventeen people, and she ran the sharing as one large circle. It was too many. People felt exposed.
“It’s not a mistake. It’s a lesson.”
The next time, she split them into small groups and kept them there for the whole session. It worked. Her advice to anyone hosting over ten people: split them.
“You’ve Got to Pay to Play”
Kat has since taken Cheeky Yoga Club beyond Olhão, to Tuscany, and to the hills outside Lisbon. Which means she now has something she didn’t have before: comparison.
Her verdict is characteristically blunt. Casa Fuzetta is not the cheapest venue you can book. But you’ve got to pay to play.
What she found elsewhere is that the beautiful room is only part of it. The rest; the reach, the audience, the unglamorous machinery of actually filling a retreat, is not a given. Other venues are lovely, and run by lovely people, but still finding their way.
Kat has around five thousand followers on Instagram. She is the first to say this is not a lot; there are yoga teachers with two and three hundred thousand who post a retreat and sell it out in a fortnight. That has never been her.
“ I need all the support I can get.”
Historically, half her guests came through her. The other half came through Casa Fuzetta’s website.
And when she asks how they found her, the answer is often the same. They Googled the best places in the world to go on a yoga retreat, and an article came up; Travel + Leisure, which has placed Casa Fuzetta among the top retreat venues on the planet three years running. They scrolled the listings, landed on Cheeky Yoga, recognised something in the humour, and booked.
The lovely detail: Tara only found those articles by accident. She noticed a spike in website traffic, went looking for the source, and there it was.
Filling Your Own Cup
Every dinner at Casa Fuzetta opens with the same toast. Love and friendship.
And every January, the first retreat of the year at the house is Heal the Healers; built for the people who spend the other eleven months holding space for everybody else. The philosophy behind it is simple, and slightly uncomfortable: you cannot pour from an empty cup.
“Come to us, and we’ll help you fill your cup, and set you on the path for the year.”
Which brings us to January 2027, when Kat will be the guest yoga teacher at Heal the Healers.
The skeptic who wouldn’t buy a mat. The solopreneur with five thousand followers and three bookings. The woman who rang to cancel and stayed to sell out, twice over, with a waiting list.
Holding space for the healers.
There is more to say about Heal the Healers: where the idea came from, what actually happens in that week, and why it always falls in the first days of January. That is the next story, and we’ll tell it properly.
For now it is enough to say this. Everything Kat built came from a beach towel, a borrowed deposit, and one phone call she very nearly didn’t make it through.
From fear to trust. That is the whole distance.
It shouldn’t work. On paper, none of it does. But it keeps happening; in that house, to those people, year after year.
That’s the thing about everyday magic. You don’t have to explain it. You just have to leave it room.
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