Retreat bookings route through our partners, not a direct checkout — and why

We made a values decision about how retreat bookings work on I Am One Self, and wanted to share the reasoning, not just the outcome.

What changed

Bookings for our partner retreat centers — Sachamama, Inca Shipiba, and Garden of Peace — route exclusively through Retreat Guru, Aya Advisors, and The Third Wave. We considered building a direct booking/checkout flow on our own site and chose not to.

We also removed pricing comparisons between our own partner centers from the site. You’ll still find pricing where we compare against centers outside our partner network — that’s honest differentiation. But ranking our own partners against each other by price didn’t sit right with what we’re building.

Why

In Christopher and Kenney’s words: giving is receiving. Sending someone to book through our listing partners is itself an act of giving — it blesses those relationships rather than competing with them for a transaction. That’s the spirit we want the whole site to carry, not just this one decision.

This also keeps us cleanly within GitHub Pages’ own policy on commercial transactions — our site is a dev portal that points elsewhere for every booking, not a storefront. Worth knowing if you’re wondering why there’s no “Book Now” button that takes your payment directly: that’s intentional, not a missing feature.