The moment I knew I had lost myself...

Eight years ago, I began to hear an inner voice urging me to break free from my life and my reality. My life had been revolving completely around my relationship and my family, and my mind couldn't conceive of breaking that. It was impossible. How could I even think of such a thing?

I refused to listen.

One night, late into the night, I found myself locked in the bathroom, crying. Why? I didn't know. I just felt lost, trapped, and powerless to make a decision. Toward the end of that year, I found myself in an unusual situation, but something inside me told me to give into it, to go down that path to the end. That end was the breakup of my relationship with my partner of eighteen years.

I don't want to go into details, but I do want to share this: never in my life had I felt so broken and so lost as I did at that moment. And yet, that was exactly what my soul needed. My soul never stopped guiding me. It asked me to see myself as I was. It invited me to feel every fiber, every crack; to acknowledge the tears I had silenced and normalized. It placed teachers and guides on my path, who shared information to help me understand what was happening to me and find tools to rebuild myself, heal, and return to myself. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves, speaks of the wild woman: that essence that guards the feminine psyche. I understood that my wild woman had led me there. She had been whispering to me for a long time, and I hadn't known how to listen.

In an act of desperation and survival, I pushed myself to the limit to let go of what was unbearable, because otherwise my body would have manifested as illness. I was hungry, malnourished; I was skin and bones. She rescued me. I broke to save myself. Being broken or hitting rock bottom is frightening, but sometimes it's the only way out. I rediscovered myself, I healed, and I began to fill myself with love, tenderness, joy, freedom, and creativity. In that process, I felt held by Mother Earth. In the middle of the jungle and the sea, I received her medicine and her warm embrace. She taught me what we are made of, because I, like her, am of the same essence: cyclical and wild, beautiful and exuberant. It has been a journey of unlearning to relearn; of regulating, opening up, letting go; of dying and being reborn. And my story is worth it. It's worth it because I returned to myself: to my truth, to my voice, to my heart, to my talents, and to discovering a version of myself I didn't know existed. Today I continue walking. The journey back to your truth is infinite. It's like a flower opening its petals in the warmth of the morning sun. It happens little by little and requires presence, devotion, and perseverance. Not from a place of pressure, but from trust: the trust that each day I am more myself, and that discovering this is one of life's greatest gifts.

At UNTAMED Retreat, we will walk together on the journey home. Us as women are going through this process of return, even though we often don't know how to name it. Sometimes, from a place of disconnection, we believe it's about becoming someone different from who we have been, when in reality the path is much simpler—and braver—: giving ourselves permission to inhabit ourselves as we are, in our entirety.

With our nuances, our light and shadows, our soft parts and our wild parts. Giving them space, without shame and without guilt.

This is an invitation to let ourselves be held by the loving embrace of the earth and to allow ourselves to be accompanied by other women who, like you, are also journeying back to themselves. Each with her own talents, her own pace, with the gentle or intense rhythms that the earth offers us. If anything in these words resonates with you, perhaps this call is also for you.

UNTMD Retreat, May 8–14, in Osa Peninsula at Costa Rica.