Retreats & Journeys
To inhabit the experience. To inhabit life.
At Casa Oraya, a retreat is not only a moment to step outside everyday life. It is also a space to look inward, to observe, to question, and to begin recognising more clearly what is happening within us.
Medicine can sometimes bring perceptions, emotions, memories or patterns into awareness. But the experience itself is only part of the process. What interests us just as much is what happens afterwards: how we learn to stay with what we have seen, how we recognise our reactions, how we create a little more space before acting, and how what has been lived gradually finds a place in everyday life.
This is why Casa Oraya is moving increasingly toward a practice of inhabiting the experience. During the retreats, we create moments and offer simple tools for self-observation, reflection and integration — not to give participants answers, but to help them listen more closely to their own experience and develop their own discernment.
For us, integration is not simply understanding an idea. It is allowing something lived to become embodied — in the way we relate to ourselves, to others, to our choices, our reactions and the life we return to.
The aim is not to become someone else. It is to come into closer relationship with ourselves, and to carry that attention back into ordinary life.
The experience may open something.
What we do with it afterwards matters.
Casa Oraya retreats in Spain are held in small groups, surrounded by nature, with enough time and space for each person to move at their own rhythm.
The retreat is not organised around intensity or performance. Between the different moments of the experience, we make room for rest, silence, the body, conversation and simple practices of observation. The intention is to notice what is happening — emotionally, physically and inwardly — without rushing to explain it.
When medicine is part of the retreat, the ceremony is held within a wider process of preparation and integration. What emerges during the experience can then be revisited through reflection, attention to the body and practical tools that help bring awareness back into everyday life.
The retreat becomes a place to practise presence — not only during the experience, but in the way we return to ourselves afterwards.
Spain — Presence in Practice
A few days to slow down, observe, and give experience time to become lived.
Arrival
Arriving into the place, the group, and the body.
The first day is about landing. We arrive carrying the rhythm of everyday life — travel, anticipation, mental activity, and the outside world still moving through us. Slowly, the body begins to settle, the place becomes more familiar, and the experience can start to be inhabited from within.
Opening
Trust begins to make more space.
After the first ceremony, something has already been shared. The place, the group and the facilitators feel less unfamiliar. The second day often brings more openness — to speak, to listen, to observe, and to continue the experience with a little more trust and depth.
Harmonising
Little by little, the whole being begins to come into tune.
By the third day, the retreat has found its rhythm. What felt scattered can begin to settle. Body, emotions, mind and experience start to relate differently — like an instrument being tuned, not toward perfection, but toward greater coherence, presence and inner listening.
Returning
Letting the experience find a place in everyday life.
The final day is a gentle return. It is a moment to recognise what has moved, what has been seen, and what may still need time. Participants leave with reflections, practical tools and a deeper capacity to observe themselves as they return to ordinary life.
The journey is not only about what happens to us, but about how we meet the place, the people, and what their presence allows us to see differently in ourselves.
Colombia — Medicine, Territory & Encounters
A journey shaped by place, relationship, and the people who receive us.
In Colombia, the experience extends beyond the ceremony itself. Medicine, nature, family, land and everyday life are woven together through the people and places we meet along the way.
Some journeys include work with yagé or ayahuasca. Others are centred more on territory, cacao, forest, craft, food, movement and the relationships that make a place meaningful. What connects them is the same intention: to approach experience with attention, respect and enough time for it to be lived rather than consumed.
Casa Oraya does not treat Colombia as a backdrop. The journeys are built through relationships that have grown over time — with families, growers, facilitators, artists, guides and people who share their own knowledge from within their own context.
