ABOUT TIME YOU REST.

abouttime.rest is a 10-day, one-on-one (max three people) digital detox and soul confrontation in the Romanian mountains for high-functioning, high-achieving, quietly disillusioned people who make hard decisions for a living and are tired of burning out in style.

In one sentence: ten days offline in the mountains, with one person who sees through your defences, to map what’s really running your life and change how you live when you go back.

Most of our clients aren’t trying to “find themselves”. They’re trying to stop bleeding onto the people they’re responsible for. Stewardship is a relationship, not a performance.

At a glance

• 10 days in the Romanian mountains. 1:1 (or max 3). No groups.
• Your smartphone stays off, sealed and physically away. A dumbphone is available for logistics.
• Structured from wake-up to lights-out, so you never have to decide what to do next.
• Daily rhythm: silent walks, journaling, meditation, cooking together, long conversations, and real solitude.
• Selection: email → video call → in-person meet (your city).
• You leave with: a written map of competing commitments & big assumptions, a stewardship plan, and a simple 30-day experiment plan.
• Not therapy. No diagnosing. Strict container. Voluntary entry. Clear exit.

Done watching your life through glass, half-present and half-scrolling?
Done wondering how much longer your soul can keep going on low battery while your calendar stays full?
This is ten days where your phone loses its crown, your role sits on the shelf, and someone steps into your universe with you and asks, without flinching: “If not this performance, then what are you really here to live?”

Digital detox, without the fairy dust

This is a boutique, fully structured 10-day program in the mountains of Romania. It’s designed for high-functioning, high-achieving, disillusioned elites whose brains have become Slack channels with legs: people everyone else leans on while they quietly fall apart.

Think: disillusioned effective altruists, second-career founders, PE/VC partners post-exit, media intellectuals at a crossroads, political advisers burned by power proximity, anyone who has tasted power but not wholeness.

You hand in your smartphone. You get a “dumb” phone for emergencies and logistics. There are no screens. No infinite scroll. No inbox. No Slack. No “just a quick check.”

Modern life sells a neat myth: you are a self-authored project, fully in control. Reality is messier. You didn’t design your nervous system. Your dignity isn’t earned. Your mind isn’t a calculator when it’s cooked. And your deepest bonds came before your choices. That’s why we don’t “expand your options”. We rebuild your capacity for stewardship, under conditions that make self-deception expensive.

What this is not

• Not group therapy. It’s one person, or at most three, not a circle of strangers.
• Not spiritual cosplay. No robes, no mantras, no “high-vibe tribe” talk.
• Not a productivity camp. We’re not here to optimise you into a better machine.
• Not a guru show. No one here claims to have “the method.” We have questions, structure, and presence.
• Not trauma merch. We’re not here to turn your pain into a brand, a storyline, or an identity you never put down.
• Not a shrine to your wounds. We respect real trauma, but we don’t treat every disappointment as a diagnosis or sell you salvation from your “brokenness”.
• Not a place to hide behind labels. If you’re hoping “my trauma” will insulate you from any criticism or responsibility, this is the wrong retreat.

What this is

• A carefully designed interruption to your normal life, in nature, with zero decision fatigue.
• A space where we step into your world, your values, your worries, and live them with you from the inside.
• An honest look at your “immunity to change” (credit to Robert Kegan & Lisa Lahey) and the hidden commitments keeping you stuck.
• Time to feel your life again, not just think about it in bullet points.

Who this is for (and who it isn’t)

You’ll probably feel seen if at least a few of these sound familiar:

You think in systems, see through façades, and can hold tension without needing to spiritualise it. You share our unease with the status quo and are not afraid of moral ambiguity; you’re just tired of navigating it alone.

• You have people, capital, or narratives depending on you, and you’re secretly running on fumes.
• Your life looks “successful” on paper, but feels thin, performative, or strangely lonely.
• You’re tired of carrying everyone else’s emotions while having nowhere to put your own.
• You’ve tried yoga retreats, breathwork, mindfulness apps… and came back to the same inbox and the same patterns.
• You crave clear, grown-up conversations about meaning, fear, grief, ambition, and love, without spiritual jargon.
• You’re willing to examine not just what was done to you, but what you are now doing with your time, your power, and your relationships.

You built this life for good reasons. We’re not here to mock that. We’re here to examine the cost.

Stewardship isn’t martyrdom. If you’re collapsing, your people aren’t safer. They’re just borrowing time from your body.

It’s probably not for you if:

• You want entertainment, pampering, or a spa holiday. This is gentler than your life, but more honest.
• You want someone to “fix you” while you stay passive. This is collaborative, not magical.
• You collect retreats, modalities, and spiritual content but avoid real confrontation. We are not for wellness junkies or the Instagram ayahuasca crowd.
• You’re looking for clinical treatment. We’re not a clinic and we don’t pretend to be.
• You want your trauma label to put you beyond question. Here, your history is honoured, but it does not exempt you from scrutiny or change.

Why this is different from yoga, Vipassana & “kumbaya” circles

Most retreats ask you to step into a different universe: new language, new hierarchy, new rituals, circles, and mandatory sharing rounds. You fly in, play a temporary character, feel something intense, then fly back into the exact same life.

We do the opposite. We, the facilitators, step into your universe.

In that sense, this is strategic shadow work for people who shape systems, narratives, incentives, and institutional behaviour, and are tired of being shaped by them. We’re here to dislodge certainty, expose fragility, plant subversive seeds, and gently nudge the fracture lines that are already there.

• We start from your reality: your boardrooms, your WhatsApp threads, your family system, your political constraints, your inbox.
• We ask “What is it like to be you, in detail?” and stay there long enough for the truth to stop being polite.
• We try your beliefs on from the inside until your values, fears, and loyalties feel like ours too.

Only then do we start gently messing with the script:

• Where do you say you value something, but your calendar violently disagrees?
• Where are you keeping promises to everyone except yourself?
• Where are you over-responsible (for others) and under-responsible (for your own needs)?

That’s what we call “non-therapy therapy”: no diagnosis, no couch, no pathologising. Just two or three humans, living your life with you for ten days, and asking the kind of questions most people in your world are too invested or too scared to ask.

Boundaries

This is a 10-day, high-intensity container. We’re warm, not soft. Clear, not clinical. We take your life seriously, and we don’t collude with your stories.

• Not therapy. We don’t diagnose, prescribe, or provide crisis support. If you’re in acute distress (active addiction, severe depression, suicidality, untreated PTSD), this isn’t the right place. Seek proper clinical care first.
• Not trauma merch. We won’t turn your pain into a product, a brand, or an alibi. Your history is honoured, but it does not exempt you from scrutiny or change.
• No label shields. If “my trauma” or pop-psych vocabulary is being used to dodge responsibility or repair, we will name it.
• Strict container. Voluntary entry. Clear exit.

We respect good therapy and serious trauma work. What we offer here is different: emotionally intense, reality-based reflection on your life, your patterns, and your responsibilities.

The loop we’ll interrupt

You don’t burn out because you’re weak. You burn out because your mind is running an old survival script that once kept you safe and now quietly runs your calendar.

• Stated goal: “I want to rest, be more present, step back a bit.”
• Actual behaviour: say yes, stay online, take one more call, keep holding everything together.
• Hidden commitments: never disappoint; never be the weak link; never be seen as selfish, lazy, replaceable, out of the loop.
• Big assumptions: “If I rest, things will fall apart.” “If I slow down, I’ll be exposed.” “If I stop performing, I’ll lose love, status, or control.”

In Immunity to Change language, you have an improvement goal, behaviours that work against it, competing commitments, and big assumptions that keep everything frozen in place.

Over ten days we map that immunity explicitly, test the assumptions in real time, and design experiments and systems that make it harder for the old script to silently retake control once you go back.

Most “overwork” is distorted stewardship: staying indispensable so you never have to face what happens when you’re not.

• Delegating something you’ve been hoarding.
• Telling the truth you’ve been postponing.
• Letting a system feel a bit of discomfort so it can grow up.

We’ll know it worked if you can name your big assumptions, run at least two real-world tests against them, and redesign one weekly system that used to run you.

What you leave with

We don’t promise a “new you.” You’re not a software release. What we aim for is something more boring and more powerful:

• A brutally honest map of how your life actually works: time, energy, relationships, addictions, responsibilities.
• Clarity on 2–3 non-negotiable changes you’re willing to make in the next 6–12 months.
• A handful of concrete systems and boundaries: in your calendar, in your phone, in your relationships.
• Language for your fears and loyalties so you stop being run by them from the shadows.
• A written “owner’s manual” for yourself, created together over the 10 days.
• A stewardship plan. What you will protect (people, relationships, integrity), what you will stop sacrificing, and what you will redesign so others don’t pay for your depletion.

You leave with a written map of your immunity-to-change, your top competing commitments, and a simple 30-day experiment plan.

Not just insight. A renewed ability to bind yourself by choice to something real, and stop renegotiating your life every morning.

Your calendar is not private. It lands on people.

We translate this into a small set of “when X, then I Y” commitments that live in your actual life:

• “When my body hits 7/10 on exhaustion, then I postpone something external instead of cancelling something internal.”
• “When I’m tempted to say yes out of guilt, then I buy 24 hours before answering.”
• “When I catch myself scrolling to numb, then I use one of the exits we designed together.”

This is not a pep talk. It is a precise, occasionally brutal, always careful account of who you are, what grips you, and where your system is already cracking. You leave with language and structure, not hype.

One question we will not avoid is: “If nothing changes in the next 12 months, what breaks first: your body, your relationships, or your integrity?” Part of our work is to answer that honestly, then design your life so you don’t have to find out the hard way.

Ten days, zero decision fatigue

Burnout doesn’t come only from workload. It comes from a thousand tiny decisions and self-negotiations every day. Here, that stops. From the moment you arrive, the structure holds you.

What a day roughly looks like

• Morning · Wake-up, simple body check-in, handwritten journaling. No phone, no news, no notifications.
• Silent walk · Slow walk in the forest or hills. No talking, just letting your brain re-learn boredom and curiosity.
• Shared breakfast · Cooking or preparing food together. Ordinary, grounded, sometimes awkward, always real.
• Deep conversation block · 90–120 minutes of guided questions, mapping your life, your conflicts, your unseen loyalties.
• Solo time · Reading, writing, staring at a tree, napping. Structured, but not filled.
• Afternoon practice · Light meditation, breath, or reflective exercises. No incense, no grand claims, just nervous-system hygiene.
• Evening · Cooking together, debrief, questions for the next day. Gentle, unhurried, human.

The exact structure shifts over the 10 days, but one thing doesn’t: at every point, you know what you’re doing and why. You’re not asked to “figure it out as you go.”

Your smartphone stays off, sealed and physically away. Because physical distance = emotional distance. You carry a basic phone for emergency contact and essential logistics. No secret scrolling in the bathroom. No “just checking something.” The environment is designed so you don’t have to use willpower.

The facilitator: diagnostic soul confrontation, not “wellness”

At the core of this program is Ilinca. She is not your therapist, not your coach, not your consultant. What she offers is an emotionally intense, deeply intuitive, no-bullshit soul excavation for people who are used to being the sharpest person in the room.

• She sees through defences in minutes and has zero incentive to please you.
• She refuses the over-diagnosing, pathologising pop-psychology circus. No DSM-5 labels, no “attachment style” cosplay.
• She listens until your patterns of loyalty, fear, self-betrayal and ambition show up, then mirrors them back with surgical precision.
• She is a translator between worlds: she understands both the inner rot of systems and the inner hunger of those still complicit in it.

She doesn’t “read you”. She listens for patterns: competing commitments, repeated trade-offs, and the stories you use to make them feel inevitable.

We frame this as diagnostic soul confrontation – diagnostic in the everyday, not medical, sense. Not therapy. Not a ‘weekly coaching package’. A precise, sometimes uncomfortable, always unhedged profile of your psyche that only she can mirror back.

She also has a low tolerance for therapy-speak used as armour. Words like “gaslighting”, “narcissist”, “trauma bond”, “attachment style” or “boundaries” are not off-limits, but they are never the end of the conversation. If you use them, she will ask: “What actually happened? What did you do? What did they do? What are you contributing to this pattern?” Labels don’t absolve you from repair. If a relationship is workable, we’ll treat it as workable.

• We won’t co-sign your pop-psych diagnoses of everyone around you.
• We won’t “empower” you straight out of potentially workable relationships by pathologising your partner.
• We will hold you accountable for your own part in every dynamic you describe.

“No retreat, ceremony, or drug has ever touched what this woman surfaced in me. I will never see myself the same way again.” — anonymous participant

To put it bluntly: you’re not paying us to agree that everyone else is the problem. You’re paying for the one person in the world who will see through your curated life in twenty minutes, include you in the picture, and actually say the thing no one else dares to say.

Why the Romanian mountains?

Because they’re stunning, quiet, slightly underestimated, and logistically simple from Western Europe. Direct flights into Bucharest from most major European cities, then a drive or train up into the hills.

• Setting · A small mountain village / valley. Forests, hills, slow clouds, actual darkness at night.
• Accommodation · A small, honest cabin in the woods: a good bed, real heat, and a view that makes your phone feel stupid.
• Food · Mostly home-cooked, mostly local, with a focus on simple, digestible, non-performative food.
• Language · The program is in English. Your facilitators are Romanian-based, used to working cross-culturally, and some of us hold multiple citizenships.
• Safety · Romania is in the EU, with boringly normal infrastructure. The risk is mostly that you’ll want to come back.

Exact location details are shared once we’ve spoken and agreed we’re a good fit for each other.

Scarcity, selection & fit

This is not a mass-market wellness product. It is a personal reckoning. A mirror almost no one else will hold up to you. We treat it as a single, high-conviction trade in your own self-knowledge, not a subscription or an annuity stream.

We reject far more applicants than we accept. Fit is non-negotiable.

We say no to

• People who want reassurance more than truth.
• People who want a new identity instead of new behaviour.
• People who outsource responsibility to labels.

Non-negotiables

• Only 15 people per year. That’s the hard cap. Most who inquire will not come. Some shouldn’t.
• Picky by design. We work only with people who can think in systems, see through façades, and tolerate moral ambiguity without flinching.
• Three-step selection. Mutual due diligence: email → call → in-person meet. Then, if it’s a yes: dates, outline, logistics, contract.
• No repeat by default. There are no “packages” and no upsell. The default is: one intensive, then you live with what you’ve seen.

Commitment is not a gimmick; it is skin in the game and narrative fuel. The right people are willing to stake time, comfort, and ego for the one thing that actually cuts through their own performance: a clear, unsanitised account of who they are, what holds them back, and where their fracture lines run.

Pricing & sponsored places

Pricing is ridiculously simple: it’s pegged to your earning power over ten days. Not because we want to punish success. Because we want commitment to match reality.

There’s a minimum and a maximum. We’ll state both on the call.

If ten days of your life isn’t worth ten days of your earning power, you’re not ready for what we do.

Accessibility, without the theatre

Each year we reserve 3 sponsored places for people with real-world responsibility and impact, but limited liquidity. This is not a discount, and it’s not a vibe. It’s the same program, the same standards, the same confrontation. The only difference is what you can afford.

How sponsorship works

• Fit first. Money second. We only discuss sponsorship after we’ve spoken and met and both agree it’s a serious fit.
• No sob story required. You give a straightforward picture of your finances. We may ask for proof. If you lie, it’s a hard no.
• Sponsored doesn’t mean passive. You still bring skin in the game: ten days offline, discomfort, honesty, follow-through.

FAQ

Can I apply for sponsorship? Yes, after the call and in-person meet, if there’s a fit.

Format & logistics

• Length · 10 full days, arrival the evening before Day 1, departure the morning after Day 10.
• Group size · 1 person (solo) or up to 3 people from the same context (co-founders, leadership trio, couple + trusted friend).
• Season · Only 15 people per year. No back-to-back conveyor belt.
• Attention · Boutique, not mass-market. Real human attention from people who could earn well doing other things.

We do not run this back-to-back. We need recovery time too. That’s part of the quality control.

We finalise dates, contracts, and practicalities once we’ve had a proper conversation and both agree this is the right intervention at the right time.

How to explore if this is for you

No “Apply Now” funnel. No ticking boxes to impress an algorithm.

If something in you relaxed while reading this, and another part rolled its eyes but kept scrolling, that’s usually a good sign.

If you’re looking for someone to validate that everyone else is toxic and you are the lone sane person in a broken world, we’re not your people. If you’re willing to have your own story cross-examined with care, we might be.

Step 1 · Send an honest email

Write to admissions@abouttime.rest with:

• Two or three paragraphs about where you are in life right now.
• What scares you most about taking ten days fully offline.
• What you secretly hope might be different twelve months from now.

Step 2 · Short call

We schedule a 60-minute video call. Cameras on, bullshit off. We ask questions, you ask questions. If it’s clearly a no on either side, we say it plainly and move on. If it’s a maybe-yes, we go to Step 3.

Step 3 · In-person meet

We meet in your city. Not to “sell” you. To confirm the fit in real life. If the chemistry, seriousness, and intent don’t hold up offline, we don’t proceed. We do this because this isn’t a transaction for insight. It’s a short-term covenant: we take your life seriously, and you stop negotiating with yourself every five minutes.

Step 4 · If it’s a yes

We fix dates, send you a detailed program outline, logistics, packing list, and a clear contract. You get one last week of “normal life + smartphone” before you come up into the mountains and switch it all off for a while.

No branding exercises. No higher purpose speeches. Just humans, time, and a structure strong enough to let you stop performing for a bit and listen to the parts of you that have been whispering for years.