Is this the most exhilarating wellness retreat in Australia?

Draw a line south from Cape Bruny, on the southern shores of Tasmania's Bruny Island, and the next landform you hit is Antarctica. If cold-water therapy has a spiritual heart, this is it, but even by those standards this moment feels irrational.

Through the night, a cold front has blown across Tasmania, rattling Bruny Island Lodge with rain and 90 kilometres per hour wind gusts. The wind chill factor is minus eight degrees and yet here we stand on the lodge's deck, pouring bags of ice into a bath into which, one by one, we'll soon climb.

It's Saturday afternoon on the inaugural Bruny Island weekend retreat organised by Wild Wellness Method. Since launching in 2021, Wild Wellness has run retreats across Tasmania, with each weekend stitching together a blend of wellness experiences: journalling, mindset coaching, yoga, breathwork, healthy chef-prepared meals. And always, as the frigid foundation of the weekend, cold water.

On Bruny Island, 14 retreat guests, from store owners to scientists, have gathered in the sprawling Bruny Island Lodge. Out of sight of the world, the two-level, barn-like log cabin is a hidden pocket on even this hidden island, looking over marsupial-grazed lawns and tall bush to the waters of Mickeys Bay.

To a large extent, nature is wellness, making this an easy place in which to feel well. In the day, the bush-fringed lawns are busy with wrens, and by evening they're a buffet for wallabies. Walking tracks radiate down to private slices of coastline - rocky shores furnished with oysters to one side, and a narrow stretch of beach that will be our white carpet into cold-water therapy to the other.

Before taking the plunge, there's breathwork to be done, preparing our bodies and mind for the shock ahead. Guiding us through it is Tasmanian Wim Hof Method instructor Piet Blokker.

Each chilly submersion will be preceded by long rounds of breathing, lying out in the open air (or indoors during rain), inhaling and exhaling to the Wim Hof Method, expunging the acid from our bodies as Blokker sets the beat of our breath as reliably as a clock.

Breathwork leads to beach work as we step off our mats and down the path to the beach. The shallows of Mickeys Bay are just that - shallow - so that we must wade for a couple of hundred metres off the beach, legs slowly numbing, before we can drop down into our icy baptism. Inevitably there are those who dive straight in, as happy as sea otters, and others breathing like steam trains at the shock of first frosty contact with Tasmanian water.

For two minutes we sit in the sea like this, bodies reddening, sensations intensifying. It's as cold as it is enlivening.

The weekend will be liberally filled with such swims, even at the height of the cold storm, but there are warmers in between. Inside the lodge, the wood heater burns through the days and evenings. Gathered around it, there are fireside sessions with a mindset coach and evenings of guided journalling. A mobile storytelling studio provides a chance for guests to record and preserve their stories, and a reflexologist and yoga sessions bring further focus to the body.

When we wake on Saturday morning, it's to the realisation that the day and the cold front will truly put the wild into wellness. There's more breathwork at dawn, then another nervous walk to the sea and two more minutes of delightful pain before returning to a warm lodge, hot eggs and boiling coffee.

For many, this polar-worthy morning plunge is enough, but for others, the ultimate challenge of cold water is still ahead. On an afternoon that refuses to even contemplate warmth, the small ice bath is slowly filled with a hose on the lodge's back deck, in sight of the sea and bush.

There's a mild form of dread to an ice bath at the best of times. I've done them before, nervously, timidly, and I'm imagining that my experience will be to my advantage as I stand among the four other guests braving the moment.

"The second time you do an ice bath is no easier than the first time," Blokker says, and my bubble of invincibility bursts.

As the weather rages on, we empty 16 bags of ice into the small bath, standing in collective nervous energy, awaiting the moment we'll step into this frigid pool.

"You only need to be in an ice bath until you feel peaceful," Blokker says. "Basically, once you stop swearing." For us, this will be two minutes.

As people step into the bath, there's laughter, gasps and ultimately gritted determination. It's an advance on my encounter flirtation with ice baths, when there was at least one set of tears.

When it's my turn, I quickly squat into the water, hands pressed to my thighs seeking whatever little warmth my body might hold. Bits of ice clink against my skin and I focus my gaze on the bush, distracting myself from the cryogenics, but it's still two minutes that can feel like two lifetimes.

A minute passes. My hands hurt like toothache, and I'm breathing deeply through my nose and exhaling exaggeratedly from my mouth, just as I've learned in the breathwork sessions. "Your body is in survival mode now," Blokker says, and strangely it begins to feel easier.

Is it pleasure and pain? Or pain and pleasure? Only as I step out of the bath, gravitating to the one spot of sunlight on a corner of the deck to defrost, does it become clear that it's pleasure first. As we begin a series of tai chi moves that will kickstart my blood flow again, returning it to the extremities it was fast abandoning in the ice bath, my skin is so tingly it feels electrified. I feel cold, but oh so alive. I'm ready for anything.

Getting there: Bruny Island is accessed by ferry from Kettering, a half-hour drive south of Hobart.

Travelling there: Wild Wellness Method runs two-night retreats across the state. The next Bruny retreat is in August, priced at $1395 per person.

Explore more: wildwellnessmethod.com

The writer travelled courtesy of Wild Wellness Method.

Pictures: Lewa Pertl

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