Uncorrupted Retreat
Why
Not many accessible places left on Earth built purely for practice.
What exists instead is an industry: "retreats" With infinity pools and cocktail hours, where yoga is the morning entertainment between massages and "teachers" do not know the basics even. White linen clothing on sale, group photos, "namaste" and a guitar in the evening... Places designed around pleasantries, pretences and comforts.
Not similar to anything remotely spiritual.
For the serious practitioner there has been nowhere to go.
So I am building it.
What this is not
No wellness. No spa. No "holistic experience."
No smoothies, no excursions, no evening socialising.
No photography. There will be nothing to photograph and no phone to do it with anyway.
No audience. No certificates at the end.
If reading that list disappoints you, every other retreat on Earth is available to you.
This one is not for you, and that is by design.
What it is
Two weeks of total immersion: practice, training, silence, fire, food, sleep. Nothing else.
The retreat is built to strip away everything that is not the work, and then to hold you, without escape routes, inside the work itself.
Six students at a time maximum. No more, ever.
The Place... and the places to come
The first retreat and hermitage is located in Somogy county, Hungary.
The land is secured. Three hermit dwellings are in preparation: small, simple, built to hold silence rather than comfort.
This is only the beginning.
Sister hermitages will rise in Transylvania and rural Portugal; the same discipline, the same architecture of practice, at both ends of Europe. Further sites may follow, wherever land, law, and silence allow.
A place like this should never have been missing from the world. Eventually, there will be several.
The Grounds
"The Huts"
The living quarters are imagined as pit-houses, to be more precise. Each student lives alone, in an individual hut with a fireplace. Your own walls, your own warmth, your own silence. You will learn what your own company actually contains.
Nothing that distracts. Nothing to maintain. Nothing to worry about.
Just resting. Sleeping.
The hut is not really an accommodation; it is an instrument of aloneness without boredom.
The Mess Hall
Fortunately the building already exists, basic and rather minimal renovation needed.
Two meals a day, taken together.
Breakfast after morning training.
And one more meal around 2 p.m. After that there will be other things to digest, not food. Mental beverage.
The food will be prepared with love, in service of practice.
The Shrine
Under a big walnut tree, a sculpture of Patanjali, the only Guru here.
Practice begins and ends with paying homage to him, the mighty siddhas, Adinatha and the Source of Creation.
It is proper to praise them.
The Five Stations
Scattered across the land, one station for each element, each one a practice, not a decoration.
Earth: The burial. The disciple is interred in the ground, alive, breathing, still. The oldest confrontation there is. There is not much Earth quality to work with in the human entity so it is necessary.
Water: The meditation pool. Stillness held in water, the body completely submerged. No evil can reach you under water, no doubt.
Air: Exposure to open sky and moving air, nothing but breath between you and it.
Fire: The Square of Agni. Four concrete fireplaces, the student seated at the centre, fire on every side.
Space: The cave. A vine cellar, barrels removed, painted black, floor of sand, total darkness. The element of the void, entered directly.
Why the elements?
Everything that exists, including you, is built from the tattvas: the five elemental principles of earth, water, fire, air and space. This is not poetry. The tattvas are the stages, the qualities through which the unmanifest becomes the manifest, the world, and through which the practitioner travels back.
Patanjali prescribes mastery over the elements directly; the old Hatha and Svarodaya texts treat the tattvas as the very grammar of breath, body and mind.
From this comes a skill the tradition calls tattva vision: the slowly acquired ability to perceive which element is active. In the breath, in the body, in the moment.
The ancient manuals taught practitioners to read this intricate dynamism the way a sailor reads weather on the ocean, because every element favours different work: there are hours for fire and hours for water, and the practitioner who can see this stops fighting his own nature and starts working in synergy with Nature. Undoubtedly a formidable ally.
This cannot be learned from a book unfortunately. It is trained by immersion, which is what the five stations are for.
Not installations. Not symbols.
Training grounds.
You will not read about earth; you will be buried in it. You will not contemplate fire as an idea; you will sit inside its square. Slowly, the elements stop being concepts and become perceptions.
That is the beginning of tattva vision. A big segment of the retreat is dedicated to the attainment of this very valuable skill.
The Discipline
You will know every rule before you commit, because consent, involvement and intensity is the foundation of everything here.
A taste of what you are agreeing to:
The day begins at 4 a.m.
The practice day is structured from before dawn until early night, in blocks of practice, instruction, work and rest.
Silence is the default state. Speech serves instruction and necessity, nothing else.
Full digital detox: devices are surrendered on arrival and returned on departure. For two weeks, the outside world does not exist.
Two meals daily, taken together.
You will be given everything you wear. It is received upon arrival. Bring almost nothing.
What it is, you will discover there. For two weeks: no costumes, no brands, no identity, no display.
Two weeks is a standard retreat.
No early exits or longer stays than agreed, except genuine emergency.
The full ruleset is provided to every applicant before any commitment is made.
You will have to read it carefully. It is not negotiable, that is the point of it.
Admission is by application, and not everyone will be admitted.
You will write to me: who you are, what you practice, and why you want to come.
Places are not first-come-first-served and cannot be bought.
I select every cohort personally.
Who will not be admitted: anyone seeking a holiday, a wellness experience, or content for an audience. There are no observers here, only disciples. Anyone unwilling to accept the full ruleset as written. Anyone under 18. And anyone whose mental and physical health would make the practices unsafe for them or distract the other students.
Some of what happens here is physically and mentally demanding, and honesty in your application protects you.
If you are rejected, it is not a judgment of your worth. It may simply not be your time and you may apply again.
Five cohorts per year maximum. Three students per cohort maximum. Fifteen people a year, at full capacity. That is the entire scale of it, permanently.
Nirdhūta Tantu
Students at the retreat will be the first to receive Nirdhūta Tantu. The thoroughly purified thread which leads and guides the practitioner through existence.
Uncorrupted Yoga's own complete exercise, knowledge translated into movement, carried by heavy symbolism, containing true, ancient practices.
It is not taught anywhere else, and it will not be filmed, streamed or summarised ever.
Some things are transmitted only in person. There is no other way to ensure purity.
The Price
You're invited to contribute toward the upkeep and construction of this place, on a sliding scale: half of one month's income.
The labourer and the surgeon give the same thing: the same proportion of their life.
Nobody is priced out, and nobody buys their way in.
Contribution is capped at £5,000. Beyond that point, wealth simply stops counting, which some will find refreshing and others will find intolerable. Both reactions are informative.
Nobody is special and there is nothing here that money can reach. There are no privileges.
Those who wish to give more may do so through donations to the construction and expansion funds, never for privileges.
The Plan ...and how you can take part
The land is real. The next steps, in order: the huts and the renovation of the mess hall, the shrine, the stations.
This retreat is being built without investors, sponsors or debt.
Those all come with owners, and this place must have none.
It is funded by the work, and by those who want it to be.
If you are one of them:
Phase 1
Mess Hall renovation and the first hut!
If you want this place to exist, you can make it exist sooner.
Most money disappears into things that end. This goes into the ground. Into a place built to outlast everyone reading this, where the real thing is practiced at full intensity, thirty students a year, indefinitely.
£10 — two bags of cement
£50 — three roof beams
£150 — a hut's iron stove
£500 — the timber frame of a hut
£1,500 — a hut's roof, complete
£110 raised
6 donations
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