Why a journey, not a retreat

The difference between an experience and a journey is integration.

An experience is a one-time thing: a different state for a few hours, and then you are back where you started. Useful, sometimes. But nothing changes. A journey is different. It begins with preparation and an intention. You go within yourself, to meet who you truly are, in your essence and in your blind spots, and then you carry what you find back into your daily life and your being.

Over a multi-day format, a journey moves through the whole arc of a life: a Hero’s Journey. We meet ourselves in the mirror of one another; nothing lives inside a single person alone. It is whole work: the thinking, the sensing, the doing, and the being.

What a journey asks of you

A journey asks three things of you: preparation and a clear intention beforehand, full presence during the days themselves, and time afterwards to integrate what you found. It is deep, transformational work for people who take their own becoming seriously, and want to live with more consciousness, and more aliveness.

The Four Passages · As a journey

The same arc, in a single journey

The same Four Passages I walk in every field, lived here in one multi-day arc. Here is what each passage becomes on a journey.

Depth Trust Transformation Belonging
01

Depth

Meeting what’s underneath

Beyond the “Me”.

It begins before you travel: careful preparation, your state, your intention. You set down the roles you live by and turn toward what lies beneath the structure of your life.

02

Trust

Becoming fully seen

From “Me” to “I”.

A safe, carefully held ceremonial setting, among serious people. Seen as you are, without the roles, you meet your own “I”; the group becomes the mirror in which the work happens.

03

Transformation

Light and shadow, without shame

From “I” to “We”.

The deep experience: meeting the light and the shadow you have never looked at, without shame. What you face, the group holds with you, and a new story for your life takes shape.

04

Belonging

Exchanging “Pursuit of Happiness” with “Aliveness”

From “We” to “All”.

Bringing it home. In the afterglow we integrate the journey into daily life, bridging head and heart, until what you found lives on as aliveness in your family, your work and the world.

Walked in order, they carry you from preparation to integration, and up a level.

Voices from the journeys

Loes led our group with the lightest touch imaginable, yet her energetic field was unmistakably strong — you felt held before you understood why. Loes doesn’t just facilitate a retreat; she opens a door most of us didn’t know was there.
Alicia Yi Alicia Yi Group Executive Advisor, EMA Partners
“Every time I attend Loes’s transformational retreats, I come out stronger.”
Gosia Górna Gosia Górna Chief Transformation Officer, PwC Central & Eastern Europe
There was a real sense of togetherness in the room, yet each of us still had space to be fully ourselves. Loes guided the group’s energy with such care that it often felt almost sacred — and throughout, I could feel her genuine presence, empathy, and attentiveness toward each of us.
Ibrahim Slaoui Ibrahim Slaoui President, Mafoder Group
One of Loes’s greatest gifts is her ability to create a space where people feel safe, truly seen, and able to discover their own answers. She follows the process with deep attentiveness and trust.
Małgorzata Czernecka Małgorzata Czernecka CEO, Human Power

The Lighthouse formats

Every journey is a Lighthouse journey. Most, where it serves, work with the careful use of sacred plant medicine: one tool among many, held within a legal, professional framework in the Netherlands, and always in service of the journey, never the other way around. A medicine-free path reaches for the same depth through the body, breath, and the elements.

Each format has its own brochure and workbook, built over years of running these journeys. Open a format to read more and look inside.

What makes these journeys different

I come to this as a clinician first. Whatever surfaces, whether fear, old wounds or the deep material of a person’s life, I am trained to hold. Around that professional core I build the safest, most carefully held ceremonial setting I can, so people can go as far as they need to, and come back whole.

These journeys are grounded and spiritual at once: grounded in psychology and research, spiritual because they address the whole person. They are disciplined, carefully held, and made to be lived long after the journey ends. Call it secular spirituality: mysticism given its place in a modern life, independent of any religion or ideology. In older words: a temple, a true Hero’s Journey.

I work with people who take this seriously and hold it as sacred; that is why these journeys are so often described as life-changing. For a first journey, the Gateway is the place to begin.

This is what temples once were, brought into the daily life of today’s leaders.

A field coming of age

This work rides a genuine renaissance. Since the research at Johns Hopkins over the past twenty years, at the highest scientific levels, psychedelic work has been re-established as a recognised, serious means of healing at a depth conventional approaches rarely reach, now being institutionalised across the academic and medical world. My contribution is to bridge that world with leadership and adult development. Leadership, at this altitude, is spirituality; and this is how it becomes part of a modern leader’s life.

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From the journeys

Moments from the journeys

Upcoming journeys

Find your Lighthouse

The dates held for the season ahead. When one calls to you, you can request your place directly.

A journey is a space to keep growing. If something in you is ready to meet what is beneath the surface, and to bring it home, I would welcome the conversation.

Where is your own journey asking to go?

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