Power, Without Armor
Power, Without Armor is an intimate 7-night trauma-informed immersion retreat in Ubud, Bali for professionals ready to meet the personal cost of carrying too much - and return with greater integrity, nervous-system capacity, and choice.
An opportunity to detox your nervous system, your authentic leadership story, and your self-worth narrative - in a magical village nestled among rice fields, where dragonflies dance by day, fireflies glow by night, and a wild symphony of crickets and frogs holds your healing.
Date: March 2- March 9, 2027
Location: Ubud, Bali, Indonesia
Cohort size: Max 8 participants
Price range: $2000 - $2,500
Deposit: $800
Facilitator: Maria Marc
Who This is For
This is for:
-
The leader who's forgotten what his/her own body feels like when it isn't bracing for the next ask.
-
The high-responsibility professional who can't quite name what's wrong, but knows, somewhere underneath, that something has to change.
-
Those navigating significant transitions - divorce, career changes, or mid-life re-evaluation.
-
The entrepreneur who hasn't taken an uninterrupted breath since the last meeting.
-
The neurodivergent who is ready to embrace authenticity, without fear of being rejected.
If any of these sound like a mirror, this week was built for you.
This also reaches practitioners, facilitators, caregivers, and helpers whose bodies have been adapting to impossible environments for far too long, and who are now ready to relate to themselves with more honesty and self-respect.
What to expect
This is a deliberately paced seven-night immersion that is small by design. It allows for a group experience that is intimate enough to matter and spacious enough to breathe. You will not be asked to disclose more than is right for you. You will not be pushed toward catharsis, 'breakthrough', or a prescribed version of transformation. Instead, we will work with choice, pacing, consent, nervous-system awareness, and the intelligence already present in your experience.
It is specialized work, built to meet your unprocessed stuff with precision and compassion, not force. If you're living inside chronic stress, a nervous system that never fully powers down, a burnout that doesn't respond to a vacation, or an anxiety that has quietly become your background noise - this week was designed with you in mind.
Across the days, you'll be given practical tools you can actually use: emotional regulation, breath-work, somatic practices, shadow work, guided reflection, and much more... This retreat is built on Polyvagal Theory, Compassionate Inquiry®, Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST), Shadow Work, Vertical Leadership Development, change theories, Genograms, and ancient Amatsu Tatara healing principles.
This is a trauma-informed personal and professional development retreat, not crisis care!
Two Kinds of Holding
The venue, Dragonfly Village, was built around its own quiet promise: retreat, restore, transform. It lives by the logic of its namesake - a creature that spends most of its life unseen, underwater, before it rises, sheds the form that once protected it, and enters an entirely different way of being.
That's not a metaphor I'm borrowing lightly - it's the same shape as the work we'll do together. You don't come here to leave your life behind. You come to shed what no longer serves you - the armor, the over-functioning, the bracing - and return to that same life with wings you didn't know you still had.
The village holds the container: the rooms, the rhythm, the rest. I hold the work: the therapeutic depth, the nervous system repair, the Compassionate Inquiry. Neither one does the job alone - and that's exactly the point.
The Shape of the Week
Dusk - Arrival
You land still holding the last three cities in your body. That's expected, not a problem to solve.
The final 700 metres to Dragonfly Village aren't reachable by car. Your luggage goes on ahead of you. You arrive by electric bike, down a narrow path you didn't expect, quietly unsure for a moment whether you're really meant to go down there. That small uncertainty isn't a flaw in the arrangements - it's the first threshold. By the time you step off, something in you has already started to loosen, before a single session has begun.
The air here is thicker, slower, humid in a way that has nothing to do with anyone's schedule. Temple bells keep a time that isn't yours. The rice terraces don't care what's waiting in your inbox.
You've arrived. You are home. Day one doesn't ask you to perform anything. You're not required to be insightful, regulated, or ready. The only task is noticing how long it takes your shoulders to leave your ears.
Stillpoint - The Days That Actually Change Something
Stillpoint isn't a slot on the schedule. It's a state your nervous system has to actually reach before the deeper work becomes possible - the physiological floor underneath any real insight.
This is where the reset stops being relaxation and becomes real work: somatic practice, small-group and individual sessions, the actual work on your leadership patterns and where they came from - met, finally, in a body that has stopped running on adrenaline long enough to feel what it's been outrunning. Nothing here is urgent. Not even the insight.
You don't arrive at Stillpoint by trying harder to relax. You arrive by staying long enough that your body stops waiting for the next demand - usually somewhere around day three, rarely day one. Stillpoint moves through immersive workshops, private sessions, reflective storytelling, group work, creative play, and more.
The herbal steam sauna and the salt water pool aren't downtime tacked onto the schedule - they're part of how the body relearns what safety feels like. The heat softens what urgency has hardened. The water holds what words can't yet reach.
A New Dawn - What You Take Back
The final days aren't about squeezing in one more session before your flight. They're about deliberately building the bridge home - learning what regulation actually feels like in your body, so you can recognize it again inside a boardroom, and naming what you're no longer willing to carry back into the calendar you left.
You leave with something more durable than a good week: a nervous system that remembers a different baseline, and a body that finally knows the difference between that baseline and the bracing it used to mistake for normal.The world doesn't need you to escape your life. It needs you to return to it differently. That's what this final movement is for.
What that might look like?
- A body that has felt the difference between chronic activation and actual rest - not as a concept, but as a memory it can return to.
- Language for the specific pattern that's been running your leadership, named in a body calm enough to finally see it clearly.
- A concrete re-entry plan for your first two weeks back, so the reset doesn't evaporate on the first client call.
Important Reminder
Be gentle with your nervous system - it needs time to recognize it is safe before it allows deeper emotional processing to begin. A 7-day retreat is valuable for acute stress, nervous system reset, and burnout recovery. For deeper and more meaningful trauma work, longer engagements and private support may be needed.
There will be a one-to-one private session per person after the retreat, to help you ground what you learned and understand what next steps will suit your unique nervous system and emotional design.
Why Bali
Some truths become easier to hear when you are no longer surrounded by the environment that taught you to mute them. Stepping away from those systems gives your nervous system a chance to loosen its grip on urgency, control, and constant adaptation.
Bali offers beauty, spaciousness, rhythm, and sensory relief - a felt experience of slowing down that many people have never fully allowed themselves. In that atmosphere, it becomes easier to sense the gap between how life has looked on the outside and how you have actually been living on the inside.
Imagine this retreat as an opportunity to recalibrate your mind-body-spirit axis. The land quietly supports the kind of slowing down required for deeper listening, more honest contact, and a more trustworthy relationship with yourself.
Accommodations
We will stay in century-old antique bungalows, original wooden houses brought over from remote villages in Java, decorated with beautiful carvings, 100% recycled teak wood. All balconies are facing the rice fields, with its own private outdoor garden. Dragonfly Village is all about conscious living – rooms are equipped with ceiling fan, there is no AC in all bungalows – Ubud is slightly cooler at night.
Each bungalow has an attached mud-wall bathroom, passion fruits & vines climbing over the natural roof, semi-open to the nature. Clean finishing. Hot shower is available. All rooms are supplied with natural organic shampoo, soap and insect repellent. See room samples below.
Single Room Bungalow
This fan-cooled room is fitted with wooden interiors, mosquito net and a private semi open bathroom with a shower. It has a seating area on the front terrace with it’s own garden facing the open rice fields.
Shared Room Bungalow
Accommodating up to 3 guests, this fan-cooled room is fitted with wooden interiors, mosquito nets and a private semi open bathroom with a shower. It also has a seating area on the front terrace with it’s own garden facing the open rice fields.
Private Nook in Large Bungalow
Each corner is semi enclosed with added privacy of drop-down curtain separation.
2 bathroom facilities attached. Outside terrace (14m2) with rice field view.
Best comfort level is 4 pax.
Mango Bungalow
Single or Shared Occupancy
Papaya Bungalow
Shared Occupancy
Blue Moon Bungalow
Quadruple Occupancy
Pricing for 7 Nights | March 2 - 9, 2027
Single-occupancy Bungalow $2,500
Double-occupancy Bungalow $2,200 (per person)
Private Nook in the large Bungalow $2,000
(Deposit $800 to reserve your place)
Remaining balance due by January 11, 2027
What's Included
Your Experience
Over the course of the retreat, you will be guided through a carefully held blend of:
-
Group process-based Compassionate Inquiry® and TIST (parts work)
-
Amatsu Tatara - the art of physical, emotional, and energetic self-protection
-
Genograms and individual energetics
-
Integrative emotional-wellbeing
-
Creative Play and a few surprises
-
Spacious integration time for rest, contemplation, and embodiment
-
Skillful work with the relational field
-
Meaningful connection with other thoughtful humans who are also ready to live and lead with more integrity.
The pace is intentional. There is room for insight, but also for digestion... room for honesty, but also for beauty; room for depth, without pressure to perform transformation.
Transportation
Bali Airport Pickup to retreat drop-off point - Dragonfly Village is not accessible by car the last 700m.
Luggage motorbike transfer during check in and check out from & to taxi drop off point (pack light so you can enjoy your experience). It will be fun!
Bungalow Style Rooms
Single Room and Shared Room occupancy with daily housekeeping (natural soap, shampoo, insect repellent, drinking water refill set up in each bungalow).
Sebatu Tour Experience
Sunrise Trekking Mount Batur
Meals
3 buffet style vegetarian or vegan meals/day in a combination of Balinese cooking and fusion. Note: smoothies / fruit juices are not included but can be ordered at extra.
One 60-min Traditional Balinese Massage
Other Amenities
-
Two-floor wooden studios (for movement & workshops).
-
Salt water pool.
-
Herbal steam sauna (3 times a week regularly open to Ubud community as well). Best for soothing tired muscles, for detoxing your skin and lung.
-
Unlimited drinking water refill, Dragonfly herbal tea and
-
organic Balinese coffee.
-
Fiber Optic WIFI and night security guard.
What's Not Included
-
Airfare to Bali
-
Visa on Arrival (official fee: 500,000 IDR per person for a 30‑day tourist visit visa (VoA or e‑VOA)/ $32-$35 USD
-
Drop-off service to the Airport on the last day ($20 per car - fitting up to four passengers and luggage)
-
Additional Spa Treatments, Detox Packages, and Tours
-
Traveler's insurance
-
Alcoholic beverages and/or any extra meals.
Trained under Dr. Gabor Maté
Compassionate Inquiry (CI)
Trained under Dr. Janina Fisher
Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST)
+6,000 private sessions
+1,000 hours group work
ICF Credentialed Coach
Relational Trauma
Next steps
This retreat is designed to be deep, relational, and carefully paced. We use a short private conversation to help ensure the experience is supportive, aligned, and appropriately matched to your current capacity.
The deposit is $800 to reserve your spot.
Your deposit allows us to put down non-refundable deposits on lodging, excursions, and ground transportation. Deposits are non-refundable unless we are able to find someone to take your spot.
Cancellations 90 to 45 days in advance are eligible for a 50% refund.
Fees are non-refundable 44 days before the start of the event.
If you would like to enquire more about this retreat please email contact@schoolforhumanity.org or book a call.