I’ve been watching a particular conversation happen in women’s wellness spaces for years now, and it keeps troubling me. There’s this underlying assumption that a retreat has to be a week of deprivation: no alcohol, no sugar, no caffeine, just green juice and silence and the promise that you’ll come home fixed.
That a week of strictness somehow cancels out a year of living as yourself. And what I’ve noticed is that the women who actually need this work – the ambitious, capable, high-functioning women who are burned out and disconnected and questioning whether they’re on the right path – they don’t show up. Or they show up, white-knuckle through someone else’s version of wellness, and go home unchanged because nothing was designed for the reality of their lives.
So I built something different. And I want to tell you why.
Here’s what I’ve learned from working with ambitious women in 1:1 coaching: most of them don’t struggle with discipline. They’re already doing the hard things. What they struggle with is permission: permission to be human, permission to choose differently, permission to trust yourself over the noise of what they’re supposed to do.
Wellness culture often makes this worse. The more “transformational” the retreat promises to be, the more it leans on restriction. No alcohol. No sugar. No going out past 9 p.m. No being yourself, basically, but we won’t say that out loud. And I understand the logic – create a container that’s different from normal life, so you can think differently. But what I’ve found is that rigid restriction doesn’t create the conditions for real change. It creates temporary compliance, followed by a return to normal life because nothing actually shifted on the inside.
Real change doesn’t happen because you white-knuckled through someone else’s rules for five days. It happens because you felt safe enough to hear yourself clearly. And that requires something completely different from what most retreats are offering.
Action step: This week, notice which wellness spaces or practices leave you feeling more or less like yourself. That’s data worth paying attention to.
I work with a lot of women who are at a crossroads. Life transition. Career change. Relationship shift. A growing sense that something has to change but no clarity on what. What I call the messy middle: that uncertain territory between who you were and who you’re becoming. And what I’ve noticed is that most of these women are apologising for being there. As if clarity and certainty are the destination, and anything less means they’re broken somehow.
But I think the messy middle is actually where you become yourself. It’s where you’re finally uncomfortable enough to question the choices you’ve made on autopilot. It’s where your body is telling you something your mind hasn’t caught up to yet. It’s not a problem to solve; it’s information to listen to.
A retreat that’s designed for women in the messy middle doesn’t ask you to escape it. It asks you to get genuinely curious about it. To create enough space – and enough regulation in your nervous system – that you can actually hear what’s beneath the overthinking and self-doubt.
For something more immersive, the retreats in Sagres blend yoga, breathwork, and coaching over five days designed specifically for this. Not to fix you. To help you reconnect with what you already know.
So here’s what a retreat for real life actually has in it. Yoga, yes — but also a surf lesson, because movement doesn’t just mean breathwork and stretches. It means pushing yourself in the ocean, challenging your nervous system in a fun way, remembering what it feels like to be playful and a bit uncertain.
There’s a particular kind of yoga that asks your system to slow down rather than push harder. Pilates to bring you into full presence with your body and with your breath. Then there’s the surf lesson – adrenaline, play, the simple pleasure of moving your body in the ocean without it being about performance or achievement. Movement becomes something you feel, not something you do to earn the right to rest.
There’s an optional glass of Portuguese vinho verde at dinner. Perhaps chocolate after the meal. Not because indulgence is the answer, but because restriction isn’t. Because coming home to yourself doesn’t mean abandoning the small things that bring you joy – it means integrating them consciously. It means noticing what you actually want rather than what you think you should want.
There’s a sauna ritual where we cover ourselves in coffee grounds and sit in the heat together, and frankly, it’s a bit feral. We laugh. We’re not trying to look serene or enlightened. We’re just women getting curious about what our bodies feel like when we give ourselves permission to be a bit wild and unpolished.
And this is deliberate. Because one of the biggest lies in wellness is that transformation requires transcendence. That you have to become a better version of yourself. When actually, the work is remembering who you are beneath all the doing and the proving and the perfectionism. Coming home to yourself doesn’t mean becoming someone new; it means deciding that who you are is actually enough.
Action step: This week, notice one small thing you’re denying yourself because you think you “shouldn’t.” What would change if you let yourself have it?
I spend a lot of time teaching women about their nervous system because I’ve found that most people don’t need more information or more discipline. They need enough safety in their body to hear themselves clearly.
When you’re burned out, overthinking, stuck in self-doubt — that’s not a mindset problem. That’s a nervous system problem. Your body is in a state of activation, which means your prefrontal cortex (the thinking part of your brain) is literally offline. You can’t think your way out of that. And if you try, you just create more exhaustion. And alongside this work I will be guiding a mindset coaching session to help you get clear on what you want from life and how to take steps towards it.
But before we talk about clarity or goals or aligned action, we work on regulation. Breathwork. Grounded movement. The kind of yoga that asks your system to slow down rather than push harder. We create conditions where your nervous system feels safe enough to downshift, and when that happens – sometimes surprisingly quickly – people start to hear themselves again.
This is why the week isn’t about motivation or inspiration or finding your purpose through a sequence of powerful moments. It’s about creating enough quiet in your system that you can hear what was already there. Clarity often comes after regulation, not before. And the retreats are designed with this as the foundation.
Here’s the distinction that matters: most retreats are built on the idea of escape. You leave your life, step into a container that’s completely separate, have some experiences, and then go home and try to take the feelings with you. Which almost never works. You get home to the laundry and the inbox and the life you left behind, and the retreat starts to feel like a beautiful dream that had nothing to do with reality.
I wanted to build something different. A retreat where the work isn’t just about what happens in those five days – it’s about what you take home and how you live differently. Not completely differently. But intentionally differently. The insights you have about your nervous system, about what you actually want, about how to trust yourself – those aren’t retreat insights. They’re life insights. And they should integrate seamlessly into the messy middle of your actual existence.
This is why the yoga isn’t just about flexibility. Why the surf lesson isn’t just about the adrenaline. Why the breathwork and the coaching and the time with other women in similar spaces – it’s all designed to be things you can actually take home and weave into how you live. A practice you can return to. Tools you already understand. An understanding of how your body communicates that changes how you listen to yourself from now on.
Action step: Notice one insight or realisation you’ve had in a previous retreat, course, or coaching experience. Did you actually integrate it into your life? What would have made it stick?
One more thing that I think matters, and it’s harder to articulate but I’m going to try anyway. So much of what makes this work is the people you do it with.
Women show up to these retreats at particular moments in their lives. Moments where they’re questioning things. Reconsidering choices. Feeling like maybe there’s a version of themselves they’ve forgotten about. And something shifts when you’re in a room with other women in that same space. Not comparing. Not competing. Just being witnessed by people who understand that the messy middle is actually where life happens.
There’s a particular kind of woman who finds her way to these retreats. Ambitious. Self-aware. Capable of holding complexity – which is to say, capable of understanding that you can be grateful for your life and also want something different. That you can love someone and still question whether you’re showing up as yourself with them. That you can have worked hard to build something and also know that it’s not enough anymore.
These are women who don’t need fixing. They need permission, and reflection, and other women who get it – who don’t think you’re ungrateful for wanting more, who understand that reconnecting with yourself isn’t selfish, who recognise that the work of coming home to yourself is actually the most ambitious thing you can do.
I want to be honest about what these five days do and don’t do. They don’t magically solve your life. They don’t give you the answer to whether you should quit your job or leave your relationship or move countries (sorry). They don’t make your body look different or your circumstances change overnight.
What they do is create a moment where you’re not living on autopilot. Where you’re regulated enough to hear yourself. Where you’re with people who understand that the messy middle is a feature, not a bug. Where you spend time in your body instead of just in your head. Where you practice trusting yourself in small ways so that trusting yourself in bigger ways becomes more possible.
And then you go home, and the work becomes integrating that. Not perfectly. Not trying to create some completely different version of your life. But noticing, slowly, that you’re checking in with yourself more. That you’re saying no to things that don’t align. That you’re building a relationship with your own wisdom that actually feels reliable.
That’s the work. Not the week – the week is just the beginning.
Action step: Before booking anything, ask yourself what would actually change if you felt more connected to yourself. Then notice whether you actually need a retreat to start that, or whether you’re waiting for external permission to do work you’re already ready for.
If this is resonating, 1:1 coaching is where we go deeper into this work over time. And if a complete reset in Sagres sounds like what you need right now, the retreats are designed for exactly this — five days of coming home to yourself, with other women who just get it.
The messy middle is where the real work happens. Book a discovery call if you want to talk it through. Or if a complete reset sounds right, the retreats in Sagres are designed for exactly that.
If this article has helped you notice something, you can explore practical support through breathwork, retreats or coaching with Chaz.
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