October 15-18  |  Catskills, NY

The Retreat

Space to reconnect with the parts of yourself you've had to leave behind.

If you’ve spent years being the one who holds everything together, chances are you’ve become incredibly good at one version of yourself.

The responsible one. The capable one. The one everyone can count on.
Those parts of you are real. But somewhere along the way, they started taking up all the room.

What if you’ve mistaken a survival strategy for your personality?

What if the reason life has started feeling one-dimensional isn’t because this is just what adulthood is… but because you’ve slowly lost touch with the rest of yourself?

This retreat was created to help you reconnect with the forgotten parts of yourself that have been buried underneath years of responsibility.

Not by escaping your life.

By helping you understand why you’ve become disconnected from yourself in the first place—and creating enough safety, support, and space to begin living differently.

Because when you reconnect with the fullness of who you are… life starts feeling like it’s in full color again.

I Thought I Needed More Time

For years, I believed that if I could just get a little more organized and stop feeling behind, then I’d finally have time to breathe. Time to read the books sitting on my nightstand. Time to enjoy the life I was working so hard to build.

But that day never came.

Because I was solving the wrong problem.

The problem wasn’t time.

It was space.

Not just space in my calendar, but space in my life. Space to rest without feeling guilty. Space to change my mind. Space to feel something besides pressure. Space to ask myself what I wanted before immediately thinking about what I should do next.

Somewhere along the way, life became more about checking the boxes than actually living it.

The pages of the calendar just kept flying by.

And I couldn’t shake the feeling that there had to be another way to do life than this.


Let Me Ask You This

When was the last time you made a decision because it genuinely felt right for you—not because it felt like the responsible thing to do?

When was the last time you noticed your body and/or mind asking for rest and actually listened?

When was the last time you let yourself want something before deciding whether it was practical?

When was the last time you told someone what you really wanted instead of saying, “Whatever you want is fine?”

When was the last time you checked in with yourself before checking in with everyone else?

When was the last time you let someone else be disappointed instead of making yourself uncomfortable?

When was the last time you asked for help instead of automatically assuming it was easier to do it yourself?

When was the last time you had a free afternoon and your first thought wasn’t everything you should catch up on?

When was the last time you felt fully present in your own life instead of thinking about everything that came next?

If you’re realizing it’s been a long time…

You’re not alone.

This Is What Over-Functioning Steals

I define overfunctioning as taking responsibility for more than is actually yours.

It can look different for everyone, but the pattern is the same. Sometimes it looks like:

Feeling responsible for other people’s emotions.

Making sure everyone around you is comfortable.

Carrying the mental load because it’s easier than asking for help.

Believing everything depends on you.

Constantly sacrificing today for the version of yourself you’re trying to become.

Believing there’s always something more important than listening to yourself.

None of this usually feels like self-abandonment.

It just feels like who you are.

You’re responsible. Reliable. Independent. The one who gets things done.

Little by little, you stop checking in with yourself. You override your body. You dismiss your emotions. You ignore your desires—not because you’re consciously deciding they don’t matter, but because this way of moving through the world has become automatic.

Eventually, it stops feeling like a pattern. It simply feels like your personality.

Those qualities aren’t the problem. The problem is that they’ve become the only version of yourself you’ve had room to be.

Those parts of you are real. They’re just not all of you.


That’s Why Resentment Matters

Most people think resentment is the problem. It’s actually a clue. It’s your life trying to get your attention because some part of you knows you’ve been negotiating against yourself for too long.

Here’s the irony: we often end up resenting the very things we’ve convinced ourselves we’re sacrificing for.

The career we’re building.

The business we’re growing.

The relationships we’re trying to protect.

The future we’re working so hard to create.

Not because those things are the problem, but because somewhere along the way, we disappeared from the equation.

We tell ourselves we’re doing it for those things. But when you’re constantly sacrificing yourself, you don’t create a better relationship with them—you create resentment towards them.

The very life you’re working so hard to build starts feeling like the thing you’re trapped inside.

Nobody wins. Not you. Not your relationships. Not your future. Because no matter what you’re sacrificing yourself for, no one benefits from a life where you’ve stopped being fully alive inside it.

One day, you look around and wonder, “Is this really what life is?” Not because your life is bad, but because you’re always preparing for it instead of fully living it.

So what’s the point of building a beautiful life if you’re too disconnected from yourself to actually experience it?

The Biggest Misconception About This Work

Most of us assume the answer is changing our circumstances. We tell ourselves we need more time. More help. A different relationship. A better boss. Fewer responsibilities. And while those things can absolutely make life easier, they aren’t what’s creating this pattern.

Because overfunctioning isn’t just something you do. It’s the way you’ve learned to move through life.

Somewhere along the way, being responsible became how you stayed safe.

Being capable made you feel valuable.
Being easy kept the peace.
Being productive made you believe you’d eventually earn the life you wanted.

So of course choosing yourself feels risky. It doesn’t just feel like changing a habit—it feels like risking the very things you’ve built your life around.
But here’s what I’ve learned.

Choosing yourself doesn’t take away from your life. It gives you your life back.

Your relationships become more honest because you’re finally bringing your whole self into them.
Your work becomes more meaningful because it isn’t fueled entirely by pressure.
Your ambition becomes more sustainable because it no longer requires sacrificing yourself.
Your decisions become clearer because they’re coming from you instead of autopilot.

The goal isn’t to become less capable, less caring, less ambitious, or less responsible. It’s to reconnect with the fullness of who you are.

Because the version of you that’s capable isn’t the only version of you worth knowing.


What Becomes Possible

Something shifts when you stop organizing your life around pressure and start organizing it around connection.

At first, it doesn’t necessarily look dramatic. It feels like relief.

You stop carrying quite so much. You stop believing everything depends on you. Rest becomes something you can receive instead of something you have to earn. Support starts feeling a little safer. You begin trusting that not everything is yours to hold.

And as you create more of that space, something unexpected starts to happen.

Parts of yourself that have been buried underneath years of responsibility begin coming back online.


You become more playful.
More curious.
More creative.


You laugh more.
You notice what sounds fun.
You make decisions because they feel true—not just because they seem like the responsible thing to do.

Little by little, your life stops feeling like something you’re constantly managing…
and starts feeling like something you’re actually living.

Imagine…

Waking up without immediately feeling crushed by the weight of everything you need to do.

Trusting yourself enough to know what you need before asking what everyone else expects.

Noticing your body asking for rest… and simply letting yourself rest.

Someone saying, “I’ve got it,” and actually letting them.

Realizing everything doesn’t depend on you.

Asking for what you need without worrying you’re asking for too much.

Disappointing someone… and discovering your relationship survived it.

Trusting that your emotions matter just as much as everyone else’s… and more than your to-do list.

Trying something new simply because it sounds fun… and letting yourself be terrible at it.

Laughing hysterically over something silly and realizing you haven’t felt this playful in years.

Having a free afternoon and your first thought being, “What do I want to do?” instead of, “What should I catch up on?”

Imagine looking around at the life you’ve built… and realizing you’re finally here for it.

That’s what I mean when I say life comes back into full color.

That’s What Inspired This Retreat

When I went on my first retreat, I thought the workshops would be what changed me. And they absolutely did.

But what surprised me most was the “retreat” itself. It pulled me out of my everyday life long enough to finally see the patterns that had quietly been shaping it. I was like a fish in water that had suddenly been plucked out. For the first time, I could actually see what I’d been swimming in.

And it was really disorienting.

I was so excited to get away from the pressure and responsibility of my everyday life. But once I did, I realized I didn’t really know who I was without it.

That’s when I understood why retreats can be so transformational. Not because they magically change your life in a few days, but because they give you enough distance to finally see the patterns that have been shaping it.

Why This Retreat Is Different

When I started designing this retreat, I didn’t begin with an itinerary.

I began with one question: What actually helps someone stop abandoning themselves?

Because transformation doesn’t happen through information alone.

Real change happens when what you’re learning, what you’re experiencing, and the environment you’re in are all working together.

You can’t think your way back to yourself. The parts of you that have been buried under years of responsibility need more than insight. They need enough safety, support, and space to begin coming back.

That’s why every part of this retreat was chosen intentionally.

The workshops help you understand why those patterns formed.

Human Design gives you a roadmap back to your natural way of operating.

Breathwork helps you reconnect with yourself beneath those patterns.

Hypnosis helps your subconscious begin experiencing another way of living as safe.

And the spaciousness gives you the opportunity to experience what you’re learning instead of simply understanding it.

Nothing here is random.

Everything is working toward the same goal: Helping you reconnect with yourself.

The Experience

One of my favorite things about retreats is that, for a few days, you get to put everything down.

The meals are taken care of.
The logistics are taken care of.
Someone else is holding all the moving pieces.

Your only job is to show up. And if you’ve spent years feeling responsible for everyone and everything, that’s a much bigger deal than it sounds.

What I love most, though, is the space.

Space to read. Space to nap. Space to go for a walk. Space to sit outside with a cup of tea. Space to work on a puzzle.

Bring your knitting. Bring your bike. Bring the book that’s been sitting on your nightstand. Bring whatever helps you feel like you.

Maybe you already know exactly what you’d do with that kind of space. Maybe you have absolutely no idea.

After years of orienting your life around what everyone else needs and what always has to get done, “What do I want to do?” can be a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

This weekend gives you enough space to start hearing the answer again.

Your Guides

Nicole Guena

Retreat Host | Human Design & Pattern Coaching

This is where we make the invisible visible.

I’ll be with you from the moment you arrive until the moment you leave—guiding our workshops, facilitating conversations, helping you connect the dots, and supporting you as everything begins coming together.

We’ll use Human Design, subconscious pattern work, coaching, and conversation to help you understand why you’ve become disconnected from yourself, what has kept those patterns in place, and what it actually looks like to begin showing up differently.

This isn’t about fixing you.

It’s about helping you reconnect with the fullness of who you’ve always been.


To deepen that experience, I’ve invited two guest practitioners whose work I’ve experience first hand and deeply trust.

Each brings a different expertise, but every session is intentionally designed to support the same goal: helping you reconnect with yourself in a deeper, more embodied way.

Your Guest Practitioners

AJ Alvarez

Breathwork Facilitator

One of the things I love most about AJ’s work is his ability to help people quiet the thinking mind and access a deeper part of themselves.

Understanding something intellectually is important.

But many of these patterns don’t just live in our minds.

They live in our bodies.

Breathwork gives you the opportunity to move beneath the planning, managing, and overthinking part of yourself and reconnect with your emotions, your intuition, and the parts of yourself that have been buried underneath years of responsibility.

It’s often in that space that we reconnect with who we were before we learned who we thought we had to be.

Sheri Fitzner

Intuitive Hypnotherapist

One of the biggest shifts in this work is realizing that you have more choice than your patterns would have you believe.

That’s what I love about Sheri’s approach.

Her work centers around helping people reconnect with their own choice, sovereignty, and personal power.

Through hypnosis, you’ll begin experiencing that on a subconscious level. Instead of automatically falling back into familiar roles and survival strategies, you’ll begin creating space to choose something different.

Three Months of Integration

One of the things that makes this retreat different is that it doesn’t end when you drive home.

Over the weekend, you’ll begin understanding the patterns you’ve been living inside, why they’ve felt so hard to change, and what they’re actually trying to protect.

Because clarity is incredibly powerful. But clarity alone doesn’t create lasting change.

For years, your nervous system learned that safety came from abandoning yourself.

From being easy. From being responsible. From doing it yourself. From holding everything together. From not needing too much, wanting too much, or being for too much.

So we’re not just asking you to choose yourself and hoping it sticks. We’re helping you build evidence that it’s safe to show up differently.

That happens in your real life. When you tell someone how you actually feel. When you ask for help instead of automatically doing it yourself. When you choose what feels true instead of what feels most responsible. When you let someone else have their reaction without immediately managing it.

That’s how your nervous system begins learning something new:

I can stop abandoning myself and still be safe.

That’s why this retreat includes three months of integration afterward. We’ll keep working together as you bring what you’ve experienced back into your everyday life—one small experiment, one honest choice, one new piece of evidence at a time.

The goal isn’t to leave the retreat as a completely different person.

It’s to build a new way of relating to yourself until, little by little, choosing yourself feels just as natural as abandoning yourself once did.


The Retreat

Nestled in the Catskills, surrounded by nature, this is a home designed for quiet mornings, nourishing meals, meaningful conversations and the kind of rest that’s hard to find in everyday life.

The Retreat at a Glance

Location: Catskills, NY

Dates: October 15-18

Group Size: Just six women.

Keeping this retreat intentionally intimate allows every woman to feel deeply seen, supported, and cared for while creating the kind of conversations that simply aren’t possible in larger groups.

Accommodations: Beautiful private rooms (with one shared room option), nourishing meals, spacious common areas, cozy places to curl up with a book, and plenty of quiet corners to simply be.

Choose Your Room

Every room offers a peaceful place to rest, reflect and recharge. Four private rooms and one shared room are available, each with access to one of the home's beautifully renovated bathrooms featuring oversized soaking tubs. Rooms are reserved on a first-come, first-served basis, so booking earlier gives you the best selection of rooms.

The River Room

A spacious king room on the second floor with peaceful views of the backyard and river beyond. The perfect place to unwind and wake up surrounded by nature.

  • Second floor

  • King bed

  • Backyard & river views

  • Dresser

Your Investment:

3 monthly payments of $737
$2,211 total investment

The Woodland Room

Tucked away on the third floor, this spacious king room offers peaceful views of the backyard, river and surrounding trees, creating an especially quiet retreat.

  • Third floor

  • King bed

  • Backyard & river views

  • Dresser

Your Investment:

3 monthly payments of $737
$2,211 total investment

The Sunrise Room

This bright corner room on the second floor features two windows overlooking the surrounding trees and neighborhood, creating a light-filled, peaceful space to recharge.

  • Second floor

  • Queen bed

  • Corner room with two windows

  • Closet

Your Investment:

3 monthly payments of $737
$2,211 total investment

The Meadow Room

This queen room on the second floor features windows overlooking the surrounding trees and neighborhood, creating a peaceful space to recharge.

  • Second floor

  • Queen bed

  • Closet

Your Investment:

3 monthly payments of $737
$2,211 total investment

The Wildflower Room

The only shared room, this spacious third-floor room features two queen beds and plenty of room to spread out. Perfect for coming with a friend or choosing a more budget-friendly option while enjoying the full retreat experience.

  • Third floor

  • Two queen beds

  • Two Closets

Your Investment:

3 monthly payments of $574
$1,722 total investment

The Decision to Come

If you’ve spent years believing there’s always something more important than yourself, choosing something like this will probably feel uncomfortable.

Your mind will immediately start making a list. The time. The money. Everything you’ll fall behind on. Everything you “should” be doing instead. Everything that feels more responsible.

I don’t see those thoughts as reasons not to come. I see them as evidence that you’ve found the pattern.

Because this is how overfunctioning survives. It always gives you another reason to wait.
Another season. Another milestone. Another version of your life where you’ll finally have time to come back to yourself.

But that’s the treadmill. At some point, someone has to decide to step off.

In many ways, that’s what saying yes to this retreat is.

Not an escape from your life.

An interruption.

The first interruption to a pattern that’s been quietly shaping it. Because you don’t change your life by waiting until you finally have time to choose yourself.

You change your life the moment you decide you’re done waiting.

That’s what this retreat really is. Not a vacation. Not an escape.

A turning point.

A decision to stop waiting until everything else is done before making room for yourself.

I hope you say yes.