SEPTEMBER 22-27, 2026 • EQUINOX & FULL MOON IN ARIES • CARVALHEIRA, PORTUGAL
6-Day Self-Worth Adventure Retreat in Peneda-Gerês
The Return to Inner Worth
Stop trying to feel valuable through love, approval, achievement, or control.
Join us during the Equinox in the wild mountains of Portugal for a 6-day transformational retreat based on The Return to Inner Worth Method: a practical path to break free from Borrowed Value, reconnect with your center, and build self-worth as something embodied, stable, and real.
"I feel that the power is back in my hands."
— Ovidiu
This retreat is for you if...
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You accept less love than you know you deserve.
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You give a lot, but still struggle to receive without guilt or discomfort.
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You find it hard to set boundaries without feeling selfish, tense, or afraid of conflict.
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You struggle to express your truth cleanly and fully occupy your space.
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You undervalue your work, your gifts, your presence, or your service.
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You know your worth intellectually, but you do not yet live from it consistently.
“Low self-worth is not just a confidence issue.”
Borrowed Value and the Empty Center
In many cases, the real problem is deeper. People learn to look for value in approval, love, success, productivity, control, or being seen a certain way. They may function well on the outside, but inside, their sense of worth still depends too much on what life gives back.
This is what we mean by Borrowed Value.
Borrowed Value is the habit of needing external signs to feel okay with yourself. Love, praise, money, validation, results, certainty, belonging. As long as those signals are there, you feel relatively stable. But the moment they disappear, the center collapses again.
That is what creates the Empty Center.
The Empty Center is the painful inner state in which there is no real resting place inside. You may still look strong, capable, spiritual, kind, or successful. But inside, there is no quiet solidity. No stable feeling of being enough without shrinking, pleasing, performing, or proving.
That is why this retreat does not treat self-worth as a surface-level mindset issue.
It works at three deeper levels.
The 3 Roots of Low Self-Worth
1. The Underworld
Identification with the Fragile Self
At some point, often early in life, you learned to become a certain kind of person in order to receive love, safety, acceptance, or protection.
Maybe the good one. The easy one. The strong one. The helpful one. The one who does not cause problems.
Over time, that adaptation stopped feeling like a strategy and started feeling like you.
This is the Fragile Self, the identity shaped by fear, approval, dependency, and self-rejection. It quietly affects the way you relate to love, money, work, conflict, expression, and the future.
2. The Center
Disconnection from Vitality
Self-worth is not only a belief. It is something the body has to be able to hold.
When your system is tired, passive, contracted, shut down, or disconnected from life-force, it becomes much harder to feel confidence, dignity, clarity, and presence. The body starts reinforcing the old identity instead of helping you move beyond it.
3. The Upperworld
A Life That Is Too Small for the Soul
Self-worth is also shaped by the kind of life you are saying yes to.
If your relationships, goals, work, or daily choices are built mainly around fear, compromise, adaptation, or survival, some deeper part of you feels it. It becomes difficult to respect yourself fully while living below what you know is true.
So this retreat works with self-worth at the level of identity, vitality, and direction.
Because this is not solved by positive thinking alone.
It has to be rebuilt from the roots.
The Return to Inner Worth Method
This retreat is built around a clear transformational framework.
You will not leave only with inspiration or emotional release. You will leave with The Return to Inner Worth, a practical inner method for recognizing when you have left yourself, restoring your center, and protecting self-worth in daily life.
At the heart of this method are three core movements.
Unmask
See the fragile self, the false beliefs, and the borrowed identity.
The first step is to recognize the structure you have been living from. The fearful self. The pleasing self. The dependent self. The self-critical self. The self that learned to adapt in order to be loved or safe.
Through guided inquiry, meditation, ritual, teaching, and deep reflection, we help you see that this painful image of yourself is not your deepest truth. It is a conditioned perception that can be witnessed, challenged, and released.
Ignite
Restore vitality, presence, confidence, and inner aliveness.
Once the old identity begins to loosen, the body must stop reinforcing it. Through breathwork, movement, conscious activation, cold water, dance, nature immersion, voice, and embodied practices, we help you reconnect with vitality, directness, and presence.
This is where self-worth stops being only an idea and becomes something felt.
Align
Reconnect with a path, purpose, and standard of life that matches your true potential.
Self-worth deepens when your life reflects who you really are. It becomes harder to respect yourself when your relationships, work, goals, and daily choices are built around fear, pleasing, or compromise.
Through vision work, Tarot, upperworld-oriented practices, inquiry, and symbolic exercises, we help you reconnect with a more truthful direction and a life that can actually hold your deeper potential.
What you take home
By the end of the retreat, you will receive a practical take-home system that includes:
The Return to Inner Worth Field Guide
A structured guide to the method and how to apply it in daily life.
The Borrowed Value Map
A personal map of where you still seek worth outside yourself.
The Fragile Self Diagnostic
A guided process to identify the identity patterns and core beliefs beneath low self-worth.
The Energy Leak Inventory
A practical map of the relationships, habits, and behaviours that drain your vitality.
The Soul Direction Map
A tool to reconnect with the life direction that reflects your deeper truth and potential.
The Scan. Activate. Align. Daily Practice
A simple daily method to detect contraction, restore presence, and move from worth.
The 21-Day Integration Path
A post-retreat framework to help you stabilise the work once you return home.
"Self-worth is not arrogance. It is the quiet, steady feeling of someone who no longer needs permission to be who they are."
The Outcomes
What changes when you return to inner worth
Boundaries Without Guilt
You stop absorbing everything from everyone around you. You begin to take back the energy you were losing through pleasing, overgiving, and overexplaining. You learn to say no in a cleaner way, without hardening yourself and without collapsing into guilt.
Cleaner Love and Healthier Relationships
You stop confusing anxiety, adaptation, and self-sacrifice with love. You begin to recognize what genuine respect feels like. You become less available for manipulation, emotional dependency, and relationships that require you to betray yourself in order to belong.
More Vitality, Less Collapse
You feel more alive in your body. More present. More available for life. Less frozen, passive, heavy, and self-defeating. The system starts waking up, and with that, your natural confidence becomes easier to access.
More Truthful Expression
You stop swallowing your truth just to keep things calm. When your worth depends less on how others respond, you become more direct, more honest, and more free to occupy your space without apology.
More Value in Work and Money
You stop making yourself smaller in the way you serve, ask, negotiate, and receive. You begin to value your work, your time, your energy, and your presence more seriously. And because of that, your decisions around money, service, and opportunity start becoming cleaner.
Stronger Direction
You stop organizing your life only around comfort, fear, or adaptation. You begin to choose from a deeper place. Your decisions become more aligned, your standards rise, and your life starts reflecting more of who you really are.
When your value is no longer hanging outside you, the world stops feeling like such a dangerous place.
It starts to feel more open. More alive. More spacious. More like a place where you can experiment, grow, choose, and create.
Peneda-Gerês National Park
We are going to a very special place, right on the wild border between Portugal and Spain, very close to Galicia. Peneda-Gerês has a raw, ancient, and unpolished force that supports this work in a very direct way.
If you have never been there before, it may surprise you. It feels far from the noise of modern life, almost as if some deeper rhythm has remained intact.
There are forgotten Roman roads, old oak forests, granite mountains, hidden viewpoints, freezing waters, silent valleys, and places where the nervous system naturally starts letting go of unnecessary tension.
This kind of landscape does not do the work for you. But it helps. It strips away noise. It brings you back to the body. It helps the mind slow down and allows something older, deeper, and more truthful to come forward.
The mountains become part of the method.
Places of Power
- ✦ Bosque de Albergaria — An ancient forest with a depth of silence that helps you return to what is real underneath the mask.
- ✦ Portela do Homem — Freezing, crystal-clear waters that wake up the body and interrupt passivity, fear, and emotional stagnation.
- ✦ Pedra Bela — A wide, open viewpoint that helps restore perspective and reconnect you with a bigger horizon.
- ✦ Lindoso — A place of stone, old strength, and rootedness that supports work around boundaries, space, and dignity.
- ✦ São Bento Sanctuary — A place of stillness, devotion, and quiet inner listening.
- ✦ Geira Romana — An ancient road that speaks of memory, direction, and walking your path with intention.
Your 6-Day Journey
This retreat follows a carefully guided progression through the core phases of The Return to Inner Worth Method: release, recognition, activation, alignment, and integration.
Each day combines inner work, embodied practice, nature immersion, and structured reflection so the process does not stay abstract. It becomes lived experience.
Note: We will enjoy breakfast at the house, take picnics into nature during many of our daily excursions, and gather at local restaurants for dinner in the evenings.
The Call & Arrival
Phase: Release begins
Arrival window: 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM. You arrive, settle into the mountain silence, and step out of the speed and performance of daily life. In the late afternoon we gather for our opening circle, intention setting, and the beginning of the container.
After settling into the house, we head to a local restaurant for a nourishing welcome dinner. The work begins gently but clearly: creating the safety, honesty, and focus needed to start letting the masks fall.
The Ancestral Forest
Phase: Release and Ignite
We begin the day with somatic meditation and esoteric martial arts to bring your attention back into the body. We introduce principles of Shamanic Aikido: how to relate to pressure, projection, and external demands without losing your center.
Then we hike through the sacred Bosque de Albergaria and share a picnic in nature. At Portela do Homem, the cold water becomes part of the method, helping interrupt passivity and reconnect you with aliveness. In the evening, we gather for integration.
Water, Wind & Unmasking
Phase: Unmask
A day for emotional opening, deeper honesty, and contact with the structures underneath the symptoms. We begin with conscious dance and movement to loosen stagnant energy, then explore the valleys and crystal waters of Gerês.
At sunset, the work turns inward. Through ritual, contemplation, and inquiry, we examine where you have traded self-respect for approval, adaptation, or false safety. We begin to expose the core beliefs and inner contracts that keep the fragile self alive.
Rest, Receive & Reconnect
Phase: Ignite
Deep work needs rhythm, not constant intensity. This day allows the system to breathe and receive. We slow down with gentle nature yoga, spend time at the São Bento Sanctuary, and enjoy a quieter afternoon on Caniçada Lake.
The teachings of the day focus on worth, receiving, and the relationship between your inner state and what you allow into your life. At night, we gather under the stars for a Shamanic Drum Journey.
Roots & Sovereign Space
Phase: Align
Today is about standing in your space more cleanly. The morning includes body-based release and grounded practices that help you feel your own center more clearly. We then walk among the medieval structures of Lindoso, connecting with the archetype of rootedness and sovereignty.
This is where the work becomes more practical. We move into teachings around boundaries, communication, discernment, and the standards that protect your energy. You begin clarifying what no longer fits and what kind of life, relationships, and choices actually reflect your worth.
The Return
Phase: Integrate
On the final day, we seal the process and prepare for the return home. Through purpose work, Tarot, vision-based exercises, and final integration, we connect restored self-worth to concrete direction.
The retreat closes not only with insight, but with structure. You leave with a clearer inner map, practical take-home tools, and a stronger sense of what you must protect, change, and move toward next.
We share a final integration lunch before departure. (Departure: after our 2:00 PM closing lunch).
"Most of the self-worth I had was borrowed."
Your Guide: Pablo "Teiwaz" Leon
Spiritual Guide, Shaman & Healer
- ✦ Initiated Yogi and Shaman
- ✦ Disciple of Master Northern Deer Alexander
- ✦ 10+ years of experience in energy work
- ✦ 300+ seminars, workshops, and international retreats
Ten years ago, I left everything behind to follow my spiritual path. From the outside, my life looked solid. I had a privileged position in a research center, advanced work, status, relationships, and a life that many people would have considered successful.
But when I stepped away from that structure, something painful became impossible to ignore. I suddenly felt fragile, empty, and worthless. I could not understand it. How could I feel so weak when I was finally moving toward something true?
Little by little, I understood something essential.
Most of the self-worth I had was borrowed.
It was coming from a system that made me feel valuable only as long as I followed its rules and kept sacrificing parts of myself. Once I stepped out of that system, the borrowed structure collapsed. I could no longer lean on status, belonging, achievement, or approval. I had to learn how to stand in my own energy.
That became the real beginning of my path.
It became a journey of learning how to stop searching for value in achievement, relationships, image, and external proof. A journey of returning to something much simpler and much more real: the intrinsic worth of my presence and being.
Over the last ten years, I have received teachings and practices around self-worth, personal power, energetic boundaries, and inner alignment through direct transmission from my teacher, Master Northern Deer Alexander. I have lived this work, tested it, taught it, and refined it through years of guiding people through retreats, seminars, and deep transformational processes.
This journey is, in a very real way, a return. A return to the freedom of loving yourself, feeling your own intrinsic worth, and building your life from that place.
Don't Take Our Word For It
The medicine we use is proven. These are the voices of men and women who have walked this path with us in our past retreats and immersions. Real people, facing real friction, who decided to stop abandoning themselves and reclaim their sovereignty.
Sylvie The Pragmatist
"This is not magic, it doesn't give you pre-fabricated solutions. But it gives you the power to make the necessary changes. I feel completely at peace."
Ovidiu The Activation
"I feel that the power is back in my hands. The mountain environment and the brotherhood made me realize I am not fighting these internal battles alone."
Esin The Safe Space
"As a highly sensitive person, I found a soul family here. Nobody made me feel broken. I feel complete by myself, and that is what helps me heal."
Ana The Breakthrough
"I was able to process and release things in a few days that I hadn't been able to touch in years. The compression of time and the depth of the emotional work here is unmatched."
Maya The Sovereign Path
"I came seeking clarity and left with a profound sense of self-worth that immediately translated into my professional life. I stopped undervaluing my work and finally have the courage to trust my decisions."
Daniel The Tribe
"If anyone feels lost, lonely, or is going through a difficult time, this retreat is incredibly helpful. It is a tribal environment that gets you out of your head. You realize that we share similar sufferings and paths, and you feel entirely supported."
"Comfort, silence, and privacy, right on the edge of the wild."
The Sanctuary & Practical Details
The House
A Beautiful Setting
A beautiful rural home in a quiet location right on the edge of Peneda-Gerês National Park. Open mountain views, spacious outdoor areas, and enough distance from the noise of normal life to help the system soften and reset.
Deep Silence
This is a place where the nervous system can finally slow down. Garden, mountains, nature, privacy, and a strong sense of calm all around.
Spacious & Comfortable
The house offers six bedrooms and six private en-suite bathrooms, so there is real comfort and enough personal space for deep work and proper rest. High-speed WiFi, comfortable beds, and a fully equipped kitchen are all included.
Your Space
You can choose the type of room that best supports your process:
- ✦ a private individual room
- ✦ a shared twin room
- ✦ a shared room for 4 with bunk beds
The Logistics
Dates
September 22–27, 2026
(6 Days / 5 Nights)
Group Size
The group is kept small so the space feels personal, safe, and focused. No crowds. Just a close circle with enough depth for real work.
Transport
You can fly into Porto Airport (OPO). We help organise shared transfers directly to the retreat house.
Meals
The food rhythm is simple and natural. Breakfasts at the house, picnic lunches during many excursions, and dinners at local restaurants in the evenings.
"This is not just a retreat experience. It is a complete take-home method."
The Complete Package
Everything is organised so you can go deep while you are there and continue the work once you return home.
✓ What You Are Really Receiving
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The Method: A full immersion in The Return to Inner Worth Method, guiding you through release, recognition, activation, alignment, and integration.
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The Take-Home System: You will receive: The Return to Inner Worth Field Guide, The Borrowed Value Map, The Fragile Self Diagnostic, The Energy Leak Inventory, The Soul Direction Map, The Scan. Activate. Align. Daily Practice, and The 21-Day Integration Path.
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The Practices: A carefully selected range of embodied and transformational practices woven into the retreat, including: esoteric martial arts, shamanic breathwork, conscious dance, dynamic meditation, Patanjali yoga, shamanic theatre, free expression, guided inquiry, ritual work, and nature-based contemplative practices.
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The Retreat Experience: 5 nights of premium accommodation in our private rural villa in Carvalheira, plus: internal transport during the retreat, national park entry fees, guided mountain hikes, waterfall excursions, kayak rental, and all teachings and facilitated group processes.
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The Written Teachings: The retreat teachings will be compiled in writing for you to keep and revisit, including key frameworks around self-worth, boundaries, energy, and direction.
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The Music Library: You will receive access to the curated playlists used for movement, activation, and meditation sessions, so you can reconnect with the atmosphere and energy of the work at home.
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Professional 4K Media Pack: Stay present and off your phone. Our team captures the experience discreetly with professional cameras and drone footage, and delivers a high-quality photo and video pack after the retreat.
✕ Not Included
- — Flights to Porto.
- — Personal travel insurance.
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Food, estimated at €20–30/day: Meals are not included. We will visit local supermarkets together for breakfasts and picnic lunches, and enjoy dinners at local taverns and restaurants.
This Retreat May Not Be for You If...
- ✕ You are looking for a passive holiday with lots of free time and very little inner work.
- ✕ You want transformation without emotional honesty, embodied participation, or personal responsibility.
- ✕ You are only interested in intellectual insight, but not in working through the body, the emotions, and real-life patterns.
- ✕ You are looking for plant medicine work. This is not a plant medicine retreat.
- ✕ You are not willing to be challenged gently but directly in the way you relate to yourself, your truth, and your life.
If, on the other hand, you are sincerely ready to stop abandoning yourself and build something more truthful from the inside, this retreat may be exactly the kind of space you need.
Enhance Your Journey (Optional)
Comfort Transfer
Optional Porto round-trip transfer. Confirmed with a minimum of 5 participants.
1:1 Deep Healing
1 Spot Left2-hour private session with Teiwaz including personal consultation, shamanic energetic work, and Tarot reading.
Strictly Limited to 10 Spots
To guarantee deep, personalized attention and a highly protected group dynamic, we are capping this experience at 10 participants. Once these beds are booked, registration will permanently close.
Choose Your Container
The Bunk Experience
Shared room for 4 people in bunk beds. Perfect for deeper community immersion.
The Shared Experience
Shared twin room. Perfect for connection while maintaining personal space.
The Private Experience
Individual private room for maximum privacy, silence, and focus.
You will select your preferred room type on the next page.
⚠️ Important Notices
FLIGHTS: Please do not buy your flight tickets until we officially confirm that the minimum group size has been reached. We will notify you in advance.
🔄 FREE CANCELLATION: You can cancel your booking for a full refund up to 60 days before the retreat begins. Secure your spot risk-free.
⏰ EARLY BIRD DEADLINE: Early Bird pricing ends strictly on July 15.
⏳ REGISTRATION DEADLINE: Registration closes strictly on September 15, 2026.
Clarity & Details
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know to feel completely safe, informed, and confident in your decision to join us.
Yes. You do not need any prior background in shamanism, yoga, or energy work to participate fully. The method is built to meet you where you are. The only requirements are a baseline of mental stability, honesty, and willingness to engage with the process.
The retreat includes walking, movement, and time in nature, but it is not designed as an extreme physical challenge. A basic level of mobility and comfort in natural environments is enough. If you have specific concerns, contact us and we can help you assess whether the retreat is a good fit.
Absolutely. Many people come alone. In fact, this retreat is designed to create a safe, focused, and connected group field, so solo travellers often feel especially supported here.
No. This retreat does not use plant medicine. The process is based on embodied practices, ritual, breathwork, movement, inquiry, nature immersion, energetic work, and guided inner exploration.
Both. This retreat is deeply experiential, but it is also structured. You will leave not only with strong experiences, but with a clear framework, written materials, practices, and an integration path you can apply in your daily life.
That is exactly the kind of real-life material this retreat is designed to help with. We do not treat self-worth as an abstract topic. We work with how it shows up in love, boundaries, expression, money, purpose, and daily decisions.