The Living Ingredient
Fourteen years ago, yoga had been seeping into my life slowly, and then one day I looked up and realized I’d really found it. Some of my friends were even a little concerned about how much time and devotion I was giving the practice.
So when I saw the option to go on a yoga retreat, I should have jumped. I thought about how amazing it would feel to do the thing I was obsessed with, all day, with nothing else in the way. A chance to go deeper into the craft.
Instead, the doubts showed up first. Will I know anyone? What if I fart in my sleep? What if I say the wrong thing? What if I snore? Who will I even sit with at meals? Every childhood wound from being the shy kid came hurling back at me, and it kept me from signing up.
A year later, another opportunity landed in my inbox: a horseback riding yoga retreat. In Vermont. In the fall. Taught by two teachers I really looked up to. I remember thinking, well, I guess I don’t have a choice with this one. I was also a little more confident on my mat by then, so I went.
And that was it. I felt genuine excitement and genuine fear in the same breath, and beneath both, I knew I was about to fall in love. I did. Not just with the retreat, but with a kind of travel-lust and a different way of connecting to the earth and people that I hadn’t touched before. Traveling to a place where you aren’t just looking for the coolest restaurant and drinking establishment was different. Instead, learning about the history of the land, the flora and fauna, and communing in such a different way was inspiring.
Here’s the distinction I discovered that weekend: spirituality can be rehearsed. It can be bottled up and worn as one more thing to do or be into so you look a certain way. Or it can be what I found there — doing yoga outside because you’re devoted to the craft, sitting in circle with other women who are using the practice as an antenna to pick up on feelings and discernment about their own bodies, eating food that was prepared by someone who actually wanted you to feel good that weekend. That’s what changed me. And once I’d tasted it, I wanted more.
The more I sought out these weekends, the more I understood that yoga was never just a practice on the mat. It’s a reflection of how you live. Eventually that pulled me toward leading retreats myself. I wanted to hand people that same gift: the chance to fully detach from their lives, let someone else handle the details, and just sink into themselves for a few days.
What actually happens when you stop
Tucking yourself into a group of women who are all on their own quest to heal was a gift that cracked something open in me. We need rooms full of other people to expand our thinking and remind us we’re not the only ones carrying something. The unexpected twist: the moment you’re finally given permission to do nothing, it can be deeply confronting.
How do I rest? Why can’t I relax? What does my belief system even say about earning rest? Am I worthy of it if I haven’t checked off the to-do list first? That question — have I earned this — is one most women are dragging around with them, and a retreat is often the first place it gets to surface.
This isn’t new — but the reasons are
Wellness retreats aren’t a modern invention. People have been fleeing to spas and health-minded resorts since the Roman baths of the second century B.C. in search of feeling better. That impulse eventually evolved into places like Golden Door in San Marcos and Canyon Ranch in Tucson — opulent, rigorous, and selling physical transformation above all else. By the mid-2000s, yoga retreats had taken over Instagram: sun salutations on the beach, green smoothies, the whole aesthetic. I was one of those photos.
What’s changed isn’t the impulse to retreat. It’s what women are retreating from, and what they’re finally allowed to be looking for.
Retreats give women permission to prioritize their own needs — to turn inward and look at the parts of themselves they weren’t ready to face before. Strip away the external noise (kids, partners, work) and a slice of real inner peace comes fast, almost embarrassingly fast. Even if all it does is shine a light into one dusty corner of your soul, it can be life-changing.
Self-care isn’t self-improvement
I think we’re right to have replaced “self-improvement” with “self-care.” Women are doers — when we don’t feel good, we go looking for the fix. And there’s a lot to fix: conventional healthcare still fails women’s needs at nearly every turn. Hustle culture keeps raising the bar. Social media keeps us comparing. The pay gap is still the pay gap. Add in a generalized hum of anxiety about the economy and the planet, and it’s no wonder women are out here looking for answers — for how to feel joy again, how to step off the anxiety loop, how to feel carefree instead of braced.
That search is psychological wellness work, whether we name it that or not. And when women experience real empowerment, bonding, and transformation together, it doesn’t stay contained to the retreat — it ripples out through every community those women belong to.
We put enormous expectations on ourselves and rarely leave room for actual self-reflection. It takes time to untangle what I need from what everyone else needs from me. But the goal underneath almost every retreat is the same: finding the light to excavate whatever’s been silenced or suppressed.
The living ingredient
Yoga puts you back in touch with your body and your edges. Good food clears your mind and lets your body remember, at a cellular level, what it actually needs. And a trusted group of women creates the one thing most of us are starved for: space to be vulnerable and say the true thing out loud. Put those three together, and you get an avalanche — the slow, then sudden, process of taking back your own power.
Stepping away like this is a temporary release from the pressure to perform outwardly, in favor of just experiencing something inwardly — and we’re doing it at a moment when so many women are simply worn all the way out. When we let a retreat’s support systems make room for that kind of expansion, we tend to come home with more capacity for the emotional labor the world asks of us every single day.
Sometimes, a retreat isn’t the destination. It’s just the first step toward figuring out what was missing all along.
