What retreating can do for us high-acheiving, often anxious, working women
By Brooke Jean, MA, LPC
First things first, let’s get something straight. Retreats with me and my people — meaning my team and community, clients, and brave explorers — are going to be a little different than your hard core wellness retreats.
We are not going to sit in silent meditation for a day, or live on juice, or hallucinate. (Not that we have any judgement about that!)
We do wellness a little different.
We are hard-working women in leadership roles running companies, managing big projects and teams, and driving change in the world while also taking care of our families and all the other things. We appreciate wellness and yet, we have had a hard time making space for ourselves for anything at all.
Rather than taking a dive deep into some wellness culture components, we need a freaking break.
From our jobs, our teams, our clients, our families, our responsibilities and the freaking pressure that comes with doing all that in a really bad ass sort of way.
So. We do it our way.
We meet somewhere cool. Preferably in nature because that shit grounds us whether we knew that beforehand or not.
We let loose the second we hit the premise.
Once we take that long awaited exhale we look to our sisters with sheer exhaustion in our eyes and say telepathically, “I see you girl. I see you.”
From there we open up.
We are ready to do the deeper work even though we may have not ever considered it before or perhaps just dabbled.
We vulnerably share intentions, open up to the group about our current struggles.
We engage in deeply transformative workshops that guide us on how to let go of who we think we are supposed to be to create the life we always wanted. We learn about psychology and conditioning and stuff like subconscious beliefs and why we find ourselves in this place of people pleasing at the expense of our own goddamn happiness.
Here’s my favorite part…we rally around each other!
You say you need support, space, resources, ideas? Served right up in the moment!
You remember that when you were little you loved to teach, dance and perform? We provide you an opportunity to do just that and schedule it on the calendar before we leave. As women, we make things happen, don’t we?
Whatever it is. Our sisters surround us. Hold us. Promise us we deserve what our hearts truly desire. And for some reason. IN this space, with these people, we believe this shit for the first time.
We sleep like babies feeling held.
We release in a bonfire what we’re ready to leave behind.
We leave lighter. Connected. To our truth. To one another. To the essence of the feminine.
That, my friends, is where the miracles happen and where real change begins to take place. This is what an unperfected retreat looks like and its pure magic.
So, what did this experience teach me?
That we deserve what our hearts truly desire but we need to make space to get clear on who we are.
We need to create our life’s vision, determine our path to get there and protect that path fiercely with boundaries.
We need to unlearn all that we have learned about self-care being selfish and that we need to put ourselves last to be “good girls”.
We have to rewrite the rules of our lives and reprogram the beliefs holding us back from taking the action and believing we deserve what we are capable of. And I would like us to do it unapologetically.
We need sisterhood. Connection. Nature. Movement.
To remember who we were when we were little and to embrace that inner child. We need to rebuild our trust with ourselves, our bodies and our inner knowing system because THAT is our super power.
This is not easy to do if you do not claim space. That’s why we created a workshop on boundaries to help busy working women and mamas do just that.
