Tag Archive for: mindfulness

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Well-being Holidays: The Healing Power of Nature & Travel at FitCamp Montenegro

In today’s fast-paced world, mental health has become an increasingly important aspect of overall well-being. As stress levels rise, people are turning towards nature and travel to find relief and healing. At FitCamp Montenegro, we are pointing out the transformative power of nature, engaging in various activities like yoga, mindfulness, hiking, nutrition, reading, writing, and similar. So we decided to make a blog post about the profound connection between mental health and healing in nature, combined with the activities FitCamp Montenegro offers through our programs.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a one-day experience (such as Women’s Circle) or a 5-night stay (such as a Mindful Retreat or Wellbeing Holiday), FitCamp’s focus stays the same – to bring you to the next level of vacation by achieving permanent benefits that will serve you in your every day life too!

nature healing at fitcamp montenegro

Mental Health and Nature Healing

The link between mental health and spending time in nature must be clear to everyone. Nature has a remarkable way of calming the mind, reducing stress, and improving overall mood. At FitCamp Montenegro, visitors can immerse themselves in the stunning natural beauties of Montenegro. Surrounded by lush forests and breathtaking mountains, located in the close vicinity of crystal clear lakes and rivers, participants can experience a sense of tranquillity that revitalises their mental state.

The Healing Power of Travel

Travelling to unique and beautiful destinations such as Montenegro, opens a myriad of benefits for mental and physical health. Stepping out of the daily routine and experiencing new environments can encourage a sense of wonder and excitement, relieving symptoms of anxiety and depression. FitCamp Montenegro’s location provides an ideal backdrop for a transformative travel experience. Put your hands and feet into the soil, reconnect with our mother Earth and release all the stress your body accumulates through a simple practice such as grounding.

Discovering Ways of Mindfulness and Wellness

FitCamp Montenegro caters to individuals seeking mindfulness and wellness activities. Through carefully curated programs, participants can engage in activities like yoga and meditation, which enhance self-awareness and inner peace. The serenity of the surroundings adds an extra dimension to these practices, allowing participants to achieve a deeper level of mindfulness.

Yoga has long been honoured for its positive impact on mental and physical health. At FitCamp Montenegro, experienced yoga instructors lead classes tailored to all skill levels. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced practitioner, yoga can help reduce stress, improve flexibility, and cultivate a greater sense of well-being. If you are more into fitness, we are here to offer this practice too.

Hiking is not only an excellent form of physical exercise but also a means of connecting with nature on a profound level. Montenegro offers marked hiking trails that take participants through scenic routes, where they can embrace the natural wonders and enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes with conquering new heights. Read the experience of one of our guests here. 

Swimming is a refreshing activity that promotes mental clarity and relaxation. FitCamp Montenegro’s location is a 10-min drive from Krupac and Slano Lakes, which offers participants the opportunity to rejuvenate in the refreshing waters while soaking in the beauty of the surroundings.

FitCamp Montenegro is here for travellers seeking to experience the ultimate relaxation through yoga, nature healing, mindfulness, nutrition and all this by minding the environment and local community. The breathtaking landscapes, numerous activities, and the chance to explore the world contribute to a profound and transformative experience. By embarking on this journey of self-discovery, FitCamp Montenegro visitors can leave with a renewed sense of balance, inner peace, and overall well-being. The point is – you should disconnect to reconnect, and let us take you to the next level of vacation.

Welcome to our community!

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Guided Stargazing Experience in Montenegro

Did you ever wonder how it feels to be lost in a galaxy of stars? Well, our June blog post might give you an answer as it comes with a beautiful addition to our programs – The Guided Stargazing Experience!

Namely, since this spring, FitCamp Montenegro has become the official licence holder for the guided Visit Dark Skies – a new, celestial way to experience the night! Being located in the intact nature and far away from the city light pollution, FitCamp Montenegro is your safe spot in the mountainous forest from where you can admire the Milky Way, shooting stars, constellations and mesmerising sky events throughout the year!

The only thing you need to do is to lay down on your back or sit down comfortably and start enjoying the beauty of the night sky. We will provide you with our audio file, which will help you gaze towards the night sky for half an hour. After 20 minutes of listening, there is a WOW effect, and we promise you, if you indulge in this completely, you will experience a magical face of Montenegro that you have never expected to!

Your eye is fascinatingly good at adapting to the dark. As you learn how this multi-step process works, it happens: your eyes adjust to take in as much light as possible. That’s how you can see more stars. With Guided Stargazing, you learn how to perceive all the stars at once and let the sky overwhelm you.

To get the optimal stargazing experience, we recommend you follow these 4 steps:

Find the best place 

At FitCamp, we will take care of this for you and recommend you the best spots but, what you should do is try to awaken this remote feeling and focus only on the sky, without your phone notifications or anything that can disturb you or distract your eyes adjust to the darkness of the skies above you.

Choose appropriate clothes

Nights are always colder than days and FitCamp is located in the mountains, so to be relaxed and ready for this experience, you need to pay attention to what you wear. Even if it’s summertime and the day temperatures are over 30 degrees, laying down on the grass and being still for half an hour can affect your overall experience if you aren’t properly dressed. Let us help you with more recommendations on the spot! Just ask for it. 🙂

Prepare the audio file before going to the Stargazing Spot

As the internet connection in remote places is not always covering all the areas, we recommend you download the audio file while you are in the Community House or your apartment and be prepared once you comfortably lay down to experience the dark skies. Charge your phone beforehand and earplugs in case you use wireless ones. 

Relax your senses

Enjoy the moment when, at some point, your gaze no longer fixates, and you experience divine relaxation! Let the gentle rustling of leaves, the scent of night-blooming flowers, or the soft grass beneath take you over.

Play the audio file, but put your phone aside, so that the light doesn’t disturb you. Put it on aeroplane mode, so that you can’t receive any notifications during the gazing. We will make sure that your stargazing spot is perfectly chosen so that the car lights, house lights or any noise around don’t disturb you.

We wish to encourage you to step outside, look up at the night sky, and experience the magic firsthand. With FitCamp programs, this feature is included in your stay free of charge. Let us show you the beauty of the unexplored vast space of the sky – constellations, planets and galaxies are inviting you to focus on what surrounds you!

Photo credit Visit Dark Skies

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The Development Goals of FitCamp Montenegro

Being a crazy ant is not an easy job. All of us crazy ants know it, but we usually wouldn’t do anything different even if we could turn back the time. 

‘…most of the ants in the nest are creatures of habit (workers). They mark their routes with scent trails and only follow routes where another ant once walked. So they obediently finish their work list. They will mainly work harder and harder but do nothing structural about the problem.

Fortunately, there are always several crazy ants (scouts) in a nest. They deviate from the fixed routes and, therefore, find new places that the ant people need to survive. The crazy ant is the one who will find a new place. But how does he convince the other ants to help him move the entire nest?’

Read the full story about the crazy ant here. 

Lagant.nl

As many in our surroundings characterised us as crazy when we left the coast and headed up to the Adriatic hinterland of Central Montenegro to develop FitCamp, we wished to write this blog and explain our reasons, or better say goals!

GOAL 1 – Local Community Involvement & Development

Seeing the potential and optimal growth in rural tourism development of Montenegro, one of the leading thoughts of our business idea was to include the local community in all that we do. 

Offering only local products to our guests and visitors is what we crave, but taking in mind that our production is not that big to cover all the needs yet, we saw an opportunity for everyone in the village producing anything from fruits and vegetables to cheese, meat, marmalades, juices, rakija, wines and similar. 

This goal includes long-term effects that are equally positive to our business development as to the city’s economic empowerment, a larger tourism inclusion and better rural product placement. 

We frequently hear how the city of Niksic, where we are located, is not touristically developed, so we want to motivate people from this city to understand the potential of the area and plan their agricultural and other activities following all the possibilities that the modern market offers. 

GOAL 2 – Sustainable Environment

The mal-influence of tourism on the environment has become very clear, taking in mind massive movements, cruising travels increase and similar. Some of the greatest minds in sustainable tourism development are now finding a way to regenerate the travel market and decrease the poor effects of the travelling crowds that used to happen from the 70s of the 20th century up to today. 

From the very beginning, FitCamp Montenegro had a clear idea in mind – development in touch with nature! All our efforts to find a remote place and cultivate it further paid off when we landed to today-location of our well-being centre. We clicked with this area and saw all the small bits and pieces needed for the puzzle that we started to put together.  

Firstly, we were enthusiastic that the village where we are now located doesn’t have a city water supply system. Most of the people we work with and our partners told us – oooh, but the water might be a problem there. We nodded and made it one step closer to our vision.

Most of the people living here are collecting the rainfall and snowfall in underground containers from which they distribute it further to their barns, houses and gardens. The same is with us. Our property has a 44 m3 water container built underground in the backyard, and it is connected to the house by an electric water pump. So, when you are inside our premises, you can’t feel the difference as it seems the same as in the urban areas. In reality, it is not the same, as we take as much as nature has given us and reuse it in our daily life. The best about it is the reaction of our guests and visitors and how fast they learn to collaborate in saving water and protecting natural resources.

Furthermore, we started planning a sustainable irrigation system for our gardens, orchard and future cattle. We dag a pool in the valley of 150 m3 size that will soon be our addition to recreation on the FitCamp estate, as well as a secure water supply for all the produce.

The system is planned with a SMART addition so that we can control the water flow even remotely.

A solar plant is something we keep for the near future, but it’s been on our list since the very beginning. The reason for postponing it is the investment that it requires. That piece of the puzzle will close the circle of self-sustainability and give us the title of the possibly only self-sustainable place in Montenegro, especially in the commercial market.

Thus, nature will give us:

– electricity from the power of sun and wind, and 

– water from the rainfall and snowfall.

This will shape our small system as a perpetuum mobile. 

GOAL 3 – Diversified Travel Product   

As parts of our team have been working in tourism for years, we are aware of the clutter and fuzz that follows travelling. The effects of tourism on nature are not flattering, but luckily, the latest generations of travellers seem to see this problem and react to it. 

Even before the pandemic, FitCamp Montenegro’s idea was shaped around the fact that nature has a healing effect and that we should let that fact into urban lives that are stale and dusty. We didn’t want seasonal work or to offer the same services as everybody else in the rural areas of Montenegro, so it took us time to shape the whole program and system with our partners and friends. From 2018 up to today, we didn’t stop working on this idea and sharp-shaping it for the market in the best way we possibly saw it could go.

All our programs are based around the benefits and inspiration that nature gives us, and we invest ourselves in the best combination of silent time within the forest, hiking, swimming, outdoor adventures, yoga, fitness, healthy food & nutrition, and mindful workshops. We immodestly consider that we crafted a unique travel product for the Montenegrin market, and we are fanatical about the reality that our demand is responding so positively to what we created for them! That gives us further inspiration and motivation to never stop and always introduce novelties to our products and the Montenegrin travel market in general.

Avoiding the short seasonal work, our doors are not open only to travellers and our programs are not crafted just for short-term rentals. We are happy to share that winter 2022/23 was more than successful at our estate, with numerous digital nomads who have chosen coliving stay, entrepreneurs and MSMEs who have chosen our team buildings and workshops and last but not least – our volunteers, who help us and at the same time live the life with us, by applying the same set of rules and goals we crave for FitCamp.

We do hope to welcome you here and spread our love for nature and all it gives us with you, introduce you to our elderly neighbours and their delicious products and heal you by being one with our Planet Earth. 

Approaching Earth Day, we wish that this blog enlights you in your future travels and motivates you to only travel with purpose!

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