Leadership Weekend Retreat in Paris
A City‑Based Mythic Journey for Leaders
3‑day immersive hero’s journey in Paris
What does the soul want?
In the quiet corners of our lives, this question often sounds like an echo beneath the noise of meetings, deadlines, and plans. It becomes a whisper only when we stand in a Parisian museum, a library, or a cinema, facing a myth, a painting, or a film that suddenly mirrors something deep inside us.
Around the world, storytellers, sages, and artists have long described a pattern: the journey of a person who is called out of ordinary life, faces trials and thresholds, and returns with a new understanding of the world and of themselves. In Paris, that journey is everywhere: in the Louvre, in the opera, in bookstores where myths sleep on the shelves, in movie theaters where the same old stories are told with new faces, and on the streets where strangers become characters in each other’s tales.
This 3‑day leadership retreat in Paris is inspired by the ancient pattern of mythic journeys—the kind of stories that have shaped human reflection for centuries, in many cultures and traditions. Like the spirit of modern psychological retreats that invite you to step back from everyday life and reflect on who you are as a leader, this program uses the city as a reflective landscape rather than a distraction.
You arrive on Friday, spend your days walking, talking, and reflecting in and around central Paris, and leave on Sunday with a clearer sense of what the soul wants—and how that relates to your leadership role at work and in life.
Practical Information
Format and rhythm
- 3‑day immersive city retreat
- Small group: maximum 12 participants, for depth, intimacy, and personal attention.
Time and structure
- Friday (arrival + opening): 14:00–18:00
- Welcome & hotel check‑in.
- Introductory session: “What Does the Soul Want? Where Are We in Our Own Stories?”
- Light city walk to the Louvre forecourt or a quiet bridge over the Seine as an opening ritual.
- Saturday (intensive day): 09:30–17:00
- Morning: walking tour in the Louvre, exploring how statues and paintings echo ancient story patterns of departure, ordeal, and return.
- Afternoon: reflection walk along the Seine + small‑group sharing on your own leadership story.
- Sunday (return): 09:30–12:30
- Short reflection walk (e.g., Pont Neuf, Île de la Cité).
- Closing circle and “leadership story map” for the coming year.
Location and setting
- City‑based urban retreat in central Paris (1st–4th arrondissements), similar in feel to modern psychological and therapeutic‑style city retreats in London and Amsterdam.
- Key sites:
- Louvre (Winged Victory, Venus de Milo, The Raft of the Medusa, Liberty Leading the People) as mirrors of mythic patterns.
- Opera Garnier as a “mythic architecture” temple.
- Bookstores and cinemas in the Latin Quarter and Marais, where old myths live inside modern stories.
- Streets and bridges along the Seine as moving reflection spaces.
Financial conditions (with hotel)
- Program + hotel fee: €1,995 per person (excl. VAT) for the 3‑day city retreat, including:
- 2.5 days of facilitation and guided walking.
- 2 nights in a 4‑star boutique hotel (central location, breakfast included; double room).
- All psychological and narrative‑leadership materials (personal story workbook, reader, reflection tools).
- Guided entries to the Louvre and Opera Garnier (skip‑the‑line).
- 2 lunches in Paris cafés or restaurants as part of the program.
- Single‑room supplement: +€220.
What is excluded:
- Travel to Paris and personal travel insurance.
- Dinner on Saturday (participants choose; list of simple, quiet options provided).
- Optional evening activities (e.g., opera or concert ticket).
How to register and connect
- Email: peterdekuster2023@gmail.com
- Your guide: Peter de Kuster – founder of the hero’s journey & the heroine’s journey project
With this leadership weekend retreat, you join a long tradition of city‑based retreats designed to expand and deepen our psychological and spiritual lives. In Paris, that retreat becomes a walking, mythic journey through the heart of leadership—and the soul.
Myth and Dream
Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some forgotten myth echoed in an old Parisian chapel, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of monks in medieval scriptoria; now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument in the back room of a Parisian philosophy café, or catch suddenly the shining meaning of a bizarre fairy tale told in a children’s corner of a Paris bookstore — it will always be the one, shape‑shifting yet marvelous, constant story that we find. And it will always suggest, challenging and persistent, that there is more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.
Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, the myths of man have flourished — and they have been the living aspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind. It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth. In Paris, that ring is everywhere: in the cathedrals, the courtyards, the bookstores, the opera, and the streets.
The wonder is that the characteristic efficacy to touch and inspire deep creative centers dwells in the smallest nursery fairy tale — as the flavor of the ocean is contained in a droplet, or the whole mystery of life within the egg of a flea. For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source. In Paris, the symbols of myth live in the arches of Notre‑Dame, in the curves of the Louvre’s wings, in the repetitions of archetypes on the façades of the city and on the silver screens of its cinemas.
What is the secret of the timeless vision? From what profundity of the mind does it derive? Why is mythology everywhere the same, beneath its varieties of costume? And what does it teach — about love, loss, power, and the delicate balance of leading others while remaining true to oneself?
Today many sciences are contributing to the analysis of the riddle. Archaeologists are probing the ancient stones of the Catacombs beneath Paris, the remains of the medieval city uncovered along the Seine, the remnants of Roman Lutetia beneath the Île de la Cité, and the fragments of statues and altars brought from far‑flung empires now housed in the Louvre. Ethnologists are listening to the quiet, oral fragments passed down in the streets of multicultural Paris, in the quartered voices of the city’s bridges, churches, and markets. A generation of scholars has thrown open to us the sacred writings of the East, preserved in manuscript and translation and resting now in the Bibliothèque nationale, as well as the older, pre‑Christian layers of our own spiritual traditions, quietly waiting in the chapels and seminaries that line the city’s quiet lanes. And meanwhile another host of scholars, pressing researches begun last century in the field of folk psychology, has been seeking to establish the psychological bases of language, myth, religion, art, and moral codes, not in abstract texts alone, but in the lived stories of readers, dreamers, and cinema‑goers in Paris.
Most remarkable of all, however, are the revelations that have emerged from the mental clinic. The bold and truly epoch‑making writings of the psychoanalysts are indispensable to the student of mythology; for, whatever may be thought of the detailed and sometimes contradictory interpretations of specific cases and problems, the core insight remains clear: the logic, the heroes, and the deeds of myth survive into modern times. In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dream. The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stride through the Parisian streets today, lean against the railings of the Jardin du Luxembourg, or wait for the tram at Place de la Bastille, as if drawn from the pages of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables or the quiet, searching walks of Paris‑based cinema, from Truffaut’s The 400 Blows to Éric Rohmer’s Le rayon vert.
One striking example of such a modern dream‑myth can be found in the work of Marcel Proust, whose narrator in Swann’s Way (the first volume of In Search of Lost Time) wakes from a night of restless sleep to find himself disoriented between childhood and adulthood, between Combray and Paris, and between the comfort of the past and the pressures of the present. In that moment he no longer knows who he is; he feels as though he has lived many lives at once, each threaded through the same recurring anxieties, desires, and losses. The dreamlike confusion of the narrator’s waking mirrors the way modern individuals, in the absence of a shared myth, live in a private, half‑understood interior drama — where the characters of myth appear not as gods or monsters, but as parents, lovers, rivals, and shadows on the wall of memory. This Paris‑centred passage from Proust’s Swann’s Way illustrates how the patterns of myth and dream continue to live inside the structures of autobiographical narrative, even when the city and the self are both in motion.
A similar psychological drama, rooted in the earliest family triangle, is vividly expressed in the case of a twenty‑three‑year‑old man, described by a psychoanalyst, who writes:
“I am the eldest child in our family and am twenty‑three years old. I have been separated from my wife for a year; somehow we could not get along together. I love both my parents dearly, and have never had any trouble with my father, except that he insisted that I go back and live with my wife and I couldn’t be happy with her. And I never will.”
The unsuccessful husband here reveals, with a really wonderful innocence, that instead of bringing his spiritual energies forward to the love and problems of his marriage, he has been resting, in the secret recesses of his imagination, with the now ridiculously anachronistic dramatic situation of his first and only emotional involvement, that of the tragicomic triangle of the nursery — the son against the father for the love of the mother. Apparently the most permanent of the dispositions of the human psyche are those that derive from the fact that, of all animals, we remain the longest at the mother’s breast. Human beings are born too soon; they are unfinished, unready as yet to meet the world. Consequently their whole defense from a universe of dangers is the mother, under whose protection the intra‑uterine period is prolonged. Hence the dependent child and its mother constitute for months after the catastrophe of birth a dual unit not only physically but also psychologically. Any prolonged absence of the parent causes tension in the infant and consequent impulses of aggression; also, when the mother is obliged to hamper the child, aggressive responses are aroused. Thus the first object of the child’s hostility is identical with the first object of its love, and its first ideal (which thereafter is retained as the unconscious basis of all images of bliss, truth, beauty and perfection) is that of the dual unity of the Madonna and Bambino.
This same Oedipal pattern quietly shapes the way characters in Paris‑centred literature relate to the city itself. In the work of Georges Simenon, the figure of Commissaire Maigret often returns to simple, maternal spaces — his office, his wife, the familiar Parisian streets — as if to an early protective world, while the criminal he pursues represents the disruptive, separated, “father‑like” figure who has broken the original equilibrium. In this sense, Maigret’s Paris becomes a psychic landscape where the son–mother–father triangle continues to replay itself in the form of investigation, confession, and return.
In this way, the mythic structure of the earliest family drama becomes the hidden blueprint for much of what will later be experienced as love, leadership, and inner conflict — even in the streets, cafés, and bookstores of a city like Paris, where the ancient stories quietly continue to shape the way we dream, the way we lead, and the way we relate to those who, in our deepest layers, still stand between us and the mother.