The Retreat Begins Before You Arrive
Most Retreats Begin When You Land. This One Begins Weeks Earlier.
A final group integration call brings all participants together virtually before the retreat, so that when you arrive, you are not walking into a room of strangers. You are walking into a group that has already begun.
Building Connection Before Arrival
One Group Integration Call
Session 1
Where Am I Right Now?
An honest look at your current emotional state, life context, and what you carry into this experience. No pressure to fix anything — only to observe.
Session 2
Patterns, Flexibility &
Self-Observation
A deeper exploration of how you respond automatically — to discomfort, to vulnerability, to others. The beginning of recognizing the structures that shape your life.
Session 3
Masks, Defenses & Emotional Awareness
An exploration of the protective identities and emotional patterns that operate beneath the surface. Not to pathologize — but to begin recognizing what has protected you and what it has cost.
Accepted participants complete three individual preparation sessions with José Antonio before arriving in Todos Santos.
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These sessions are not administrative onboarding — they are genuine therapeutic work designed to soften defenses, begin self-observation, and allow you to arrive at the retreat already connected to your own process.
The Layers of the Retreat
A living progression that moves from awareness toward integration.Â
Awareness
The retreat begins by slowing down. Before anything else can happen, you have to be able to see what is already here — in the body, in the mind, in the emotions running quietly beneath the surface. Most of us spend enormous energy managing our experience. The first movement of this retreat is to stop managing and start noticing.
Once you can see more clearly, patterns begin to emerge. The way you respond to challenge. The way you hold yourself back or push past your own limits. The way you relate to others in moments of discomfort. In the water, in movement, in the group — these patterns appear in real time. Not as stories about the past, but as things happening right now.
Patterns
The retreat takes its name from this moment. As patterns become visible, so do the structures built around them — the identities we perform, the emotions we hide, the faces we present to keep ourselves safe. This is not pathology. Every mask was built for a reason. The work is not to destroy it, but to recognize it — and to begin asking what it covers.
Masks
The emotional center of the retreat. The place where the masks begin to loosen and something more honest can emerge. This is not collapse — it is contact. Real, honest contact with yourself and with others. It requires safety, and that safety is built carefully over the days that come before.
Vulnerability
The final day is not an ending — it is a beginning. Participants sit with what has emerged and begin consciously connecting it to their real lives. Through creative expression, reflection, and group closure, the experience is anchored. Not as a memory. As a change in how you relate to yourself.
Integration
Something opens. After the intensity of confrontation and vulnerability comes an unexpected lightness — a reconnection with play, with pleasure, with spontaneity. This day is one of the most surprising parts of the retreat for many participants: the discovery that freedom was not something to achieve. It was something already there, waiting beneath what had been covering it.
Freedom
The Emotional Layer
Layer 1
Layer 2
What the Days Actually Look Like
Each day is structured around three rhythms — morning, afternoon, and evening — with free time woven throughout for rest, meals, and personal processing. The intensity varies by design: some days are physically active, others are emotionally deep, and the balance shifts to mirror the arc.
A Typical Morning
Morning sessions begin in the body.
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Yoga, breathwork, or somatic grounding practice.
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On most days, ocean-based activity: surfing instruction or freediving practice guided by qualified instructors.
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The patterns that emerge in the water become material for the day's therapeutic work.
Midday
Afternoon sessions are the therapeutic core of each day.
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Individual and group dynamics
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Experiential exercises
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Somatic work and depth process.
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This is where the morning's experience is received — not explained, but felt, named, and worked with.Â
In-between time
Free time is not empty time.
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Meals together. Rest. Swimming. Walking.
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Time to be with what has moved.
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The unstructured moments of a retreat are often where the most important processing happens.
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Evening
Each evening closes the day consciously.
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Creative integration
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Journaling, group sharing
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Symbolic work, or simple presence.
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Some evenings are quiet. One ends around a fire. Each one allows the day to be received before the next one begins.
Day 5 - Reflection, Intention, and Conscious Choice
With greater awareness of old patterns and protections, participants explore what feels possible moving forward. Through reflection, movement, and experiential practices, the focus shifts from what is being released to what is ready to emerge.Â
Day 6 -Â Integration, Creative Expression & Closure
A quiet morning of personal reflection and journaling. Creative integration: painting, writing, symbols, collage. A final movement practice mirroring Day 1 — this time with the awareness of how much has changed. Group sharing, gratitude, and a conscious, intentional goodbye.
Day 4 -Â Play, Connection & Embodied Freedom
A deliberate shift after the intensity of Day 3. Games, music, movement, surprise dynamics, laughter, and joy. The invitation: to rediscover what it feels like to exist without performance, without self-consciousness, without the weight of who you think you're supposed to be.
Day 3 -Â Confrontation, Contact & Release
The retreat's most emotionally intense day. Contact exercises, vulnerability dynamics, group feedback, and embodied emotional release. The evening culminates in a bonfire ritual: a structured ceremony in which participants acknowledge what they have carried and begin, symbolically, to release it.
Day 2 -Â Masks & Patterns in Action
First ocean session. Surfing or freediving introduces conditions where patterns emerge naturally and unavoidably. Afternoon work focuses on masks, emotional wounds, and adaptive identities — the structures that once protected us. Theatrical exercises and role-play allow the masks to be explored playfully before they are examined honestly.
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Day 1 - Arrival & Awareness
Arrival. Grounding. First contact with the group and the retreat framework. An introduction to the Gestalt cycle of experience and emotional awareness — followed immediately by practice, not just theory. The evening closes with expressive movement: the first invitation to let the body speak.
Day-by-Day Summaries
Layer 3
Integration & Continued Support
What Happens When You Return?
The hardest moment of any retreat is not what happens inside it. It is what happens two weeks after you return home.
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The environment is familiar again. The routines reassert themselves. The people around you relate to you as the same person you were before. And you may begin to notice the gap between who you were becoming in Todos Santos and who you feel yourself becoming in the ordinary texture of your life.
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This is not failure. It is the nature of integration — the real work of translating an experience into a life.
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The Post-Retreat Integration Session
The Retreat Ends. The Process Doesn't.
Included in your retreat investment, the post-retreat integration session takes place several weeks after you return home.
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This is an individual session — a chance to reconnect with José Antonio and share any insights after the six days, and to bring honest attention to what has happened since. What patterns have reappeared? What has been different? What insights have held, and which ones have been harder to sustain? What does everyday life want to pull you back toward, and what feels worth protecting?
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The integration session does not try to recreate the retreat. It works with the reality of your life as you have lived it since.
Continuing the Process
Beneath the Mask is designed to be complete in itself. You do not need to continue anything for the experience to have been meaningful.
For those who feel called to go further, optional continuation pathways are available:
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Individual sessions with José Antonio — ongoing one-on-one therapeutic work
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Group integration sessions — monthly spaces for continued self-observation and relational work
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Deeper long-term process work — for participants ready for extended personal development
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Future retreats — participants who have completed one retreat may apply for advanced or repeat experiences
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These are offered separately, with their own investment, and participation is entirely voluntary.
The Bigger Vision
Beneath the Mask is the beginning of something larger.
José Antonio’s intention is not to offer a single retreat and move on. The retreat is the entry point into a practice — a way of relating to yourself and to growth that can deepen over time. The ecosystem he is building includes individual therapeutic accompaniment, group processes, and increasingly deep experiential retreats for returning participants.
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If you feel drawn to more than one thing here, you are welcome in all of it.