Retreats - 2027 Season
June 2–6 | Chair Mountain Ranch, Colorado
Sculpt your system.
Collage your soul.
Restore your body.
A deliberate pause for practitioners ready to deepen their relationship with their internal world.
Welcome!
Dine with Sayle and Achara at The Sanctuary in Colorado for “Savoring Self-Energy.” This is more than a retreat; it is a sensory immersion. Using the precision of IFS Healing Circles, the creativity of Parts Collage, the somatic grounding of Polyvagal Theory, and nourishment by world-class culinary craft, we will sculpt a new relationship with our internal world proving that the path to healing can—and should—be delicious.
The Work We’ll Explore
IFS Sculpting
Give your parts a physical place in the room through IFS Sculpting. This allows you to see and be in the geometry of your internal family.
Parts Collage
Move beyond words through the art of collage. Give your parts a visual face. No artistic skill required—only your willingness to let your parts choose images that represent them.
Polyvagal
Meet your nervous system. We use Polyvagal insights to find the physiological anchors of safety, allowing your system to move from protection to connection.
The Importance & Impact
This retreat creates space for experienced healers to turn their depth inward in community with others who understand the weight of holding space.
We look for the moment your shoulders soften and your breath settles. Most participants leave having set down the subtle vigilance required to be the steady one for others and having reconnected with their own internal steadiness.
By the time you leave the ranch, you may notice:
A Quieter Internal Landscape
The constant monitoring, managing, and anticipating begins to ease. Protective patterns that serve you professionally soften enough for you to hear yourself more clearly.
Nervous System Reset Through Experience
Rather than learning about regulation, you experience it. Extended time in a paced, intentional environment allows your system to shift out of chronic activation and remember what unforced steadiness feels like.
Renewed Access to Self-Led Presence
You reconnect with your own grounded clarity, not as something you provide for others, but as something you inhabit. This often translates into greater ease in session, clearer boundaries, and less post-session depletion.
Community Without Performance
The relief of being among peers who do not need you to lead, fix, or contain. Conversations deepen. Silence feels shared rather than awkward. You leave with relationships rooted in mutual understanding.
So often, we give more than we receive. This retreat offers the structure, safety, and community for you to receive and to continue your own work with the same care you offer others.
Who this is for
Healers who need space for their personal work in a mature container
People looking to experience new techniques in their personal work
Licensed therapists and mental health professionals
Coaches with foundational somatic literacy
Practitioners familiar with IFS or parts-based work
Professionals seeking embodied integration
Individuals able to self-regulate within a group container
Who this is not for
People who are experiencing emotional or mental instability
People who are unable to regulate in a group environment
People who are new to their healing journey
People who are not associated with any healing modalities
The Experience & Setting
Chair Mountain Ranch
Colorado Rockies
Set at 7,500 feet in the Elk Mountains, the ranch offers:
Quiet seclusion
Mountain air and expansive views
Shared meals prepared by a CIA-trained chef
Comfortable lodging
Cedar dry/wet sauna
Transportation from Aspen Airport
Nature supports the pace of the work.
Mornings: Structured experiential work
Afternoons: Integration, reflection, embodied practice
Evenings: Communal meals and spacious presence
Meals are intentional and beautifully prepared. Nourishment is part of the work.
Meet Your Guides
Achara Tarfa and Sayle co-create a retreat grounded in depth, systems awareness, and embodied discernment. Drawing from advanced IFS training, executive leadership, and nervous system–informed practice, they offer a container that is steady, structured, and intentionally paced.
Within this carefully held setting, participants engage in meaningful personal work supported by a respectful group presence. The experience extends beyond the session room, with shared meals and communal time woven into the rhythm of integration.
Executive Coach | IFS & Polyvagal-Informed Former CFOSayle Hutchison
Sayle works at the intersection of nervous system regulation, internal coherence, and sustained responsibility. With three decades of executive leadership in complex, high-demand environments, she understands how external expectations can quietly outpace internal capacity—and how that misalignment erodes presence, clarity, and vitality. Her work supports those who recognize that meaningful impact depends not on endurance, but on embodied steadiness.
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Grounded in Polyvagal Theory and informed by IFS principles, Sayle focuses on how internal systems organize around protection and connection. She brings thoughtful pacing and systems awareness to the work of integration, helping practitioners strengthen regulation, expand access to Self-led presence, and cultivate resilience rooted in biological safety rather than effort. She understands that sustainable change does not come from pushing through, but from creating the conditions in which the nervous system can reorganize with clarity and trust.
As Founding Partner of FounderWell and founder of Chair Mountain Coaching, Sayle bridges leadership development and internal systems work, supporting healers and leaders in aligning external structures with internal coherence. Her work examines the subtle fractures that occur when responsibility accumulates without reflection, and she helps professionals restore integrity between what they carry outwardly and what they experience internally. She believes that leadership and healing share the same foundation: the capacity to remain present under load without abandoning oneself.
At Chair Mountain Ranch, this philosophy becomes embodied practice. Growth unfolds within intentional structure, nourishment, and relational depth—creating the conditions for integration that extends beyond insight into lived experience. The land itself reinforces pacing, steadiness, and reverence for process.
Certified IFS Level 3 | Somatic IFS Step 2Achara Tarfa
Achara works at the intersection of systemic leadership and internal structural integrity. With over 30 years rooted in community advocacy and culturally responsive education, she supports influential leaders who recognize that collective impact depends on internal coherence. Drawing from a life shaped by diverse bloodlines and lived experience at the edges of systemic pressure, she brings radical congruence and somatic honesty to the leadership landscape.
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As a Level 3 Certified IFS Practitioner and mentor within the global IFS community, Achara specializes in the resolution of shame, anxiety, depression, and the chronic energy cost of masking. Her work focuses on system reconciliation, helping leaders resolve the friction that arises when external responsibility outpaces internal readiness. She understands that urgency is rarely a reflection of leadership from the heart, for the heart is never urgent. Instead, it is paced, reverent, and operates in love.
Achara’s private practice is intentionally limited to ensure depth, precision, and unhurried somatic presence. She provides the disciplined, steady container required for structural integration and the sustained coherence that replaces exhaustive energy costs. In this space, she helps leaders notice what enters the doorway to the soul and supports the process of bringing what is wounded into unburdened expansion.
Beyond her private practice work, Achara contributes to public governance and trauma-informed community frameworks. She serves as President of PATH and as Co-Founder of the Global Trauma Institute, training the next generation of practitioners to hold the complex, high-stakes environments required by the influential leaders of today. Her approach is grounded in embodied sovereignty, supporting those who are ready to mature into influence with presence, integrity, and an unshakable commitment to the truth, both inside and out.
Investment
Chair Mountain Retreat
Investment: $2,800 – $3,600 (sliding scale)
What’s Included:
4 days & 3 nights Lodging @ Chair Mountain Ranch
Curated meals by CIA chef
Transportation from Aspen Airport
Space is limited to maintain depth and attention.
Sliding Scale
We offer a sliding scale to help make this accessible to the people who want this work. We ask participants to place themselves in this range with these principles:
If you make over $125K per year, the top of the range is appropriate.
If you live a life of financial stability and/or have access to generational wealth, the top of the range is appropriate.
If you make under $75K per year, the lower end of the range is appropriate.
If you have experienced generational oppression and/or have struggled with financial stability, the lower end of the range is appropriate.
Application Process
How to Apply
Because of the experiential nature of the work, participation is application-based to help participants get a more full sense of the retreat prior to commitment.
The application includes contact information, modalities that participants use, no of years in practice, professional and personal information that participants want to share and what, if any active trauma, might be in the space.
We will meet with potential participants in a brief follow-up call to meet each other and confirm mutual interest.
FAQ’s
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the group size?
Up to 10 participants
What level of IFS experience is required?
None
Is this CE eligible?
Not at this time. We are exploring this option.
Are private rooms available?
Each participant will have their own bedroom - and share a cabin with 1 other person. Each cabin has a full kitchen and bathroom with living and dining area. All meals are included and communal.
What is the cancellation policy?
50% of the tuition is non-refundable. 50% can be rolled forward to our next retreat if cancelled within 60 days of the event.
What airport do I fly into?
Aspen. We will provide transport back and forth to the ranch.
