Why I'm Hosting My First Women-Only Retreat

Every retreat I have ever held has been coed. I have watched men weep for fathers they never buried and women hold space for strangers with a grace that made the jungle go quiet. I believed, and still believe, in what happens when the whole human family sits in circle together. So when I say that our January retreat will be women only, the first in Pura Vida Collective's history, I want to be honest about where that decision came from. It wasn't strategy. It was a whisper that would not stop.

Our last retreat, by pure chance, was all men. It was one of the most powerful containers I have ever held, and it taught me something I wasn't expecting. When the circle is one thing, wholly, a particular performance falls away. Nobody is being witnessed by the other; everybody is being witnessed by their own. I watched those men set down a lifetime of armor in three days, and somewhere in the middle of it I heard the whisper: now do this for the women.

What women carry into the room

The women who come to me are, almost without exception, the strong ones. The founders, the physicians, the mothers, the ones everyone else calls when things fall apart. They have done therapy. They have read the books. They arrive with nervous systems that have been holding other people for thirty years, and somewhere underneath the competence is a woman who has not been held herself since she can remember. In a coed circle, many of these women never fully set that down. It is not anyone's fault. It is decades of conditioning about who is allowed to fall apart, and in front of whom.

A women-only container removes the last audience. What remains is sisterhood, not the word on a mug, but the ancient technology: women watching a woman go into the fire of her own life and standing guard at the edge of it. I have seen pieces of this in every circle I've held. In January, for eight days, it will be the whole room.

Why now

Because the women arriving at my discovery calls have changed. They are asking sharper questions, about safety, about screening, about what the science says, about what will be different in their blood and their sleep and their marriages when they come home. They are done with wellness as decoration. They want the deep work, held to a standard worthy of their trust. That is exactly the retreat we have built: sacred ceremony and longevity science in one arc, in one of the five Blue Zones on Earth, under the first full moon of 2027. It is the retreat I would want if I were the one flying in.