Why an ECAN Retreat?
Humanity's oldest hospital: stepping away to identify and correct what makes us sick.
Withdrawing to heal
Since the dawn of humanity, and for nearly a million years until the arrival of our modern society, when someone fell ill, a Retreat was sought.
The idea of the Retreat is to isolate the person from every factor in their life, since one of them — or a combination of several — is the real cause. It's confusion and a loss of direction that lead to bad decisions. A destructive routine takes hold of us from within without our realizing it, deep and unconscious. Repeated over time, it becomes a serious danger.
Without a doubt, for every illness, the deep root lies in a chain of poor decisions across different areas of life.
To identify it, the best thing is to withdraw: in stillness, in silence, with different habits, with different people. Often, with the help of a professional or guide. In that guided, controlled calm of new habits, it becomes possible to identify the bad habits causing the problems.
The best hospital
That's why Retreats have always been the best hospital: no harsh chemicals, no invasive surgeries — just recovery through natural change. The message that brings about healing lies within.
Because once it's achieved, a reintegration takes place that ensures the illness doesn't return. You learn, you correct course, and you can move forward with more strength, clarity and vitality.
The 5 phases of the Retreat
Assimilation and recognition
After years of struggling, we understand we can't get through it alone. Pushing in the same direction is leading everything toward illness.
Humility
We ask for help and place ourselves in the hands of professionals.
Peace
Letting go and delegating. It's not through struggle or pushing harder, but quite the opposite: surrendering, seeking peace, without effort, setting aside distractions in search of your own fulfillment.
Awareness
Signs begin to arrive, unbidden and unasked for, in the form of peace and beauty. That's where healing appears: the body works through its complex biology and repairs itself.
Reintegration
It's time to return to your previous life. It's essential to have clarity and the strength to make deep changes — not just material or abrupt ones, but changes in attitude, expectations and direction, focusing your efforts where they're truly needed.
At ECAN Retreats we take an in-depth look at the 5 essential Factors
Five factors where bad habits tend to originate, which, chained together, end up making us sick. Tap each one to learn more.
The most important Health and Longevity study from Harvard University, after 78 years of tracking, concludes that the most important factor is the quality of our interpersonal relationships. We need to learn to identify our shortcomings and improve these skills, which are essential for health and longevity.
Watch the study video →Everything around us affects us. A harmonious environment, with a pleasant design, helps generate balanced decision-making. We need to review possible shortcomings here and find ways to compensate for them.
Learning to eat well and enjoy it is key. Together we review the most important studies on a healthy diet. It's not just what you eat, but how it's prepared. We carry out a personalized test to identify which foods help you most, as well as those doing you the most harm.
Our brain is the great translator that filters data from outside in, and vice versa. The information we consume matters, first, because of the quality of the content: it should fit each person's life work, be more than mere entertainment, and produce a genuine sense of inner fulfillment. And, on the other hand, the way that data comes in matters too: if it arrives in a fast, chaotic rhythm, that's what the brain transmits to the body, and what the body ends up craving in an equally forceful way. We need to learn to re-educate ourselves and take responsibility for what we consume.
This is the fifth factor, and all the previous ones exert a direct influence on it. You cannot sustain a healthy body or a calm mind without achieving a stable, ongoing balance in relationships and groups, environment and design, diet and nutrition, and information consumption. Trying to sustain the body and mind when the errors among the 5 factors are intertwined is a tense, uphill battle against the impossible. But together they support one another: that's why we design exercises suited to each body and each age, and learn what the mind is and its whims, so we can train it to work in our favor.