About THE RETREAT
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You're not tired because you're weak.
You're tired because you've been holding too much.
Your tongue. The room. The emotional labour. The grief. The ambition you keep apologising for. The boundary you've swallowed so many times it's become part of your body. The thing you've been meaning to say for three years.
You've been so good for so long.
And it has cost you something real.
This retreat is for the woman who is done carrying silently.
Not done with care. Not done with love. Not done with showing up.
Done with doing it at the expense of herself.
This is not a spa weekend.
There will be no manifesting boards. No girlboss energy. No motivational quotes on pastel backgrounds.
This retreat works with psychology and with something older than psychology.
With the nervous system and with ritual.
With strategy and with sovereignty.
With the woman you've been performing - and the woman underneath her who has been waiting considerably longer than is reasonable.
There will be real work. Held space. Psychologically grounded facilitation. Ceremonial container. And the particular kind of freedom that only arrives when a woman stops performing and starts telling the truth.
If you want light and fluffy - this isn't it.
If you're ready for a turning point - keep reading.
TUESDAY - TRUTH
Crossing the threshold
You arrive at noon. There's soup. There's tea. There's no agenda yet.
We let nervous systems arrive before we ask anything of them.
In the afternoon, Ceryn - Word Alchemist, Threshold Oracle, Primal Witch - opens the ceremonial container of the retreat.
A space clearing. A threshold ritual. A deliberate marking of this time as something different from a workshop, a training day, a conference, a casual gathering.
This is sacred time.
Michelle and Felice don't facilitate this. They participate alongside every woman in the room. Because this work is not done to you. It is done with you.
What Ceryn creates on Tuesday afternoon is the reason Wednesday is possible.
The evening is dinner, fireside conversation and an early night. Tuesday is designed to feel steady - like the moment before something important begins.
Because it is.
WEDNESDAY - POWER
From suppression to sovereignty
This is Michelle's day.
The emotional arc is deliberate: awareness in the morning, activation at midday, regulation in the afternoon, transmutation in the evening, radiance at the close.
We start with the truth about what women have been taught to do with their power. Where it went. What it cost. What is stored in the body when it has nowhere to go for years - sometimes decades.
Then we do the work of getting it back.
The morning opens with a grounding practice and a short teaching on the conditioned patterns that keep women's leadership and lives constrained - the people-pleasing, the perfectionism, the over-functioning, the self-silencing, the endless waiting for permission. Women are guided to locate these patterns not just in their thinking but in their bodies.
Then we move from cognitive to embodied.
The midday session is somatic and physical. Stomping. Voice release. Breathwork. The "no" practice. The warrior stance. Battle cries. Whatever your nervous system needs to remember that you have a body - and it has been trying to tell you something for a very long time.
This work is tightly held. You are never alone in it. You can step back from anything at any time. And you will be grounded every step of the way.
After lunch, a Warrior Walk in the open countryside. Sixty minutes. The final twenty in silence. The prompt: what am I done tolerating?
You pick up a stone or a leaf. It represents the old story. You'll know what to do with it later.
At 3pm, Rebecca holds the sound bath. After activation, sound regulates. After the fire of the morning, the bowls bring integration. We are not suppressing what surfaced. We are metabolising it. Transmuting it into something you can actually use.
The evening is the fire ritual. Around the firepit, each woman names what she is no longer available for. Places her stone or leaf into the fire. Speaks her battle cry into the night.
Then music. Dark chocolate. Mulled cider. Hot tub. Dancing if the mood takes you.
Rage becomes radiance.
That is not a slogan. That is what actually happens on Wednesday evening.
THURSDAY - FREEDOM
Voice, visibility and the Sovereign Seat
This is Felice's day.
Wednesday gave you your fire back. Thursday teaches you how to carry it in a room.
The morning goes deep into visibility - what you believe will happen if you are fully seen, who you might outgrow, what identity would have to die. These are not small questions. Felice maps the fears on the flipchart. Then she dismantles them. Live. In the room. In front of each other.
Lauren - professional actress and voice specialist - works with you on how you actually sound when you are not performing. How you take up space. How authority feels in the body before it reaches the mouth. The gap between what you know you want to say and what actually comes out - she closes that gap in ways that feel permanent rather than practised.
Then the Sovereign Seat.
One chair. The centre of the room. The group as witness.
One by one, each woman takes her place.
She speaks: Who she is becoming. What she stands for. What she is no longer available for. What she is now claiming.
The group witnesses. No advice. No critique. No fixing. No helpful suggestions.
Just presence. Just witnessing. Just the particular power of being fully seen by a room full of women who have just spent two days doing the same work you have.
This is not a performance exercise.
It is a claiming.
And it is - without exception, in every iteration of this work we have ever held - the moment women describe as the turning point. The before and after. The thing they remember five years later.
Felice closes the afternoon with a collective anchoring practice. A vow. Short. Not cheesy. Just true.
The evening is the Matriarch's Table.
You dress up. There are candles and music and a symbolic crown for every woman at the table. Before the meal, the group toasts each person - one sentence, witnessed, named, honoured out loud.
The feeling of women who have stopped apologising.
You will remember it for the rest of your life.
FRIDAY - RETURN
Integration and departure
A gentle closing morning.
Breakfast. A final circle - what are you taking with you, what are you leaving behind, what commitment are you making, what support do you need.
Then a clean ending. Check out by 10am.
Friday is designed with great care. We do not end on an emotional peak and send you back to your life while you are still raw and open. We close the container deliberately. We integrate. We ground.
You leave clear and steady - not unravelled, not flooded, not fragile.
Changed, yes. But solid. Ready. Carrying something real that wasn't there before.
YOUR FACILITATORS
Michelle Minnikin Chartered Organisational Psychologist and author of Good Girl Deprogramming
Michelle Minnikin Chartered Organisational Psychologist and author of Good Girl Deprogramming
Michelle Minnikin Chartered Organisational Psychologist and author of Good Girl Deprogramming
Michelle has spent years mapping the patterns women develop to stay safe, stay acceptable and stay small in systems that were not designed for their full power. She has written two books on it. She has done this work on herself. She knows what it costs and she knows what becomes possible when it shifts.
She brings psychological depth, deco
Michelle has spent years mapping the patterns women develop to stay safe, stay acceptable and stay small in systems that were not designed for their full power. She has written two books on it. She has done this work on herself. She knows what it costs and she knows what becomes possible when it shifts.
She brings psychological depth, deconditioning work and the particular kind of honesty that comes from someone who has lived inside the framework she teaches.
Her work on Wednesday is the heart of the retreat.
Felice Ayling Dickhead Slayer, Visibility Strategist, Founder of Loud Women
Michelle Minnikin Chartered Organisational Psychologist and author of Good Girl Deprogramming
Michelle Minnikin Chartered Organisational Psychologist and author of Good Girl Deprogramming
Felice has spent years working with women who have something important to say and have learned - through conditioning, through punishment, through the particular exhaustion of always softening - to say it quietly if at all.
She brings strategic voice, embodied authority and the kind of facilitation that makes women feel like they can final
Felice has spent years working with women who have something important to say and have learned - through conditioning, through punishment, through the particular exhaustion of always softening - to say it quietly if at all.
She brings strategic voice, embodied authority and the kind of facilitation that makes women feel like they can finally use their full range.
Her work on Thursday is where everything Wednesday made possible becomes something you can actually carry into a room.