ALUMNI ONLY  ·  BY INVITATION  ·  9 WOMEN

Awakening the Wise Woman

The biggest love story of your life.

ADVIVUM BEACH, Baja California Sur, Mexico

October 26–31, 2026

5 nights

A five-day somatic retreat for nine Advivum alumni — the most intimate and interior experience I offer.

Nine spaces — moving quickly.

At some point in my life, I realized that there was a person who had not been invited to the table.

Not neglected out of malice. Just quietly, consistently left out — while I studied, built, created, performed, cared for others, and lived, as it turns out, almost entirely outside in. Following rules instead of impulses. Creating theatre and beauty in the world instead of a daily practice of recognizing the beauty that was already there, in me, waiting.

I went looking for her. I followed a shaman in Ecuador. I pushed the boundaries of what I thought I knew in the Netherlands. I learned to meditate in stone circles and jungles. I studied in France in circles of women whose wisdom I was hungry for. I learned techniques and frameworks and approaches. And somewhere in the middle of all that searching, I understood that the techniques were only half the answer. The other half was being brave enough to listen to the woman inside. To treat honouring her as my sacred charge.

When I finally found her — or rather, when I finally stopped running long enough for her to find me — I saw the world

differently, and it experienced me differently.

What I discovered at the end of that journey was the beginning of the biggest love story of my life. The one with me.

This retreat is my attempt to offer you a version of that journey — more directly, more tenderly, more intentionally than I found it — in five days, in a hidden villa on the ocean, with nine other women who are ready.

Nine spaces. This is more intimate and more interior than anything else Advivum offers. It will fill quickly.

She has been there all along

There is no map for the woman you are becoming.

Our grandmothers at fifty were considered old. We are not. The years stretching before us — years of health, capacity, sovereignty, and hunger for her own life — have no precedent. The structures that once held women's wisdom — the aunties, the grandmothers, the circles that gathered at every life passage — have been broken open by a society that undervalued them.

But the knowing did not disappear. It went underground.

It lives in you — in the way you read a room before anyone speaks, in what moves through your hands when someone you love is struggling, in the part of you that has always known things you couldn't quite explain. You were taught to look away from that knowing. To call it something smaller than it is.

This retreat is the turning back toward it.

We are not age-bound here. We are age-informed. And we are reclaiming our right to define, for ourselves, who we are.

Who she is

There is no single contemporary archetype for the Wise Woman. A few examples exist, but not many — which means we get to co-create her, in circle, from our own lived experience.

She carries within her aspects of every archetype that has always lived in women:

The Healer — who knows that the most powerful medicine is presence, and that what moves through her hands is more than she has been taught to believe.

The Oracle — who trusts what she knows before she can explain it, and has learned to call that intelligence rather than instinct.

The Midwife — who does not give birth for others, but creates the conditions in which they can birth themselves.

The Creatrix — who makes meaning, beauty, and safety out of whatever is in front of her.

The Wild One — who remembers, even now, how to play, how to feel, how to follow what her body says yes to.

She holds all of these. She is not one thing. She is the fullness of you — reclaimed. Ancient and contemporary at once. The witches, the healers, the goddesses — you are their descendant. That line of knowing runs directly through you.

If only you could see her clearly —

you would recognize immediately:

you already are her.

The body remembers

Our bodies keep score. It is true. They store the hurts and the suffocation and the adrenaline-infused hustling for worthiness — but they also store our first knowing of ourselves.

The pureness of healing touch awakens the skin and beneath it the unexpressed: the need to be witnessed, held, loved. A hug can heal — not because of the hug's power, but because the body remembers a love affair with itself.

When I started learning this practice, I hid. I was pretty sure people would think I was bonkers. But the truth was, every time I entered into the sacredness of a circle of wise women who could gently hold me, I somatically released into real learning about myself. I had felt like life was closing in on me — moving quickly to a soundtrack that had a baseline of loneliness. And then I spontaneously smiled. Heat crept up my neck. And it freaked me out. I realized I had not had a spontaneous, non-strategized, non-intellectual reaction in ages.

I was mesmerized. It was like seeing my twin for the first time. I always knew she was alive. And somehow I was meeting her for the first time.

I'm not hiding anymore.

Ready? This is the moment.

The tenderness of it

Is there anything harder than tenderness applied to self? We have saved it so carefully for others — our children, our partners, our friends — and kept so little for the woman in the mirror.

And yet it is in that tenderness that everything lives.

Knowing who I am. Feeling my own presence. Knowing my boundaries. Feeling my voice articulate my desires. Knowing pleasure. Knowing purpose — from the inside out.

This is tender work. Some of it will be harder than you expect. All of it will be worth it.

“The moment it hit me was when I realized that the face I was so critical of — the lined one, the one that shows the rings under my eyes and creeping grey in my eyebrows, the very face that I punish every morning when I gaze at it — is the face that others see for its compassion, its tenderness, its willingness to do the hard stuff. When I saw that face, my whole world opened up.”

— Theresa, Advivum Alumna

What we do together

This is a structured, deeply experiential retreat — more interior and more physical than anything else Advivum offers. We go inward. We cocoon. There are almost no off-property activities because the real work is happening inside you and inside the circle we build. If you are drawn to this and also a little afraid of it, you are probably exactly right for it.

I didn't realize I was disconnected from myself because I was so deeply connected to my intellect — my thoughts, my beliefs, my constant figuring out the world and how to have a place in it. And then, over the course of many trainings and somatic learnings, I discovered there was a whole woman, entirely ignored, trying to live inside me.

She is the one who knows her boundaries.

She is the one who tells me when I am tired.

She is the one who experiences the frisson of looking into kind, loving eyes.

My quest since then has been to find my pathway to her. This retreat is a part of my journey — and yours.

The shape of a day

Each day opens with a Sacred Body Awakening practice — a feminine healing practice that begins in the breath, moves into the hands, and returns you to a sacred feeling of Self that you had forgotten.

Through our days, we will co-create the Wise Woman archetype from our own lives — not a textbook. We will examine our relationship to ourselves: the old tapes, the inherited rules, the ways we learned to come last. And we will begin the work of setting them down. Not all at once, but enough. Enough to feel what's underneath.

We will practice gazing — at our own faces, our own bodies — with the quality of attention we have almost never allowed ourselves. Not judgment. Not critique. Just looking, openly, the way a woman looks at someone she is beginning to love. This is the most radical thing we will do here. You don't have to be ready for it. Coming is enough.

We will explore what it means to carry healing in our hands — not what we do to others, but what we midwife in them. We do not fix. We witness. We place our hands and trust what moves through.

A note on touch

Some of our practices are hands-on — touch that is intentional, consensual, and healing. This is not massage, not therapy, and not sexual in any way. It is something older and simpler: the placing of hands in the service of witnessing. We touch each other not to fix but to say: I see you. I am here. Every practice is an invitation. Your body's yes is the only permission that matters here. We move at the pace of the slowest yes in the room.

On two occasions we will welcome the gifts of the community around us — sound healing, cacao ceremony — woven in as ceremony. The rest of the time, we are in our own world.

Five days, each finding its own depth. This is the shape of one of them.

SUNRISE: We open the day in ceremony — a breath, a gathering, a word dropped into the morning before the world has asked anything of us.

MORNING: Sacred Body Awakening — the practice that begins in breath and returns you to a sacred feeling of Self that you had forgotten. Then time that is entirely yours. The extraordinary quiet of Palm Orchard holds a particular stillness — all that patient, tended growth of the former nursery still present in the air.

BRUNCH: Together at the table. Unhurried. The morning's opening has softened something in everyone and the conversation finds its own way.

QUIET TIME: To rest. To let the morning settle into the body. The pool. The shade. The journal. The particular luxury of an afternoon that belongs only to you.

EARLY AFTERNOON: Our formal session — exploration of the day's theme, our healing practice, the work we are here to do. This is where the Wise Woman is met, named, and slowly, reverently, reclaimed.

SUNDOWN: In ceremony, at the ocean's edge. Each evening a closing of the day that honours what was opened in it. The light here does something genuinely difficult to explain.

DINNER: Nine women at a table at the end of a day that changed something. The laughter is different here — deeper, looser. Nobody is performing. Everyone has arrived.

Every day the work we do together will settle into something you carry home differently. That is the promise.

THE PLACE

Palm Orchard is a collection of private villas tucked within a former plant nursery on the ocean side of Baja California Sur. It belongs to Advivum — which means I am not offering you a venue. I am bringing you home.

There is a beautiful pool. Privacy in every direction. Nine women in this space. Intimate enough that no one disappears.

THE FULL ARC

Before —  A private coaching session with Tania, you arrive with intention, not just luggage.

The retreat —  Five days at Palm Orchard. October 26–31, 2026.

Continue* —  Flow directly into the Baja Wisdom Council, November 2–7. Both retreats create something neither can do alone. * This is optional and for an additional fee.

After —  Six months of monthly facilitated calls and exercises to deepen your discoveries and keep the circle alive.

THE DETAILS

Dates  October 26–31, 2026  (5 nights)

Location  Palm Orchard, Baja California Sur, Mexico

Investment  USD $4,500 per person — all-inclusive

Group size  9 women — intimate by design

Includes  All accommodation, all meals, all daily practices, pre-retreat coaching, and six months of group integration support

Excludes  Flights and transport to venue

Airport  Los Cabos International (SJD) — approximately 45 minutes away

Nine spaces only — determined by the size of the villa, not the size of the ambition.

This will sell out. Reserve your space before it does.

Come find her

You have been living outside in —

following the rules, meeting the expectations,

showing up for everyone but yourself.

What if you turned around?

What if the woman you have been looking for

has been standing just behind you this whole time —

patient, amused, completely ready?

She will not feel like a stranger.

She will feel like coming home to someone waiting —

cup of coffee in hand.

This is where the love story begins.

The one with you.

Or write to me directly: tania@advivum.