Est. Tulum, 2020
A handful of days, far away from your inbox, with a small group of people who are up to something good in the world. The kind of story you'll be telling for the rest of your life.
Vortex Retreats
It usually happens halfway through, in the middle of the most random experience. This might be where you meet your next business partner, your next co-creator, or your closest friend for the rest of your life. Those are the moments that transcend the retreat spaces, and they can never be planned.
Most rooms want to know what you do.
You've probably noticed it. You walk into another networking event, and everyone is lovely, and everyone is performing, and every conversation is secretly the same conversation: what do you do, how big is it, who do you know. You fly home with a phone full of new contacts and no real connection to a single one of them.
Maybe you've done the retreat thing too, where it goes the other way. A week of big openings and big emotions, everyone swearing this changed their life, and then you're back home, you're back in your business, you're back with your spouse or your children, and nothing changed. Same triggers, same patterns, and that cathartic experience, you realise, hasn't really produced a long-lasting change in your life.
Vortex Retreats exists because we wanted something neither of those rooms could give us. Real experiences, with real people, and relationships that keep living long after the trip is over.
How it works ↗
That is how one of them started. Fly into Acre, drive until the road runs out, and then the Huni Kuin come to meet you and carry you the rest of the way, to a village that hosted a small group of us for ten days. Another was a single weekend at a private house outside Austin, with a dozen men who carry real weight in their lives, doing work none of them talks about lightly.
The next might be a cabin with the phones in a drawer, or the mountain hike that has been sitting on your bucket list since your twenties. Every experience is different, because every one is built around the actual human beings in it. That is what takes it way beyond a retreat.
Austin, Texas
We begin with the experience itself, something that would be worth it even if you came alone and spoke to nobody. A place you have been dreaming about, or the thing that has been sitting on your bucket list for fifteen years while life kept being louder. The bar we hold is simple. When it is over, we want you to look back and say: that was one of the wildest things I have ever done.
Every person who walks into a room changes the room. So we take real care with who is in it. Nobody is being judged here, the group simply is the experience, and when that part is done right you feel it on the very first evening: you look around the table and every single person makes you glad you came. That is not luck. That is somebody having cared about it for months.
This is the part almost everybody skips, and it is the part we care about most. The trip is not the point, it is the beginning of something. Some of these groups have grown into masterminds. Some turned into collaborations, co-creations, friendships that are still going years later. You do not fly home with photos. You fly home with people.
The honest answer
This vision started in powerful places. In India. The Amazon. The jungles and mountains of Mexico. Communities who have carried their wisdom for longer than most countries have existed. We went to so many different spaces to learn, and at some point we began bringing Western integration work to the indigenous wisdom practices. And while the places were magical, what really transformed us were the people we met and the wisdom they carry.
Somewhere in nearly a decade of this work we understood the thing this whole movement is built on. When a founder or a leader in a company of a thousand people comes home steadier and kinder, a thousand lives and their families get a little better through that transformation. When a mother of two comes home more herself, two children grow up around a different example. That is how we believe transformation actually moves, one impact leader at a time.
You don't change the world by trying to change the world. You change it by taking care of the people who are already changing it. And that is our mission.
Mexico and Guatemala
Before we started running the experiences, we built two places ourselves, one in Mexico and one in Guatemala, and even before that spent years running various other retreat centres. When you have carried the timber, fed the community and kept a place alive through multiple seasons, you stop leaving details to chance. You know exactly what it costs when nobody is paying attention. This is where being in the trenches of the hospitality industry taught us how to make experiences unforgettable.
Aldeia Pinuya · Acre, Brazil
A flight to Acre that you can only get from Brasilia, a drive towards the end of the road, and then down to the river, to a village that opened its home to a small group of us for nearly two weeks. We immersed into their pace as guests of a community that has carried its wisdom for longer than most countries have existed. We still put resources and time into indigenous projects, because a relationship like that does not end when you leave the space. This was another one of the experiences our participants will talk about for the rest of their lives.
Four continents so far
Every experience has been a co-creation. Between the people who have led the retreats so far: two retreat centres built, thousands of clients coached, processes run alongside world-renowned coaches, years of facilitation in the Amazon, and a multi-year apprenticeship under elders and pioneers of the personal development industry. Each retreat is a unique collaboration.
Look around the table
Some of the people that join us run multiple companies. Some work in startups or corporate, some are post-exit, and have built a life most people would trade for. There are builders, coaches, creatives. On paper they often don't have an industry in common and would never normally overlap.
Yet in person, they have everything in common. They are up to something big in the world, they have done enough work on themselves to be good to be around, and most of them noticed the same thing somewhere along the way: that the more successful the rooms got, the harder it became to find people in them you could actually connect with on a deeper level.
If you need every hour of the week catered to you, a stage to stand on, or to be the centre of attention, this probably isn't for you. If you read that last paragraph and felt a spark of curiosity in your heart, it probably is.
In the works
We're slowly curating the experiences in the background, and we don't post them publicly. That is part of the magic.
If any of this resonates with you, tell us who you are, what you're creating in the world, and what would genuinely be worth leaving home for. We read every application, and when the right one comes together, you'll hear about it through a direct invitation.
Apply↗