A sanctuary in the Charlcombe valley

Well Bath is a place to discover yourself, beyond the hustle and the various roles you play. A space to find what you need in the moment. This might be slowing down and pausing to reflect on changes you wish to make. It might be overcoming pain from an injury or building resilience. It might be soothing your nervous system and rediscovering calm. It might be a safe place to process what has been carried too long alone.

Our position is that life happens for you, not to you. Even on the darkest days, when physical pain afflicts the body and anxiety troubles the mind, we hold that these are catalysts for change. A deep inner call. The current way of being has stopped working, and the invitation is to build a new foundation, brick by brick, rooted in practice and experience and truth.

Through our team of practitioners, our philosophy is that where you least want to look is where you will find the greatest reward. The lotus begins its journey in the mud. It uses the challenge as nutrient. So do we.

Joe Macnab lost his father when he was nine. That early loss laid an underlying ground of instability which he has since integrated into a philosophy rather than carried as a wound: nothing is stable, everything is in flux, and the work is to walk that paradox.

In his late twenties, after ten months of preparatory sensations during meditation, Joe went through a Kundalini awakening. What followed was two years of what he now describes as lived hell: existential dread, dissolved sense of self, colours and sounds too intense, wife and friends as strangers, an inability to speak about any of it. He was working as an actor at the time and hid it. The old crisis tools he had relied on stopped working. The fact that they failed was itself the teaching.

Yoga became the way through. A friend invited him to her classes. The nervous system slowly reset. In Tiruvannamalai, under the teacher Yogi Ashokananda, he learned Prana Kriya Yoga, and the integration of what had happened began. Five years of practice, desperately and frantically at first, brick by brick, on a solid foundation rooted in truth. When his first marriage collapsed during that rebuild, it was the final straw on a process already long underway, and the void it left was the space into which he poured himself into Well Bath.

Well Bath exists, in part, because it is the place Joe needed when he was in the awakening crisis and couldn't find. What he needed most then, but didn't have, was someone who had been through it. Someone who could reassure him it was going to be okay, encourage him that everything happening was for his betterment, and help reframe the whole thing. That, in his own words, is what he is doing now.

The other practitioners at Well Bath were chosen on the same principle. Each has personally walked through a crisis of their own, and each offers the modality that was pivotal in their own healing. What you receive from them is lived experience. It is what they know from the inside.