NAWA Sober Retreats

Awera Island · Mentawai · Indonesia

For people who have built a life worth protecting. A four-week private recovery program on a remote Indonesian island for high-performing professionals ready to stop managing addiction and start understanding it.

Most sober retreats are a long weekend. Most rehabs are clinical, crowded and built around the first few weeks off a substance. There’s very little in between for people who are already stable but know something still isn’t right underneath.

NAWA sits in that gap. It’s four weeks on a remote island in Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands, for four people at a time. There’s no town, no bar and no other guests. The first week is about letting the nervous system come down, through the ocean, breathwork, rest and routine. Only then do we go into the deeper work: trauma, identity, shame and the patterns that drinking or overworking were covering.

It’s led by people with lived experience of addiction, with a psychiatrist, a nurse and each guest’s own therapist alongside online. Every stay ends with a reintegration plan and 60 days of aftercare, because the hardest part is going home.

It matters now because more people are getting sober or sober-curious without wanting the rehab label, and burnout among high-functioning people has never been higher. TSC readers are exactly who we built it for: people choosing sobriety as a better way to live, who want time and space to do the work properly. Our founding group starts in February 2027.

Richard is the founder of NAWA Sober Retreats and leads the programme on the island as a peer support specialist. He has been sober for nine years and has spent five years working inside residential recovery programmes across Europe and Southeast Asia.

Over that time he kept seeing the same gap: people with the right clinical team, the right diagnosis and the right plan, still struggling, because what was missing wasn’t clinical. It was connection with people who had been through it themselves.

NAWA is built on that. Richard’s role is deliberately non-clinical. He works alongside a psychiatrist, a nurse and each guest’s own therapist, and brings the one thing a clinical team can’t: lived experience of the journey from addiction to a life worth staying sober for. He also mentors clients one-to-one online.