ALIVE - Arizona, USA, March 12–27, 2027
Accountability Love Integrity Vitality Embodiment
I: The Journey Within
A 7-day immersive training in coming home to your whole, integrated self.
This 7-day immersive training is for anyone ready to come home to themselves in a deeper and more lasting way, gently dissolving and rewriting the dysfunctional patterns, scripts, and conditioning that no longer serve.
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Through a trauma-aware, capacity-building process, we awaken dormant potential and learn practical tools that support the nervous system and deepen connection with Presence.
Step by step, participants reclaim the wisdom of the body, heart, emotions, and soul, reconnect with the birthright of core authenticity and authentic voice, and discover what it means to live in greater flow.
The “new operating software” is not something taught or given from the outside. In this journey, we guide you to reboot and source a renewed way of living from deep inside your own integrated self.
The week is intentionally spacious. Daily practice, guided inquiry, and group process are woven together with breathwork, embodiment, and honest conversation inside a clear, held container.
Everything is invitational.
There is no single “right” way to arrive or participate. Couples, singles, and long-time students of this work each find their own edge, moving at a pace that supports real integration rather than overwhelm.
What the Week Involves
Mornings open with movement and breath practice, followed by teaching sessions that build progressively across the week.
Afternoons are dedicated to integration, small-group work, time with facilitators, rest, and personal practice so the material can settle.
Evenings bring the group together for ritual, reflection, and closing the day. Perhaps even a movie night with cuddle time.
Clear agreements and boundaries are in place for both participants and the facilitation team, supporting a mutual, consent-based culture in which you remain the author of your experience.
Opting in or out is always available.
No prior experience is required. What matters is a genuine willingness to show up for yourself and for a life that is both divinely and humanly possible.
WE: The Journey Together
A 7-day immersive training in relationality and embodied intimacy.
This multi-layered experience explores mastery across every form of relationship. It deepens the study of human synergy and builds practical skill for creating healthy connection in intimate partnerships, families, business relationships, communities, and humanity as a whole.
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Together we examine the dynamics that shape how we relate, including patterns of control, manipulation, collective fear, competition, group behavior, loneliness, and more. We learn tools that support emotional mastery and expand our capacity for love, care, and skilled relational presence.
Relationality is the recognition that nothing stands alone. We are connected to everyone and everything, and meaning arises through connection. Most tools store information in isolation. We build ones that reveal the ties between people, ideas, and experiences, because that is how humans actually understand the world.
Connection is our most valuable asset. Navigating life with more presence, skill, and heart is essential for anyone who wants healthier relationships in every area of life.
Across the week we work directly with presence, breath, movement, and rhythm as foundations for lasting attraction and synergy. Daily practice builds real capacity, including the cultivation of life force and sexual energy, ejaculatory choice work and other power building practices, taught with care, humor, and zero shame.
The week also includes optional opportunities for touch and intimate sensual or sexual experiences. These are fully invitational and consent-based, offered as additional pathways for those who wish to explore embodied intimacy more directly, while remaining entirely optional for everyone.
What the Week Involves
Mornings open with movement and breath practice to build the physical foundation for the day. Teaching sessions unpack presence, polarity, and communication, followed by guided practice in pairs, triads, and quads.
Evenings bring the group together for integration, ritual, and connection.
Clear agreements and boundaries are held for both participants and the facilitation team. Everything remains invitational, with full freedom to participate at your own pace and capacity.
Completion of the first week, The Journey Within, or of an ISTA training or equivalent (to be approved by the Lead Facilitator) is required - reach out if you're not sure. You do not need to arrive with a partner. Previous participants have come single, coupled, and everything in between.
max 40 participants per week
Beautiful desert nature-rich venue with pond and newly renovated housing
Great Facilitation Team
Including Accommodation and meals
Good to know
Can I join for just one week?
Yes. You can come for the first week only (The Journey Within), the second week only (The Journey Together - if you meet its prerequisite), or both weeks for the full two-week initiation. Choose your option when you register.
Who is this training for?
Anyone ready to come home to themselves in a deeper and more lasting way. Couples, singles, and long-time students of this work each find their own edge - there is no single “right” way to arrive or participate.
What will I actually be asked to do?
Expect daily practice, guided inquiry, and group process, woven together with movement, breathwork, embodiment, and honest conversation. Everything is invitational: you remain the author of your experience, and opting in or out is always available.
Do I need any prior experience?
Not for the first week. What matters is a genuine willingness to show up for yourself - the week is intentionally spacious, moving at a pace that supports real integration rather than overwhelm.
For the second week, The Journey Together, completion of the first week, The Journey Within, or of an ISTA training or equivalent (to be approved by the Lead Facilitator) is required - reach out if you're not sure.
Do I need to come with a partner?
No. Previous participants have come single, coupled, and everything in between.
What does the second week actually involve?
Mornings open with movement and breath practice. Teaching sessions unpack presence, polarity, and communication, followed by guided practice in pairs, triads, and quads, and evenings bring the group together for integration, ritual, and connection. The week also includes optional opportunities for touch and intimate sensual or sexual experiences - fully invitational, consent-based, and entirely optional for everyone.
Facilitators
Dez Nichols
Lead Facilitator
Dez Nichols is the creator of ALIVE and founder of the Integration School. An author, speaker, and teacher of Emotional Mastery, he has spent more than 20 years creating and refining the week-long training that ALIVE evolves from - work that has reached over 10,000 participants in more than 46 countries.
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Allison Avalon, MHS, Ord.
Co-Facilitator
Allison Avalon is an integration teacher, facilitator, ceremonial musician, and guide whose work is devoted to helping people come home to themselves. She supports people in integrating the parts of the human experience that have become separated - body, mind, emotion, sexuality, spirit, relationship, and nature - so they can live with greater presence, integrity, pleasure, and wholeness.
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Her inquiry into consciousness and the nature of being human began in childhood. Highly sensitive to the natural world and fascinated by altered states, embodiment, mortality, and the mysteries of consciousness, Allison spent much of her early life trying to understand how to remain deeply attuned to her own experience while also finding her place in the world. This became a lifelong exploration of a question that continues to inform her work today: How do we meet life fully without abandoning ourselves in order to belong?
Her professional path has been similarly integrative. With a B.S. in Ecology and an M.H.S. in Sustainable Systems/Permaculture, Allison began teaching in the early 2000s through natural building, sustainable agriculture, and Deep Ecology. Over time, her work shifted to the inner landscape; to meditation, breathwork, somatics, Tantra, sacred sexuality, end-of-life work, ceremonial music, and transformational facilitation.
Sustainability starts within. What may appear to be many different disciplines are, for Allison, expressions of the same inquiry: how we come into right relationship with ourselves, one another, the living world, and life itself. At the center of this inquiry is integration - the process of bringing what has become separate back into relationship and wholeness. For Allison, integrity is integration embodied: the alignment of our inner truth with how we actually live.
She is a 500-hour GPBA-certified breathwork practitioner, an ordained minister with more than two years of formal ministerial and entheogenic-guidance training, a certified hospice caregiver, and an ISTA-trained sacred-sexuality practitioner. Her own practice includes decades of contemplative, embodied, and relational inquiry.
At the heart of Allison's work is presence. For her, Tantra is not primarily about sexuality; it is the practice of meeting life directly by expanding our capacity to experience what is actually happening within and around us. Eros is part of that wholeness, as are grief, mortality, relationship, nature, silence, pleasure, creativity, and the capacity to surrender into life and death.
Her facilitation combines candor and profound compassion with highly attuned somatic observation. She believes we can only meet another in places where we have met ourselves. Having explored a wide range of human experience in her own life and practice, she brings warmth, humor, perceptiveness, and grounded honesty to helping others recognize where they have become disconnected from themselves - and find their own way home.
Music is central to Allison's work and one of her deepest medicines. A singer, songwriter, and ceremonial musician currently creating her second album, she weaves live music, voice, and immersive sound into transformational spaces as tools for regulation, expression, surrender, and integration.
Allison believes transformation is most meaningful when it becomes embodied change rather than a peak experience. Insight alone is not integration. Her intention is to create enough safety, presence, and nervous-system capacity for what we discover about ourselves to become how we actually live - changing how we relate, create, love, choose, and participate in our lives. Ultimately, the measure of the work is whether we become more aligned with our own truth and more able to live a life we can wholeheartedly stand behind.
Across all of her work runs one invitation: to know yourself deeply enough, trust yourself fully enough, and become present and courageous enough to live a life that genuinely feels like you - one you can look back upon at the end of your life and know you truly lived, and lived well.
Marion Ellyard
Co-Facilitator
Marion is an international facilitator, somatic therapist, and tantra teacher devoted to embodied awakening and conscious relating. For over 30 years, she has guided thousands through transformational work, blending somatic therapy, meditation, and nervous system regulation. As the founder of The Taste of Love Tantra School, her work brilliantly bridges the stillness of white tantra with the aliveness and polarity of red tantra.
The venue & catering
Our venue for the training features beautiful, spacious grounds including ponds and a wooded creek to walk along. There are horses and other sweet animals around. All of the rooms have been recently renovated and are extremely nice and cozy.
We have master retreat chef Jason Dolly and his team preparing restaurant-level fresh food meals including plenty of both meat and vegetarian protein options. Lots of fresh vegetables, cooking from primarily whole foods, and catering well to special needs diets.
What's included
- 6 nights accommodation per week (plus the nights between the weeks if you join both)
- Three meals a day for each training week
- Full curriculum, facilitation, and course materials
Details
- I: March 12–18, 2027
- WE: March 21–27, 2027
- Arizona, USA
- Organizer: Nathan Coury
- nathan@nathancoury.com
Pricing
One week:I: orWE:
Same price for either week. The second week requires completing the first week, or an ISTA training or equivalent (approved by the Lead Facilitator).
Regular | $2,800 |
Couple's Shared Room limited availability | $2,850 |
Private Room limited availability | $3,400 |
Self Camping RV/Van/Tent NO hook-up | $2,550 |
Self Camping RV/Van/Tent WITH hook-up | $2,750 |
ISTA Graduate | $2,500 |
ISTA Core Member Organizer to communicate pricing | |
Assistant MUST BE ACCEPTED FIRST | $1,200 |
Both weeks:I: +WE:
Regular | $5,000 |
Couple's Shared Room limited availability | $5,100 |
Private Room limited availability | $6,200 |
Self Camping RV/Van/Tent NO hook-up | $4,500 |
Self Camping RV/Van/Tent WITH hook-up | $4,900 |
ISTA Graduate | $4,600 |
ISTA Core Member Organizer to communicate pricing | |
Assistant MUST BE ACCEPTED FIRST | $2,400 |
Pricing covers tuition, accommodation, meals, and course materials. If you're doing both trainings, your accommodations in between are covered, but meals in between will be an additional charge.
Payment, Terms & Cancellation Policy
- A deposit is required to hold your place: $600 for one training, $1,200 for both trainings.
- If the world situation changes and we need to cancel the event due to COVID or other travel/event restrictions, at least one week before it starts, we will refund all money less our non-refundable expenses (such as administration, venue deposit, food, advertising, etc).
- If for some reason you become unable to attend, you have the following options:
- If cancelling over 45 days before the date of the training, your deposit (and any additional funds paid, minus a $300 admin fee) will be refunded to you.
- If cancelling less than 45 days before the date of the training, your deposit ($600 or $1,200) is forfeited in full. Please let us know as soon as possible if this is the case.
- If you have not paid your balance less than 45 days before the first day of the training, the same will apply and your spot may be opened to another participant.
- If cancelling less than 21 days before the date of the training, your deposit and all payments are forfeited. Please let us know as soon as possible if this is the case.
- If the training begins and you test positive for COVID and we need to isolate you, we can offer no refunds or transfers because the costs will all have been paid.
- Potential transfers will be handled on a case-by-case basis.
- We all take this risk together, and take the steps needed to have a safe training.
- Also note that bank charges and transfer fees are the responsibility of the participant.
Accommodation & food
- Participants share twin or triple rooms, each with a private bathroom.
- A limited number of single/double rooms are available for an additional fee - ask when you register.
- Meals will be plant forward with animal protein options available at most meals, sourced locally where possible, and can accommodate most dietary needs with advance notice.