The Wolf Moon: Why We Planned a Retreat by Moonrise

People assume retreat dates are chosen around flights and seasons. Ours were chosen around the sky. When I set the dates for REVIVE 2027, January 16 through 23, I worked backward from a single astronomical fact: on the night of January 22, the first full moon of the year reaches its peak over Playa Junquillal. The women will arrive under a waxing moon, and every night of their descent, the light over the Pacific will grow as they do. On the second-to-last night, it completes itself. So do they.

Why the Wolf Moon

January's full moon carries an old name: the Wolf Moon, the moon of the deep winter nights when the wild ones sang. I did not choose the name, but I could not have designed a better one for the first women-only retreat in our history. The wolf is the animal of the pack and the howl: of belonging, and of a voice that will not be domesticated. Eight days of sisterhood, crowned by that moon, is not a metaphor we invented. It is one we joined.

Fire, and the energy of sacred release

Under that full moon we hold the retreat's culminating night of release, the fire night. In the tantric traditions this energy has a name and a face: Kali, the fierce mother, so often misread as the goddess of rage. She is not. She is the goddess of subtraction, the fire that takes nothing real, only everything false: the pleasing, the performing, the decades of borrowed selves. What a woman gives to that fire was never her. What walks away from it always was. That is the energy we work with, held, as everything at REVIVE is held, within a trauma-informed container where every threshold is chosen, never imposed.

Why timing matters in deep work

Do I believe the moon does the work? No, the woman does the work. But ceremony has always understood something modern life forgot: the nervous system trusts rhythm. Sunrise practice, shared meals, ocean tides, a moon that visibly completes itself as the week does, these give the body a story older than language about where it is in the journey. We use every rhythm available to us. The sky happens to offer the most beautiful one.