Why we publish these

Most operators handle this in a circle on the first evening, if at all. We publish it before you pay, for two reasons.

You should know what you are agreeing to before you commit money and four days. And the people most cautious about being in a group setting, which is most thoughtful people, deserve to see that the group has actual rules, not just good intentions.

Every guest confirms these on their screening call and again on arrival.

What happens here stays here

Names, faces, stories, and anything anyone shares in a circle do not leave the retreat. Not to your partner, not as an anonymized anecdote, not on social media, not ever.

You may talk about your own experience freely. You may not talk about anyone else's.

Some of the people in your cohort hold jobs and positions where being identified as having attended would carry real consequences. This is not a soft courtesy. It is the condition that lets people be honest in the room.

Consent, including about touch

Nobody touches anyone without explicit permission, and that includes the well meant hand on a shoulder during someone's difficult moment.

During journeys, supportive touch from our team is limited to your hands, feet, or shoulders, only where you agreed to it in writing beforehand, and it stops the moment you want it to. Guests do not touch other guests during a journey at all.

Between sessions, ask before you hug. People are more open than usual and less able than usual to say no comfortably, which is exactly why the burden sits with the person initiating.

You share only what you want to share

There is no requirement to speak in any circle, ever. Passing is a complete answer and nobody will follow up on it.

Equally, nobody asks another guest to explain their journey. Not that evening, not at breakfast, not on the drive to the airport. If someone wants to tell you, they will.

We stay sober together

No alcohol and no recreational substances for the duration of the retreat. This includes the New Year's Eve evening, which is deliberately alcohol free.

This is not moralism. Alcohol interferes with the work, it changes the room for everyone in it, and several of our guests in any given cohort are people for whom alcohol is not a neutral presence.

If you smoke or vape, do so outside and away from shared spaces.

Phones stay out of the container

Phones are yours in your room and during free time, and there is time built in to check in with people at home.

They go away entirely during journeys, ceremonies, and held evenings. No photography of other guests at any time without their explicit permission, and no photography at all inside the journey room.

Your worldview is yours

People arrive here from every direction: clinical, spiritual, religious, scientific, skeptical, and combinations of all of it.

Hold yours and let others hold theirs. Do not evangelize, correct, diagnose, or explain to another guest what their experience really meant. It is a small group and there is nowhere to go if someone will not stop.

Nobody is anyone else's project

You are not here to fix, rescue, coach, or counsel the other people in your cohort, however much you may want to help.

Care looks like presence and listening. It does not look like advice, and it does not look like taking on someone else's difficulty as your own. That is our team's job and we are trained for it.

You look after your own needs out loud

Say when you are cold, tired, hungry, overwhelmed, or need to step out. Ask for the blanket. Skip the activity. Go to bed at eight.

There is no prize for endurance here. The guests who get the most out of this are consistently the ones who said what they needed out loud, not the ones who toughed it out politely.

What happens if an agreement is broken

Most of the time, a private conversation with a facilitator, and that is the end of it. People make ordinary mistakes and we are not looking for reasons to escalate.

Where something is serious, meaning a breach of confidentiality, unwanted touch, intoxication, or behavior that makes the container unsafe for other guests, we will ask the person to leave the retreat. That has consequences: no refund, and transport arranged at their cost.

We would rather tell you plainly now that this is possible than let a cohort of eight be held hostage to one person's behavior. Protecting the room is our first obligation to the other seven.

What we agree to, for our part

These run both ways, and here is our half.

• We will never leave the journey room unattended.
• We will never touch you outside what you agreed to in writing.
• We will never tell you what your experience meant.
• We will keep your attendance and everything you tell us confidential.
• We will tell you the truth on your screening call even when the truth costs us the booking.
• We will not add a cost you were not told about.
• We will answer your call in the week after you go home.