A living sanctuary where indigenous wisdom keepers, plant stewards and story carriers tend the fire between people and the Earth. We host slow retreats, ancestral ceremonies and field study journeys for those who feel the old songs returning.
We are not a school and we are not a retreat chain. We are a small, slow collective of indigenous wisdom keepers, ethnobotanists, musicians and land stewards who believe the oldest technologies of healing are still humming underneath the noise of the modern world.
Native Spirit began in the late 1990s as a single fire circle on a hillside above a river valley — a handful of people who had grown tired of the shallow promises of wellness culture and wanted to sit again in the presence of those who had never left the old ways. Twenty-seven years later, that circle has grown into a network of retreats, land projects and apprenticeship programs spanning nine countries, yet the shape of the work has not changed: sit down, shut up, listen, and let the land speak first.
We work hand in hand with indigenous teachers from the Amazon basin, the Andean highlands, the North American plains and the Siberian taiga. Every ceremony we host is guided by their lineage, protected by their protocols, and shared only with their permission. We do not sell traditions — we accompany them, we translate them, and we protect the conditions in which they can continue to live. Nothing is done on our land that a grandmother would not recognise.
Our retreats are small by design. Twelve to twenty guests, never more. Ten days, sometimes fourteen. No phones in ceremony, no performances for the camera, no festival culture. What happens around our fire belongs to the people who came with open hands, and it stays with them long after the ash has cooled. We believe depth is not a luxury — it is a discipline, and it is the only thing we are genuinely good at.
Alongside retreats, we run long-term initiatives: a land guardian apprenticeship, a seed and medicine garden in the foothills, and a small archive of oral teachings recorded with the explicit consent of the elders who share them. Every euro that passes through this house is divided transparently — a third to the teachers, a third to the land, a third to keep the fire burning for the next generation of carriers.
— The Native Spirit Council, founded 1998, in ceremony.
Each program is a container built with the teachers who hold its lineage. Some last a long weekend, some a full moon cycle. All of them ask the same thing: arrive slowly, leave differently.
Night-long ceremonies guided by Amazonian and Andean lineage holders, held in strict protocol with medical screening, ceremonial diet and integration circles before and after. Space is intimate — eighteen guests maximum, two facilitators, one fire.
Four days alone on the land, with water, a sleeping bag and the sound of your own breathing. We prepare you for a season, we hold the perimeter, and we welcome you back with broth and silence. This is the oldest technology of becoming an adult that we still have access to.
Ten days inside the ear of the Earth. Overtone singing, drum lineage, icaros, lament and lullaby — taught as living languages, not as repertoire. You will leave singing something your grandmother would not recognise but would understand.
A seasonal, land-based retreat for people who want to touch the craft: fire making, foraging with consent, natural building, seed saving, tracking, and the quiet grammar of a household that lives with the seasons instead of against them.
For those who have already sat at the fire more than once. A twelve-month apprenticeship of four retreats, one land project and one personal rite overseen by an elder. Slow, demanding, and often the beginning of a life's work.
Small, local, recurring circles around the four great turnings — solstices and equinoxes. Open to alumni of any Native Spirit program, and to the families and children who carry the fire through the ordinary days of the year.
Our work is not a seven-step method. It is a turn of four hands: attention, kinship, voice, and tending. Whatever the season, we come back to these four.
Learning to listen to the land, the body and the silence before speaking. Attention is the first offering — and the rarest resource of a modern life.
Remembering that we are relatives, not resources. Plants, rivers, animals, and one another belong to the same family. Ceremony is the grammar of that kinship.
Reclaiming the songs and stories that were broken in our lineages. To sing is to remember that we were never meant to walk alone, or silently.
Keeping the fire, the garden, the water and the relationships. Nothing here is finished — the path is upkeep, not arrival.
Some are lineage holders who have carried their traditions long before this house existed. Some are land guardians and musicians who translate between worlds. All of them are here because a specific community asked them to be.
Raised between the Andean highlands and a Spanish coastal village, Amara has walked with plant teachers since her teenage years. She holds the container, translates between cultures, and makes sure the ancestors are introduced to every guest.
Kawê has guided ceremonies in his own community for four decades. He travels to our lands three times a year to hold the night-long ceremony and to teach the protocol that keeps everyone safe. His grandmother's songs open every retreat.
A Sami-adjacent vocalist and sound practitioner, Elin teaches overtone singing and the long lament as tools of grief and praise. She leads the ancestral sound intensives and the winter fire nights.
Forester, tracker and natural builder, Tomas keeps the physical ground of the house: the garden, the seed library, the buildings, and the trails that guests walk alone during their vision quests.
We ask every guest for one true sentence before they leave. These are a few of them.
I came to be fixed. I left with the more frightening and more beautiful job: to be present, with everything I have, to a life that is not mine alone.
The night ceremony did not give me answers. It gave me back a language I thought had been taken from my family generations ago. I am still learning to speak it.
Ten days without a phone, a mirror or a plan. The quiet was not the absence of noise. It was the presence of someone I had not met in a very long time.
Notes on upcoming retreats, land projects, ceremonial calendars and the small happenings of the house. Long, slow, occasionally late — like everything else here.
No news yet.
Write to us before you book anything. Tell us who you are, where you are in your life, and what you are drawn to. Every application is read by a human hand, and every retreat begins with a conversation — not a payment.
If you are a teacher, land guardian or lineage holder and you feel a kinship with this work, we would love to hear from you as well. The house is always open to the right next door.