Scheduled Ridge Intensive

The Five-Day Ridge Intensive

Five days of psychotherapist-led residential work. Six people maximum.

21–25 September 2026 · Six people maximum · €9,500 per person

The scheduled route

Five days. Six people. The full Ridge programme.

This is the scheduled Ridge Intensive: five continuous days with Simon, a maximum of six participants and the wider specialist team built into the programme. It is the only Ridge format that runs to public dates and a published price. If you are still deciding between the three formats, compare them on the Programme overview.

Compare All Three Formats

Scheduled Ridge Intensive · Before you arrive

The work starts before you get here.

Every participant completes a ninety-minute online session with Simon before arriving. Not a booking call and not a conversation about logistics. It is a clinical assessment, and it does four things.

It tells Simon what you have actually come with, which is rarely the thing people say first. It establishes the pattern underneath the story. It checks that this setting is right for you, physically and psychologically, and allows him to say so honestly if it is not. It also means that on Monday morning you and Simon are not strangers.

That is one reason five continuous days of intensive therapy can reach places that months of weekly sessions often cannot. Most residential work spends its first two days building what this session has already built.

Why the setting matters

Sometimes distance changes what becomes possible.

Simon Hitchcock on why changing the setting can change what becomes available in the work.

Weekly therapy asks you to do difficult work and then return immediately to the same pressures, roles and routines. Part of the value of five continuous days is having enough distance from ordinary life for something different to become possible.

Explore Intensive Therapy

From Simon You Can't Heal In The Environment That's Wounding You

Scheduled Ridge Intensive · The five days

A week with a shape, built around you.

No two intensives are identical, because no two people arrive with the same thing to solve. But the week has a shape, and it moves quickly. This is not therapy stretched thin across five days. It is five days of depth work at a pace weekly sessions can never reach.

Monday

Straight in

You arrive on Sunday, so Monday is not spent settling. It starts. The group meets first thing and Simon asks why you are here and what brought you to this particular moment. Then the work begins. Because of the assessment already completed with each participant, he is not gathering history. He is going to the thing. The afternoon is your first time with the horses, and it is deliberately unstructured. Verena brings you to them and explains almost nothing. Who approaches. Who hangs back. Who tries to control the animal. Who waits to be invited. Nobody has worked out how to perform here yet, which is exactly why the afternoon reveals so much.

Tuesday

Naming it

Monday opened it up. Tuesday names it. Individual work, and group work alongside five people who may turn out to be closer to your own experience than you expected. Most people have circled their pattern for years without ever saying it out loud in a room. That usually happens here. The afternoon goes to Nuria: breathwork, then cold exposure. This is not relaxation. It is the nervous system being taken somewhere it has been avoiding. What surfaces during and after the ice tends to be some of the most honest material of the week, and it feeds straight into Wednesday.

Wednesday

The deep work

The hardest day. The deepest individual work happens here, and the group work afterwards tends to surface threads that connect several people at once. The afternoon is the equine session, and it is the most distinctive thing we do. Three practitioners watch the same forty minutes. Verena reads the horses. Nando reads the human: the body language, the energy and what happens when it does not work. Simon reads what passes between the two of you and connects it to the morning. You cannot lie to a horse, and you cannot lie to three people watching a horse respond to you.

Thursday

Integration and challenge

The morning is lighter and starts building forward. What has shifted, and what a life shaped around that actually looks like. The afternoon belongs to Nando. Mountain terrain, physical challenge and controlled exposure to difficulty, designed around what he has observed in you. The point is not fitness. It is showing you where your real edge is, rather than the imagined one. The real one is usually further out than people think, and that discovery travels home better than almost anything said in a chair.

Friday

Forward architecture and closing

The excavation is finished. Friday builds what you take with you: where you want to be in a year and in three years, specific and embodied rather than aspirational, and what you had to put down to get there. The evening is the closing session. Each person names one thing they arrived with and one thing they are leaving behind. The group witnesses it without comment. Simon gives each person one reflection on what he saw across the five days. Nando adds what he observed in their body. The ninety-day plans are confirmed out loud, in front of everyone.

Scheduled Ridge Intensive · The elements

Not separate modules. One responsive programme.

Individual psychotherapy with Simon. The core of the week. Sessions run through the mornings and into the afternoons where needed, and who works when is decided each morning according to what is most active rather than a fixed rota. Depending on the person, that might be psychotherapy, empty-chair work, working with projections, parts work or creative work. Simon gets in early and does not spend the week circling.
Daily check-in. Every morning, all six participants answer three questions. How did you sleep? What is in your body? What are you most resistant to today? That third question often tells Simon more than anything else collected all day. It shapes who works and what the afternoon needs to be.
Group integration. Forty-five minutes after the morning's individual work. Nobody is required to disclose anything from their own session. Instead, themes surface and people recognise themselves in each other. It is the part almost everyone underestimates before they arrive.
Breathwork and cold exposure. Led by Nuria, a health psychologist and Wim Hof certified instructor. The work includes breathwork, cold exposure, functional breathing and, crucially, a set of exercises you keep and use on your own long after you leave. For many people, it is also the first time in years the noise in their head goes quiet.
Groundwork with the horses. Not riding, and not watching. You work with a horse from the ground and it responds to what you are actually bringing rather than what you are presenting. Confidence, intention, facing fear, and the plain accomplishment of getting an animal to move with you. You can wind a horse up with your own energy, and then have to calm yourself in order to calm the horse. That lesson tends to outlast the week.
Wilderness and physical challenge. Led by Nando, a behavioural scientist and former marine who travels in for the programme. Real mountain work: terrain, challenge, navigation, silence, the fear response arriving on schedule and being walked through rather than around.
Flex time, every afternoon. Ninety minutes daily that belongs to you. A walk and talk with Simon, which produces a different conversation from sitting face to face. Extra time with the horses. More breathwork with Nuria. Or the mountain and nobody at all. Asking is the whole system. Nothing here is a fixed timetable you have to fit inside.

The work happens psychologically, emotionally, neurologically and physically. Not in sequence. Together. Because that is how human beings actually change.

Who the scheduled programme is for

For people who built something, and found it quieter than expected.

Functioning well by every external measure, and struggling privately. Disconnected from the people they love and from themselves. Living someone else's version of a life for so long they have forgotten what their own looks like. For some, this shows up as burnout or the particular pressure of executive burnout. For others, unresolved trauma is still shaping the way they live, work and relate.

The Ridge is not suitable for people in acute psychiatric crisis or active addiction. The assessment with Simon establishes this honestly before participation is confirmed.

What you leave the scheduled programme with

You do not leave with a workbook.

Your pattern, named. The thing you have been unconsciously solving for, stated plainly enough that you can recognise it happening in real time three months from now. Most people have circled this for years without ever landing on it.
A written leaving document. Within a week of going home you receive Simon's clinical synthesis of the five days, Nando's behavioural observations and Nuria's notes on what your nervous system did: what you arrived with, what moved and what is still live.
A ninety-day plan built for you, plus ninety days of Simon on WhatsApp. Specific daily practice, the thing being put down and the thing being built toward, confirmed out loud in front of five people who watched you build it. Direct support continues when you return home, including when you wobble.
Regulation you can do without us. The breathwork is taught so that you keep it. It works in an airport, a car park and the ten minutes before a conversation you have been dreading.

People arrive exhausted and performing. They leave knowing what they have been running from and what they actually want instead. That sounds small written down. Most people spend a lifetime not knowing.

The investment

Why the scheduled programme costs €9,500.

A fair question, so here is a straight answer.

Six people. Not sixteen. Led personally by Simon across all five days, with three specialist practitioners working around you. A ninety-minute clinical assessment before you arrive. Five days of continuous depth work, individual and group. Breathwork and cold exposure. The equine session with three practitioners reading the same forty minutes. Physical and wilderness work designed around what has been observed in you. Airport transfers, accommodation, all meals, a written leaving document and ninety days of direct follow-up.

This is closer to several private intensives running at once than to a retreat. What you are paying for is depth, attention and the fact that almost none of it is shared with a crowd.

Five days will not solve everything. It may be the first time in years you have stopped performing long enough to hear yourself think. Where privacy, timing or circumstances require a different format, there are two private routes: the seven-day Private Ridge Intensive, arranged 1:1 or potentially 1:2, and the Private Weekend Intensive, a shorter 1:1 format from Friday to Monday.

Discuss the Scheduled Programme

Scheduled Ridge Intensive · Practical details

Everything you need to know about the five-day programme.

Location: The therapeutic programme takes place at The Ridge near Pizarra, Málaga, around 40 minutes from Málaga Airport.
Arrival and departure: Arrive Sunday, or Saturday if travelling far. Leave Friday evening or Saturday morning.
Accommodation: Five nights in nearby rural accommodation approximately one kilometre from The Ridge are included. Earlier arrival or an additional night can be arranged at no additional cost.
What's included: Airport transfers, nearby accommodation, all meals, the full programme, written leaving document and 90 days of direct follow-up
Group size: Six people maximum, not negotiable
Investment: €9,500 per person, all-inclusive
2026 dates: 21–25 September 2026 and late October 2026

View 2026 Dates

Scheduled Ridge Intensive · Further information

Common questions about the five-day programme.

Is this therapy or coaching?

It is depth psychotherapy, delivered as a five-day residential programme and led throughout by a qualified integrative psychotherapist. The therapeutic work takes place at The Ridge, with accommodation provided nearby. It is not a coaching retreat or a wellness break.

Do I need a diagnosis or referral to attend?

No referral is required. Suitability is established through a ninety-minute online clinical assessment with Simon before participation is confirmed.

What if the equine or wilderness elements are not for me?

The scheduled programme includes the specialist elements as part of the week, but how they are used is responsive to the people in the room. Nothing is there simply to fill a timetable, and Simon will take suitability into account throughout.

Is the group work confidential?

Yes. Confidentiality within the group is a foundation of the work and is addressed directly on the first day.

What happens after the five days end?

Within a week of returning home, you receive a written leaving document and a ninety-day plan specific to you. You also have direct WhatsApp access to Simon for three months of integration support.

Discuss the Scheduled Programme

Need a different container?

There are two private ways to work at The Ridge.

If the group setting or scheduled dates are not right for you, the seven-day Private Ridge Intensive and Private Weekend Intensive are arranged separately with Simon.

Compare All Three Formats