“The medicine work gave me a catalyst for inner transformation… I came away from this experience full of gratitude, love, self-knowledge, and hope.” ”
UNIVERSAL AWARENESS RETREATS
What These Retreats Are, And What They Are Not
Universal Awareness Fellowship retreats are not “wellness getaways.” They are not “ceremony booking services.” They are not a “meaningful weekend.”
They are a four-day, deeply supported experience designed to produce specific, observable change in how you live, relate, and show up in the world — and a surrounding seven-week arc of preparation and integration. This is followed by an ongoing community designed to make that change last. (See UAF Retreat testimonials here)
UAF is a nonprofit spiritual organization. Its mission is to support healing, meaningful rites of passage, and long-term integration in community. UAF offers supported-rate access for people who otherwise could not participate. If cost is a consideration, please reach out directly.
The Problem We're Solving
The most common failure mode in this field occurs after the experience ends. You have a breakthrough. You go home. The insight fades. The old patterns quietly reassemble. Within weeks, life has returned to its previous shape — sometimes with an added layer of disappointment because the breakthrough didn't hold.
Most retreat providers treat this as a participant problem. We treat it as a design problem. If an experience produces insight that doesn't translate into lived change, the container is incomplete. The work is not the experience. The work is the change that follows.
UAF retreats address this through a full arc: three weeks of preparation before you arrive, four days on site, structured integration for weeks afterward, and an ongoing community that holds the work in place for as long as you choose to remain in it.
Why Cohort - Specific Retreats
Every UAF retreat is built for a specific group of people whose shared experience creates a depth of resonance that a general-population container cannot reach.
In a mixed retreat, you spend energy translating context. In a cohort-specific container, that energy is freed. Less explanation is needed. The room already speaks the relevant language. The work goes deeper, faster, and the depth holds longer.
The cohort is part of the medicine.
The Arc Every Retreat Follows
Before you arrive, three weeks of preparation. Three group calls over Zoom: introductions and intentions, personal patterns and sensitivities, and logistics. By the time you arrive on site, you've already met the people in the room. The nervous system has a reference for the space. You're not walking in cold.
On-site — four days
Day 1 — Arrival and Training Ceremony. You settle in, share a meal, and enter the container gently. A short, facilitator-supported ceremony that evening is about orientation, not intensity — teaching you what the terrain feels like before it asks anything significant of you.
Day 2 — The Deep Dive. The central inner-work session: four to six hours in a held, intentional communal space with curated music, your own mat, and multiple sober facilitators present throughout. Not alone. Not interfered with. Witnessed.
Day 3 — Integration. A full day without ceremony. Morning movement, group sharing, relational workshops, and an art-based process to give what emerged a non-verbal channel. The day is designed to metabolize the experience, not let it become a blur.
Day 4 — Community Ceremony and Closure. A heart-opening session built on the trust and earned intimacy of the previous three days. Witnessing, gratitude, and relational honesty. A closing ritual that names the commitments each person is bringing home.
After you leave — three to four weeks of structured integration, two group integration calls, two one-on-one sessions with a facilitator, and two Arising Awareness deepening sessions. Plus an ongoing community channel that keeps the cohort connected.
Ongoing — the work continues, Growth Groups, alumni community, and an open standing relationship with UAF. You don't graduate out, you graduate in.
The Values That Drive Every Retreat
These are not slogans. They are the operational orientation of every facilitator, every container, and every community UAF holds.
Take 100% responsibility for your life
Speak kindly and humbly to yourself and others
Let your actions speak for you
Honor all sentient beings
Be passionate
Be courageous
Embrace vulnerability and authenticity
Stand up for others
Always keep learning and expanding
Strive to be better today than yesterday, and better tomorrow than today
Live a kind and compassionate life
Offer service where you can
THE PROGRAMS
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Built for women who have been holding things together — often quietly, often brilliantly — for a very long time.
This container is designed and co-led by women whose decades of experience in the medicine space inform every element of the arc. The work is shaped around a specific pattern that shows up consistently in this cohort: extraordinary external competence paired with an internal cost that is rarely spoken out loud.
Who comes
Women carrying invisible emotional labor who have become very skilled at hiding how much it takes
Women who feel "too much" — who self-edit constantly, who scan rooms before entering them
Women who have done therapy, coaching, and personal growth work and have hit a ceiling those modalities cannot move
Women in transition: the end of a marriage, a midlife reckoning, an empty nest, a professional inflection point
What the container addresses The conditioning around being responsible for everyone else's experience. The chronic vigilance and self-monitoring. The loss of voice, of need, of joy at full volume. The exhaustion of running on reserves that were never replenished. The cost of being the one who holds everything — and the question of what it would mean to finally put it down.
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Built for men who have held themselves together through performance, achievement, and the suppression of feeling — and who have begun to sense the cost of that arrangement.
Men of Integrity is the foundational UAF container and the reference architecture for every program that has followed it. It is grounded in roughly twenty retreats and decades of direct work with men. It is not therapy. It is not a personal development workshop. It is a high-support, high-intentionality container designed to surface what has been managed, hold what arises, and translate insight into a different way of living once you go home.
The cohort is small — typically five to seven men. The arc is seven weeks.
Who comes
Men who have built lives that look successful from the outside and feel hollow from the inside
Men working through divorce, addiction, the end of a career chapter, or the death of a parent
Men who have done therapy and personal development and want something with more depth and structure than their previous work has offered
Men who have had powerful experiences before and didn't know how to integrate them into real life
Men who want to live with greater honesty, presence, and connection in their relationships — and are ready to do the work
What the container addresses The conditioning around emotional restriction. The performance of competence. The isolation that comes from having no peers with whom you can be fully honest. The quiet, recurring version of the same statement that brings most men into the room: I am functioning, but something is missing. I am stuck in the same patterns. I have been holding it together for everyone else, and I need to find my way back to myself.
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The same proven architecture. Built from the ground up to meet this cohort where they actually are.
This container was developed in collaboration with a roundtable of deeply experienced gay, bisexual, and queer men who could speak from both the transformational space and from their own lived experience. The structure of the Men of Integrity work is preserved. Everything else was rebuilt specifically for this cohort.
Who comes
GBQ men who carry the layered weight of identity formation in a world that did not always make space for them
Men who have done significant work on their identity and are ready to go deeper into the places identity work alone doesn't reach
Men who want to be witnessed in the fullness of who they are by other men who share enough of the lived experience to recognize what is being said — and what is being left unsaid
What the container addresses The chronic vigilance that comes from a lifetime of reading rooms for safety. The internalized messages absorbed during identity formation. The grief of versions of self that were postponed or never fully lived. The longing for a brotherhood in which you don't have to choose between authenticity and belonging.
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Four days alongside other men who have served. No translation required.
This container is built for veterans ready to reconnect to purpose, brotherhood, and the next chapter. The architecture of the Men of Integrity work is preserved. The facilitation tone, the language, the calibration of the day, and the composition of the room are built around five realities that consistently appear in this population.
The facilitation team includes two guides, three lead facilitators, and two combat veterans who have lived inside the realities this cohort is built around. Veteran-informed facilitation is not a posture. It is the lived experience of facilitators who have walked the same ground.
Who comes
Veterans who sense that what they came home with has not finished settling
Veterans who have worked with the VA, private therapy, or other programs and want a container with greater depth and a cohort that doesn't require them to translate
Veterans navigating the gap between the man who left service and the man who returned — including reintegration into family, work, and civilian relationships
Veterans who want a brotherhood that recognizes what was asked of them without needing it explained
The five realities this container is built around
Moral injury — the weight of actions taken, witnessed, or ordered, and the meaning that has not yet settled around them
A nervous system shaped by service — hypervigilance, sleep disruption, startle response, and a body still running on readiness long after readiness is required
Loss of identity — the man who left service is not the man who returned, and the role that organized everyday life is gone
Difficulty with civilian relationships — spouses, children, colleagues who are willing but cannot fully meet the experience
Isolation and the absence of brotherhood — the unit is gone, and what replaces it is rarely as close, as honest, or as known
To see if you are the right fit, you need to have a conversation with Yoni Havana or Michael Tierno. If you want to learn more about our UAF retreats, please reach out to Michael Tierno by making an appointment to have a conversation BELOW.