The ten-day Tranquillum House program

The ten-day Tranquillum House program is a personal-development retreat whose promise of transformation is carried out through an escalating sequence of restrictions, altered states, and group experiences. Its ten-day frame lends the retreat the shape of a passage: guests are separated from familiar habits, led through experiences Masha calls necessary for change, and eventually return to ordinary life together. But the program’s structure also raises a persistent tension: its language of renewal sits beside rules and interventions that the guests do not always choose or understand.

Design and Daily Routine

The retreat begins by interrupting ordinary habits. Guests surrender electronic devices, and Frances switches off her phone and hands it over to Yao. The moment leaves her with a feeling of subservience, which she compares to being on a plane after the seatbelt sign comes on. Yao presents the digital detox as an enjoyable part of the experience and imagines that guests will not want their devices back when they leave. For Frances, however, the loss is immediate: without her phone, she cannot fall back on scrolling through Instagram and Pinterest when she cannot sleep.

Food is also governed by the program’s schedule. A five-minute warning bell announces meals, or smoothies during fasting periods, and guests are expected to come promptly to the dining room. Frances has forgotten about the fasts and asks whether room service is available. It is not, though Yao says that morning and late-evening smoothies will be brought to guests’ rooms. The rules translate the retreat’s ideals into everyday practices: the timetable, rather than individual preference, determines when guests eat and what is available.

Masha presents the opening period of silence as a deliberate way to set the retreat’s tone. She expects that guests will find it frightening and resist it, and she anticipates that some will break the rule, whether accidentally or on purpose. Her experience running Tranquillum House has taught her to expect guests to bend restrictions: in the early days, a guest arranged for a family-sized meatlovers pizza to be delivered at the back fence. Masha’s response is to monitor the property, check bags, and take precautions. The retreat therefore combines prescribed separation from ordinary life with an institutional system for enforcing its boundaries.

Silence, Altered States, and Trials

At the end of the noble silence, Masha celebrates the group’s completion of the rule and asks them to reintroduce conversation and eye contact gradually. Each person is invited to speak briefly about why they came, what they enjoy, what they find difficult, or simply ordinary facts about themselves. The return of speech is made into a shared threshold: after days in which even familiar gestures and faces have taken on heightened significance, the guests are asked to make themselves known to one another again.

The program also includes micro-dosing with LSD. Masha describes the doses as about a tenth of a normal dose and claims they can increase creativity, focus, spiritual awareness, and the quality of relationships. Frances responds with uncertainty when she realizes that the guests have been taking LSD. Lars, who had expected a health retreat to help him reduce his recreational drug use, finds the practice startling. The contrast exposes a gap between the retreat’s reassuring language of wellness and the guests’ understanding of what is being administered.

Some of the later experiences involve smoothies containing hallucinogenic drugs. After one such experience, Frances recalls a vivid, extended sequence involving her deceased friend Gillian, her father, and her former husbands. She remembers Yao, Delilah, and Masha interrupting and trying to steer the experience, while she ignored them because she was absorbed in it. She also recalls being in space and being an ant. The account connects the program’s therapeutic ambitions to an experience whose meanings Frances expects to interpret afterward, rather than to a simple, controlled exercise.

The retreat’s trials can extend beyond the participants’ immediate expectations. When Yao and Delilah begin to wonder whether the guests should be released from a confined room or given a clue, Masha insists that they must work their way out themselves. She describes the ordeal as essential to their rebirthing and compares it to a baby squeezing through a birth canal. Her confidence in the trial’s purpose is not shared by Delilah, whose reaction registers doubt. In this episode, the promise of transformation gives Masha a rationale for prolonging an experience that her colleagues question.

Experiences and Personal Meaning

The altered states do not produce a single interpretation. During the drug experience, Zoe speaks about her dead twin brother, Zach, and says that he would have found the family getting high together funny. Napoleon answers that Zach is there, and then addresses him. The episode gives Napoleon a sense of the family as it had been before Zach’s death, with all four of them together and their lives taken for granted. For him, the imagined presence is bound to the return of an ordinary family feeling that loss had disrupted.

Afterward, Zoe tells Frances that she had been angry with Zach and felt that he had left her with pain deliberately, making forgiveness seem impossible. She says that during the experience it felt as if they had spoken again. Frances shares that she encountered Gillian and her father, and that the experience felt more vivid than a dream. Zoe wonders whether they might really have seen the dead. The program creates a setting in which bereavement can be spoken aloud, but the exchange does not settle whether the encounter was supernatural, psychological, or a product of the drugs. Its significance lies in the renewed possibility of telling and hearing grief.

Lars has a different kind of insight. He remembers Ray’s attentiveness and realizes that Ray does not want to take anything from him; Ray wants his love. For a moment, the thought seems to answer every question, before his consciousness breaks into an image of purple petals. The sequence joins a relational realization to the program’s altered perception, without making the two identical: the insight is specifically about what Lars has misunderstood in his relationship with Ray.

Return and the Program’s Promise

The retreat’s promise is stated most starkly by Masha: she tells the exhausted guests that, in ten days, they will not be the people they are now. Jessica responds with repeated profanity, while Lars suggests that Masha is speaking under the influence of the drugs. Their reactions put the slogan of transformation under pressure. The same declaration that may sound like assurance to Masha lands amid fatigue, despair, and uncertainty for the guests.

When the group reconnects with the outside world, Ben finds their phones, Zoe retrieves wine smuggled into her room, and Frances discovers six bottles in a room behind reception, left behind by previous guests. The guests learn that relatively little has happened in the wider world during their absence. Then the group makes its own communal return through food, drink, and music: Jessica cooks steaks, Tony makes pizza dough, Frances helps in the kitchen, and Carmel receives praise for her cake. Some guests dance and others cry; Lars cannot dance, and Frances watches him with delight. This gathering is a vivid contrast to the retreat’s schedules and restrictions. Its conviviality is not another instruction from Masha but a social moment the guests make together.

The program’s logic persists beyond the retreat. Masha later writes a book about a ten-day personal-development program incorporating psychedelic drugs, being locked in a room with strangers, therapy, confronting fears, and solving riddles. The book recasts the retreat’s distinctive practices as a repeatable method. The program’s ending is therefore not simply the guests’ release: its practices become part of a public account of transformation, even as the events themselves expose the difference between promising change and determining, on someone else’s behalf, what change must require.