Curriculum for the Eftalou Earth Re-Alignment Retreat
"Living the Elements: Heart-Centered Alchemy in Nature"
For students & practitioners of acupuncture, healing, and human development
Daily Rhythm: Swimming and bathing in the springs: From early to 11 am, and 4 to 6 pm. Can include walk, journaling, meditation, quantum touch meridian practice.
The week is devoted to receiving the sun-heart resonance. Open ended inquiry into true love
Inquiry into the heart as the seat of sun conciousness.
Listening to the heart and it's language
The relationship between heart as a core of awareness and each one of the other aspects: Thought, somatic soul, essence and etherial soul.
Each day is devoted to one Element’s resonance: its season, spirit, organ, sound, color, virtue, wound, and healing.
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Morning Session: From 11.00 to 13.00 (Elemental Embodiment)
→5 element moving inquiries, qigong, circle of dream and story telling
Includes: -
Afternoon Session: From 18.00 to 20.00 pm (Inquiry & Integration)
→ Elemental teachings + 5 Element diagnostics, pulses, meridian-based work, dreamwork, or field walks.
Includes: group reflection, personal ritual or artistic expression (song, ink, stone, sound, etc.).
🜃 Day 1: FIRE — Communion and Heart Field
The formless and universal nature of awareness
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Season: Summer
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Virtue: Joy / Intimacy / Shen
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Organ Pair: Heart / Small Intestine (+ Pericardium / Triple Burner)
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Inquiry: How does joy move through me? Who do I trust with my heart?
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Practices: Heart-touch meditation, laughing practice, joy walks, voice work.
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Heart Thread: Anchoring the heart in presence and safety.
🜁 Day 2: EARTH — Centering and Receiving
Healing thought: The journey from Plato's cave to sun conciousness
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Season: Late summer/ Receiving nourishment
- Virtue: Integrity / Reverence
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Organ Pair: Spleen / Stomach
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Inquiry: How do I nourish and be nourished?
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Practices: Grounding, soft belly awareness, slow walking meditation, earth altar making.
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Heart Thread: Making space for the heart to breathe.
🜂 Day 3: METAL— Autumn. Fire melts grief into praise, respect and gratefulness
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Season: Summer
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Virtue: Joy / Intimacy / Shen
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Organ Pair: Lung / Large Intestine
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Inquiry: What is ready to be let go? What is sacred?
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Practices: Breath, sound (sighing, weeping), grief ritual, listening to the stones.
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Heart Thread: Reclaiming joy as medicine, intimacy with self and other.
🜄 Day 4: WATER — Deep Listening and Rest in Presence.
The sacred marriage between conciousness and essence
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Season: Winter
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Virtue: Wisdom / Stillness
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Organ Pair: Kidney / Bladder
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Inquiry: What lives in my bones? What am I truly afraid of?
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Practices: Volcanic spring water ritual, bone breathing, night journey, dreamwork.
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Heart Thread: Letting the heart be held in mystery.
🜁 Day 5: WOOD — Visioning and Becoming. Individuated conciousness.
Alignment of Personality, to soul, to embodied presence.
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Season: Spring
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Virtue: Growth / Benevolence
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Organ Pair: Liver / Gallbladder
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Inquiry: What longs to grow in me? What truth needs to be spoken?
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Practices: Vision walks, anger work, creative writing or movement, acupuncture demos.
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Heart Thread: Protecting the heart’s direction, growing with love.
Day 6: Elemental Review in Circle
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Group Healing Ritual (with land offering)
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Optional: receive or give 5-element treatment
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Sharing dreams, insights, seeds
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“What will I carry forward in my heart?”
Day 7: INTEGRATION —Summer solstice rituals and fire offerings.
You will leave with:
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A lived connection to each element
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Practical seasonal alignment tools for your practice
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A felt sense of elemental diagnostics through your own body
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A renewed heart connection with your medicine path
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Overview of one year 5 element training by living with the seasons
Spring — Growth & Flow
- Transform stagnation and pain into movement and vision
- Explore anger as life-force; practice forgiveness and boundary setting
- Practice: Neck-release acupressure for liver/gall bladder
- Theme: Dreaming with direction
Summer — Expression & Joy
- Free your heart and relationships from reactivity
- Transform over-excitement into real connection and love
- Practice: Heart-opening bodywork + relational meditation
- Theme: Communication as care
Late Summer — Nourishment & Ground
- Transform worry into curiosity and embodied understanding
- Learn a seasonal diet to support digestion and release dogma
- Practice: Body-mind connection through touch and taste
- Theme: Healing through receiving
Autumn — Letting Go & Clarity
- Grief becomes gratitude, heaviness becomes breath
- Cleanse the body through breath, movement, and colon work
- Practice: Lungs & colon regulation
- Theme: Making space
Winter — Depth & Will
- From fear to wisdom, from depletion to reserves
- Learn warming therapies, Taoist willpower cultivation, back-body work
- Practice: Energetic storage and deep rest rituals
- Theme: The wisdom of the dark
Structure of Each Seasonal Module
Each weekend includes:
- A transmission: feeling into the seasonal and emotional themes
- A practice day: learning acupressure, movement, seasonal foods, and other healing tools
- Reflection: Explore your relationship with creativity, love, nourishment, letting go, rest
Pricing & Options
- €200 per seasonal weekend
- Full course: €800 (5 weekends)
- Online cohort option: €800 for the year
(Join a group of fellow travelers online, journeying through the year together)
Interested in a custom-designed learning path?
Contact me to design a study program
Winter — Water Element — The Fertile Dark
Winter’s Invitation: Rooting into the Fertile Dark
A Seasonal Practice of the Water Element
Season: Winter
Element: Water
Themes: Stillness, storage, darkness, reserves, mystery, fear, depth, trust
Organs: Kidneys & Bladder
Spiritual Energy: Zhi – the will to keep going
Climate: Cold
Emotion: Fear (and its transformation into wisdom/trust)
Invitation: Rest into the unknown. Listen below the surface.
WEEKLY INQUIRIES: Winter / Water
1) What does it mean to rest as a revolutionary act?
2) Where am I leaking energy without noticing?
3) How can I practice contentment with what is already here?
4) What are my energetic savings—what have I stored well?
5) Where does fear live in my body—and what is it trying to protect?
6) Can I trust the dark to hold me?
7) What does slowness teach me about myself?
8) How do I relate to exhaustion—as failure, or as signal?
9) What part of me needs to go underground right now?
10) If I had no one to impress, how would I move this week?
"Winter speaks in hushes and sighs.
Beneath the frozen soil, the seed dreams.
This is not death—it is depth.
A time for listening, not launching."
Seasonal Message
Winter is the season of the Water Element—the deep well of ancestral wisdom, the darkness that nourishes roots, the pause before emergence. In a world addicted to light and productivity, winter invites us to become quiet, to rest, to trust the unseen.
Water teaches us about essence—not performance, but presence. Not force, but flow.
It whispers: “Stop pushing. Start listening.”
In this chapter, we begin to attune to that whisper.
We make space for restoration, silence, and slow, honest reflection.
Elemental Teaching: The Water Within
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Water governs willpower, rest, and the bones in Chinese medicine.
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When in balance, it offers quiet strength, adaptability, and endurance.
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When out of balance, we may feel fearful, restless, or frozen in overwhelm.
Winter is not a mistake.
It is not something to escape.
It is part of the cycle. Part of you.
Practice: Dreaming with the Darkness
Materials: A candle, a blanket, and time.
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Prepare a quiet space. Light a single candle.
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Wrap yourself gently—invite stillness in.
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Ask: What is longing to be dreamed through me—not done, not achieved, but dreamed?
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Let the question linger. Don’t force answers. Let silence be your companion.
Write or draw whatever arises.
Embodied
Sit or lie down.
Place one hand on your belly, one on your heart.
Breathe in for four counts, exhale for six.
Repeat for five minutes.
With each exhale, release a pressure to do.
With each inhale, invite permission to be.
Reflective Journal
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What parts of me feel ready to rest?
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What am I afraid will happen if I stop?
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Where is life dreaming me forward from the roots?
Closing Blessing
May you remember that darkness is not the absence of light,
but the presence of something deeper.
May you rest like the seed beneath snow—
alive, invisible, becoming.
Looking Ahead
In Spring, Wood will awaken the sprouts.
But not yet.
Now we rest.6
The Breath of Spring — Remembering the Forest Within
1. The Wood Element, Liver & Gallbladder, Trees as teachers of collective rootedness and branching technology
Global Context Hook: As systems rupture and roots are lost (displacement, climate crisis, AI disruptions), can we remember how to grow together, not just survive?
Practice Invitation: Sit with a tree, feel your roots. Ask: what is one way I’ve grown dismembered from the forest of life?
2. The Ethereal Soul — Dreaming in a Time of Collapse
Liver, dreams, Taoist & Tibetan soul journey, Bardo
Global Context Hook: In times of planetary upheaval, the soul dreams not of escape but of deeper re-embodiment
Reflection
Reflect on a recent dream. What larger pattern might it be whispering to you?
3. Aligning the Soul and Personality — A Dialogue Across Timelines
Gestalt dialogue, harmony as co-creation
Global Context Hook: When the world is fractured, we are called to reconcile the fractured selves within us.
Practice Invitation: Two-chair exercise from your text (soul & personality) with gentle prompts.
4. Sacred Anger — Fuel for Transformation, Not Fire for Destruction
Theme: Liver’s anger, wood expansion, social protest, inner frustration
Global Context Hook: Injustice, climate grief, rage at systems—how do we transmute anger into sacred clarity and compassion?
Practice Invitation: Use the RAIN model on a recent moment of anger.
5. Healing Through the Eyes — The Soul’s Mirror
Theme: Eyes as soul windows, clarity, vision
Global Context Hook: In an image-saturated culture, what does it mean to truly see?
Reflection : Eye-gazing meditation with a partner or mirror.
6: The Asclepeion Within — Healing Through Dream and Light
Theme: Greek healing temples, dream medicine, sun, water
Global Context Hook: In an over-medicalized world, what ancestral healing technologies are still encoded in our bones?Practice Invitation: Create your own Asclepeion: water ritual + dream incubation.
7: Spring and Resurrection — Christ, Elias, and the Rewilding of Spirit
Theme: Easter, passage through death, mythic return
Global Context Hook: As dominant narratives crumble, which mythic templates offer re-rooting in planetary kinship?
Practice Invitation: Contemplate: What in you is dying? What wants to rise?8: The Climate of Emotion — Mapping Inner Weather
Theme: Emotions as climate, planetary grief, collective trauma
Global Context Hook: If Earth is alive, then the storms of anger, grief, and joy in us are not separate.Practice Invitation: Map your inner weather. How does it mirror the world’s?
9: The Spring Constitution — Wood Temperament & Society’s Neglect
Theme: Wood people, creativity, protest, trauma
Global Context Hook: Modernity stunts growth—what would it take to allow young (especially girls, femmes, queer youth) to fully expand?Practice Invitation: Share a protest, art, or impulse you’ve stifled. What wants to grow now?
10: Compassion as the Garden Gate — From Anger to Forgiveness
Theme: Tara Brach’s RAIN, Byron Bay’s Healing Journey, Dalai Lama’s forgiveness
Global Context Hook: As the world spirals into retribution and blame, how can we compost pain into possibility?
Practice Invitation: Forgiveness letter to yourself or the closest one
Fire — The Element of Connection and Blossoming
In the season of summer, the fire within us stirs and expands.
This element tends the warmth of our Heart, the discernment of the Small Intestine, the protection of the Pericardium, and the orchestration of the Triple Heater.Fire invites us to open, to shine, to connect deeply—with ourselves, each other, and the vastness of life. It is joy, yes—but not the fleeting kind. It’s the joy of being met, being felt, being in resonance with the who
When have you felt most radiantly alive in connection with others? What warms your inner fire?
Summer: The Season of Expansion and Sensuality
In the embrace of summer, we turn to the South—toward warmth, movement, and vitality.
We are stirred by the colour red, the pulse of bitter flavours, the vibration of laughter, the bloom of flowers, the awakening of attraction, and the essence of joy.Summer is not shy. It reveals. It invites us to be seen, to open our petals, to feel pleasure in our aliveness.
Reflection:
How does your body respond to summer’s energy? Where do you feel the fire of attraction, expression, or blooming?
Fire = The Art of Being With
Fire teaches us how to be with—not just beside each other, but in resonance.
This is not just about love, but about presence:
the ability to feel and be felt,
to speak from truth, and
to receive the truth of another without shutting down.When Fire is balanced in us, we radiate warmth and receive warmth. We become bridges of belonging.
Reflection :
Where in your life do you feel seen and received? How do you offer that warmth to others?
When the Fire in Us Glows Steady
A balanced fire warms without burning.
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The Heart pulses with quiet joy.
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The Pericardium (our heart’s guardian) allows us to feel safely open.
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The Triple Heater harmonizes our inner worlds, bringing peace to body, mind, and spirit.
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The Small Intestine discerns what nourishes and what does not—with clarity and trust.
In this state, we feel at home in connection. We can risk being close without losing ourselves.
What does a “steady inner fire” feel like for you? Where in your life do you feel safe enough to soften?
When the Fire Flickers or Flares Too High
Fire out of balance may show up as:
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Anxiety or emotional flatness
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A sense of not being able to connect—even when surrounded by people
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Oversharing or guarding the heart too tightly
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Trust that’s either withheld… or given too quickly
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Difficulty sensing what is truly nourishing
Sometimes, the fire within us burns too hot. Other times, it nearly goes out. Both are calls for gentle tending.
Reflection :
Which imbalance feels more familiar—overexposure or withdrawal? What helps you return to your center?
The Heart: Sovereign of the Inner Kingdom
The Heart is not a ruler of power, but of presence.
It governs not through force, but through compassion.
When the Heart is at peace, all parts of us find their rhythm.
When the Heart is troubled, the whole inner realm feels the dissonance.
The Heart knows how to listen, to harmonize, to hold joy and sorrow side by side.
Reflection :
What kind of sovereign is your Heart right now? What would it say if you asked it how it’s doing?
Earth: Centering & Nourishment
Weekly Inquiries for Living with Earth:
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What truly nourishes me?
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How do I give and receive care?
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What is my relationship to mother, to mothering?
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Can I distinguish between appetite and craving?
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Do I worry out of love or habit?
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Where in my life am I over-responsible?
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How do I restore balance in my body and life?
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Do I feel at home in myself?
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Can I soften into equanimity?
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What helps me feel grounded and whole?
Earth speaks in rhythms and recipes, in belly laughter and quiet knowing.
Metal: Clarity & Release
Weekly Inquiries for Living with Metal:
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What is ready to be released?
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How do I grieve—honestly, ritually, completely?
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What brings clarity to my mind and breath?
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Where are my boundaries weak, rigid, or wise?
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What values do I hold sacred?
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Can I find beauty in simplicity?
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What does my inner judge say—and is it true?
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How do I experience gratitude in the midst of loss?
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What do I treasure most in my practice and life?
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What remains when all else is stripped away?
Metal speaks through clean air, crisp endings, and the soft gleam of what’s essential.