Before, during, and after.
Whether you come for a retreat or for the 14-Day Immersion, the work here is treated as one continuous thing: how you prepare, what happens while you are here, and what you do with it when you go home.
Insight becomes useful when it becomes the way you live.
We are not offering a permanent high or a single breakthrough. The work is learning to live a little differently — more presence, more choice, more clarity, more connection — and then carrying that back into relationships, work, and ordinary days.
Our role is not to provide answers or to fix anyone. It is to build the conditions in which something real can happen, and then to help you carry it home.
Two experiences, one way of working.
Retreats at Tikkun Sanctuary
A few days, or a stay built around you.
Group weekends and private stays shaped around one person. Small groups, gathered on purpose: breathwork, circles, shared meals, time outdoors, and long stretches of unscheduled quiet.
Browse retreats14-Day Immersion
Fourteen days, for men.
Fourteen days away from the momentum of day-to-day life — long enough to see a pattern clearly, and long enough to begin living differently. Built around four movements: See it. Pause. Choose. Live it.
About the 14-Day ImmersionPreparation is most of it.
What happens before an experience often matters as much as the experience itself. Preparation is asked of everyone, and it makes more difference than most people expect.
- For a group retreat, there is a preparation period before you arrive, including dietary guidance. It is sent once you register, and there is an orientation before anything begins.
- For a private stay, it starts with a conversation — what you are hoping for, what is going on, and what combination of preparation, solitude, ceremony and integration would actually serve it. Some of the work starts there, weeks before you arrive.
- For the 14-Day Immersion, it starts with a conversation with admissions and a personal screening, so we can understand where you are and whether the 14-Day Immersion is the right next step. It is not an application you have to pass.
Aaron Stefansky, who leads the retreats
How should I prepare?
Take preparation seriously. Prepare mentally and physically. Come with an intention — intention is really powerful with this medicine… Minimize distractions, whether that's screen time, smoking, or something else. Just feel.
The whole experience is the work.
None of it is separate from the rest — the circles, the conversations, the meals, the hours with nothing scheduled. Enough space to hear yourself again, and enough support to make use of it.
On a retreat
Breathwork, movement, sharing and integration circles, conversations that help make sense of the experience, and space for prayer, reflection and rest. Meals are vegetarian and kosher, cooked on site and eaten together. Groups stay small enough that everyone is known by name before the first evening is over.
On a longer private stay, part of the time may be spent alone outdoors in a simple canvas tent set away in the trees, with regular contact from the team.
In the 14-Day Immersion
There is structure, and there is time alone. Honest conversations, teaching, movement, journaling, meditation, spiritual practice, one-on-one support, experiential work, time outside, shared meals, laughter and silence.
Not simply to talk about living differently. To practise it.
The four movements of the 14-Day Immersion
- See it. Understand what has been running you — and see the pattern without believing the pattern is you.
- Pause. Between the thing arriving and the thing you do, there is a pause. We practise finding it, and staying in it long enough to have a say.
- Choose. Once there is space, there is a question: what do I actually want? For my life, my relationships, and the man I want to become.
- Live it. Then it becomes action. The truth you tell. The boundary you set. The promise you keep.
Integration is where it becomes yours.
An experience may open something. Integration is how you come to understand it, hold on to it, and live it — so that what happened does not evaporate the moment you drive out of the gate.
Can the prayer become the way you live on Tuesday afternoon?
- On a group retreat, sharing and integration circles run through the days, and a final integration circle and a closing circle end them.
- After a private stay, integration continues once you leave. What continues, and for how long, is agreed as part of the program rather than left to chance.
- After the 14-Day Immersion, every participant receives eight weeks of weekly integration calls, stays connected to the men they went through it with, and has a path into the larger Tikkun community. When deeper one-on-one support is needed, we help guide you toward the right person — even when that person is not us.
And afterwards
Tikkun Ha'Nefesh is still there.
When you leave the Sanctuary, you do not simply disappear. Tikkun Ha'Nefesh, the nonprofit, remains available for integration, trusted referrals, ongoing guidance and community — and for outside support where that is what fits.
Integration with Tikkun Ha'NefeshWho comes to this.
Retreats
- People who feel called to go deeper — looking for clarity, prayer, connection, and a more honest relationship with themselves and with G-d.
- People who are not after a quick escape, but a meaningful process held with care, humility and respect.
- People willing to do the preparation.
- For a private stay: people for whom a fixed weekend in a group is the wrong format, or who want more preparation, more solitude, or more time than a weekend allows.
14-Day Immersion
- Men ready to get free from the patterns that have been running their lives, reconnect with who they are, remember what they are here for, and begin living from that place.
- Men who have already done a great deal of work — therapy, treatment, recovery, retreats, spiritual work, plant medicine — and have seen something real, but cannot yet live it. They may not need another breakthrough. They may need grounding and integration.
- You do not have to have everything figured out, or be completely certain. But the desire has to become yours.
What this is not.
- The 14-Day Immersion is not a rehab. It does not provide medical detox or acute psychiatric care. Needing detox does not automatically rule it out — it may simply mean detox happens first, in an appropriate medical setting.
- A Tikkun retreat is a spiritual program, not medical care. We are not a healthcare provider, and we do not diagnose or treat anyone.
- Neither is a quick escape, a permanent high, or a single breakthrough.
Held with care, and with humility.
We hold this work with both — clear-eyed about what we are working with, never above it, and in service to the people who trust us to sit with them.
- Before a retreat, part of the registration form asks about your health and any medication you take. It is asked for one reason: to work out whether a retreat would be unsafe for you, before you travel rather than after. Some conditions and medications make participation unsafe, and that is covered properly at intake.
- If you are under a clinician's care, or taking prescribed medication, talk with them before registering.
- Before the 14-Day Immersion, every prospective participant goes through a personal screening. It asks about substance use, whether medical detox may be needed, recent overdose, thoughts of self-harm, recent psychiatric instability, current medications, and any current therapist or psychiatrist — to work out whether the 14-Day Immersion is the appropriate level of support, and whether another step has to happen first. Admission is subject to that screening.
Sacred medicine ceremonies, when offered, are conducted by Tikkun Healing Center, an affiliated spiritual organization.
Ceremony is optional. It is never required to take part in the 14-Day Immersion, where — when appropriate for the person — plant medicine may be one of the tools, held separately through Tikkun Healing Center. Most Tikkun retreats include a sacred medicine ceremony, as one part of the experience rather than the whole of it; anyone who would rather not take part can say so, and nobody is pushed. Some private programs include one, and some do not.
The tools are not the point. The point is what becomes possible when you finally have enough space to hear yourself again.
Tikkun Retreats manages the retreat experience, registration, accommodations, programming, and payment. A donation is made to Tikkun Healing Center on the participant's behalf for ceremony participation.
