The Identity Retreat
Become the woman your next level belongs to.
Six days in a private 14th-century castle ·
Umbria, Italy
16–21 September 2026
With Farya Barlas, Chartered Counselling Psychologist
There's a version of you that you've never had time to become.
You've felt her. In flashes. The woman who says her price without flinching. Who rests without earning it. Who walks into a room and doesn't perform a thing, because she doesn't need the room to approve of her. She already knows.
You've read about her. Journalled about her. Visualised her on a Tuesday morning before the calls started.
And then the day began, and you went back to being the woman who holds everything up.
Here's what nobody selling you "identity work" will admit:
You cannot think your way into a new identity.
Not with affirmations. Not with a morning routine. Not with one more course you finish at 11pm.
Identity doesn't live in your thoughts. It lives in your body, in what your nervous system does when a compliment lands, when a bill arrives, when someone offers to carry something for you.
It changes one way: you live as her, somewhere it's safe to, until your body believes you.
So I found a castle.
SIX DAYS. FOUR WALLS. SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS.
La Rocca dei Trinci. A fortress on a hilltop in Umbria, standing since the 1300s. A thirty-two-metre watchtower. A chapel. A pool inside the original castle walls. A breakfast terrace hanging over a valley, with Assisi glowing in the distance.
For one week in September, it's ours. Six women. Four ancient bedrooms. One table.
You land in Perugia. You're met, your bag lifted out of your hand before you finish saying you can manage. Forty minutes through golden hills. A gap in a medieval wall.
A drink is put in your hand. Dinner is already cooking. A private Italian chef is making handmade pasta with truffle from the hills you just drove through.
Someone shows you to a room with a vaulted ceiling and walls a metre thick, and a window that has been looking at that valley for seven centuries.
And here is the strangest, most confronting luxury of all:
Nothing is asked of you. For five days. Nothing.
No bill you'll ever see. No plate you'll ever carry. No logistics, no decisions, no "what does everyone want to do about dinner."
You don't organise a single thing after the flight.
For most women I work with, that's the most radical experience of their adult life.
THIS IS NOT A RETREAT WHERE YOU REST AND COME BACK THE SAME.
Let's be honest about the retreats you've seen.
Beautiful villa. Yoga at sunrise. A facilitator two steps ahead of you with a certificate. You come home glowing and by the second Monday, the glow is gone and the ceiling is exactly where you left it.
Because rest restores you to who you were. And who you were is the ceiling.
This is different, and here's the difference in one line:
You're not coming to recover from your identity. You're coming to change it.
Every morning, you work with me, a Chartered Counselling Psychologist with twenty-three years and thousands of clinical hours. Not a workshop. Not slides. Group process around one table, one-to-one sessions on your own material, breathwork, visualisation, ritual, work at the depth where identity actually lives.
Every afternoon, you live as her. The pool inside the medieval walls. The jacuzzi. The walled garden. Long lunches that turn into the best conversations of your year. Doing nothing, magnificently, without earning it, which for you is not relaxation. It's practice.
Two evenings, we go out. Assisi by candlelight. A tiny Umbrian town where nobody knows what any of us do for a living. I take you. I pay.
Watch what happens in your body when the bill comes and it isn't yours.
That moment is worth more than a year of mindset work. And I'll be sitting right there when it happens.
The Five Days
-1-
The week is an arc, not a schedule. You arrive on 16th and are simply welcomed, no work the first night, just dinner in the courtyard and a bed inside seven-hundred-year-old walls. From there, each day takes you deeper: first seeing the identity that built everything, then the deep work of meeting the woman on the other side of it, then living as her, until, by the final evening, she isn't an idea. She's who the group has been having dinner with all week.
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Mornings are the work: breath work, process work around one table, ritual, visualisation and one-to-one sessions with me, on your material, at clinical depth.
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Afternoons and evenings, the castle is yours: the pool, the jacuzzi, the garden, the long golden hours. Two evenings, we go out, Assisi by candlelight, and a tiny Umbrian town where nobody knows what any of us do.
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And through all of it, the thing no retreat on your feed can offer: I'm not the facilitator who appears for sessions. I'm there. At breakfast. In the pool conversations. On the drive to Assisi. Six days of direct, unrestricted access to a psychologist who can see what your body is doing before you can — catching the pattern in the moment it runs, not in a call next Tuesday after it's passed.
That access has never existed in my world before, and it's why this room holds six.
No 6am schedule. No bell. You're not at a bootcamp. You're at a becoming.
Why Me?
Here's the question you should ask anyone inviting you to "upgrade your identity":
Who did you become, and who trained you to take me there?
Because right now, identity is being taught by people who read about it. A course, a certification weekend, a framework borrowed from someone else's podcast. Two steps ahead of you, if that.
I've spent twenty-three years as a Chartered Counselling Psychologist. Thousands of clinical hours. I've sat with the human identity at its most defended and its most ready and I've guided thousands of clients through the exact becoming this week is built around. Not as a coach with a concept. As a clinician whose actual profession is how identity forms, why it locks, and what makes it move.
And I've done it on myself, more than once.
I arrived in this country as a teenager without the language. The girl I was could not have built what I've built, so at every threshold since, I've had to become someone new, using the same method I'll use with you. Different life. Different income. Different rooms. Same work, walked first.
Founder of The Method™. Host of From Trauma to CEO. And for Five days in September yours.
Everything in your world is being rewritten in real time. What you sell, how you sell it, what your industry looks like next year, all of it, changing faster than anyone can hold.
One thing cannot be automated, downloaded, or replaced:
A real human, beside you, who can see what your body is doing before you can.
That's the actual offer here and it's why this doesn't exist anywhere else. Not the castle, though the castle is absurd. Not the chef, though you'll talk about the food for years.
Proximity. A clinical psychologist next to you for six days, at breakfast, in the deep work, on the drive to Assisi, guiding your becoming as it happens. Not in a weekly call, after the moment has passed. In the moment.
That's why there are six seats. It doesn't work any other way.
WHY NOW.
EVERYTHING IS TAKEN CARE OF, INCLUDING YOU.
→ Six nights in a private 14th-century castle
→ Met at the airport, driven all week, driven back
→ Every meal by our private Italian chef — breakfast on the terrace, long lunches, courtyard dinners, wine from the valley
→ Two dinners out — Assisi and the town below — on me
→ All group work, all one-to-one clinical work, every ritual and practice
You book one flight, to Perugia or Rome. After that: nothing to pay, nothing to carry, nothing to decide. That's not a perk. That's the method.
Pick Your Stay
Payment Plans Available
$3000
Shared room
Four places. The tower room has two floors — you each get your own. Your bed under a fourteenth-century vault. The valley beneath your window.
$3999
Private room
Two places Including the ground-floor room — the largest in the castle.
For context: six days of clinical work with me, alone, is more than this, before the castle, the chef, and the week of your life.
FOUR ROOMS.
THAT'S NOT MARKETING.
THAT'S THE FLOOR PLAN.
The castle was built seven hundred years before countdown timers. It has four bedrooms. There are six seats because there are four rooms, and September only happens once.
When they're gone, they're gone, and this exact week never exists again.
