Why Every Woman Needs a Retreat (At Least Once)

Coming home from a weekend at Fox Springs last September, I sat on my kitchen floor and cried. Not from sadness. From something older than words. Something that had been asking to be put down.

This is what I want to tell you about.

The women who need this most are the last to book it

Every woman I know is running on empty.

She is holding a job, or two. She is holding a household. She is holding aging parents, or growing kids, or a partner who is doing his best, or a partnership that is not what she hoped it would be. She is holding grief she has not named. She is holding a body that keeps sending her signals she is too busy to answer.

And when someone suggests she take a weekend for herself, she says the same thing every time.

Maybe next year.

When things calm down.

I couldn't leave the kids that long.

I don't need anything fancy.

I have said all of these sentences myself. I know exactly what they mean. They mean: I am not sure I deserve it.

Rest is not a reward for finishing your to-do list

Here is what I learned the hard way, after fifteen years in the recovery arena and a decade of teaching yoga to women who were doing everything and feeling like nothing.

Rest is not something you earn.

It is not the prize for having emptied your inbox, or having gotten your kids into a good school, or having proven you can survive the impossible thing you are currently surviving.

Rest is what makes you able to keep going in the first place.

The women who most need to book a retreat are the women who will tell you they are too busy for one. That is not a coincidence. That is the very system that put them there.

What a retreat actually gives you

I am not going to sell you on a resort with a spa menu and a turndown service.

That is not what happens at the retreats I build.

What happens is this:

You arrive at a hundred-year-old lodge in the Missouri woods. You leave your phone in the car. You drop your bags in a room that is simple and clean and quiet. You sit on a porch with a cup of tea and you do not have anything to do.

For most women, that alone takes 48 hours to settle into.

By the second morning, you are laughing in a way you had forgotten you could. By the second evening, you are telling a woman you met yesterday a truth you have not told anyone in ten years, and she is telling you one back. By Sunday you are not the same person who arrived on Thursday.

That is what a retreat is.

Not a spa weekend. A resetting.

Why sisterhood is the medicine

The single biggest thing women tell me they leave with is not the yoga. It is not the food, though Chef Sheri's food will make you cry. It is not the sound bath, though that will loosen something in your chest.

It is the women.

Something happens when twenty-five women are held in a safe space for three days. The masks come off. The pretending stops. The apologizing for existing stops. Someone shares something hard, and instead of the awkward silence you get in your normal life, another woman leans in and says: me too.

We have been taught to compete with each other. We have been taught to be jealous of each other. We have been taught that other women are a threat.

A retreat unlearns that in about eighteen hours.

You will leave with two or three women whose numbers are in your phone and whose voices will get you through the next twelve months. That is not a bonus feature. That is the point.

Who a retreat is for

If you are a woman who has been giving from an empty cup for a long time, this is for you.

If you are a woman who cannot remember the last time you spent three days without being needed for something, this is for you.

If you are in recovery, or if you are still figuring out what recovery looks like, this is for you.

If you have been carrying grief you do not have anywhere to put down, this is for you.

If you are perfectly fine and you just want to move slow with other women who understand, this is also for you.

What I want you to know about 2027

The 2027 Sara Taylor Wellness Experience runs June 3 to 6 at Fox Springs Lodge in Cuba, Missouri. Four days. Twenty-five women. Everything included.

The women who came in 2026 get first access. The waitlist opens next, then public booking.

If reading this made your chest feel a certain way, listen to that. Get on the waitlist. You are not committing yet. You are just letting yourself want it.

Join the 2027 Waitlist → Click here.

I will see you on the porch.

~ Sara

Sara Taylor is the founder of Sara Taylor Wellness. She is a Yoga Alliance certified E-RYT, a trauma-informed yoga teacher trained through SheRecovers with Taryn Strong, and a woman in long-term recovery. She has been guiding women through movement, breath, and honest circles for over ten years.