Cacao has been revered by ancient traditions for millennia as a sacred plant ally and medicine of the heart. 

Lake Atitlán lies beside the Suchitepéquez Mountains, one of the historical cradles of cacao cultivation within the Maya world. For the Maya, cacao is more than a plant — she is a teacher who guides us to open our hearts and reconnect with the fabric of life.

When we create sacred space to open the heart, we are met with the unshakeable wisdom of an oracle guided by love itself. 

Throughout this journey, we will have several opportunities to deepen our relationship with cacao. One of these experiences will include visiting Mama Amor, a women’s cacao collective who process cacao in the jungle. Surrounded by cacao trees, the women will guide us through the entire process — from harvest and fermentation to drying, toasting, peeling, and grinding.

Within the cacao forests, we will also have the opportunity to sit in a Mayan fire ceremony with cacao, guided by Nana Ixkik and Nana Rosalia, who will share with us the practice of cacao divination.

Throughout our days together, cacao will accompany many of our ceremonies and gatherings, helping us enter deeper states of presence, prayer, inner listening, and connection within the communal field of sisterhood.

Together, Dorothy and Munay bring over 14 years of experience working with cacao. Dorothy spent four years living in Guatemala and is the co-founder of Cacao Source, a direct-trade ceremonial cacao social enterprise dedicated to weaving together ancestral wisdom, regenerative forestry, and reciprocity with local Maya communities.

Through this sacred plant ally, we remember the medicine of the heart and the wisdom of living in right relationship with the Earth and one another.

Nature is alive, deeply intelligent, and always listening. To truly listen, we must slow down and open ourselves to the way nature communicates.

We will create many spaces where this communion can take place with nature– on the shores of Lake Atitlan, in the native cacao forests, within the rapture of fire ceremony, on the peak of a sunrise mountain hike, deep within yourself, and much much more. 

We invite you to tune in with reverence to the layers of deeper listening. 

Lake Atitlán rests within the ancestral lands of the Maya — a resilient lineage that has carried profound cosmological and spiritual knowledge for thousands of years. 

Humanity is blessed that this wisdom continues to live and bloom today. Despite the immense violence and cultural devastation that Guatemala experienced in the twentieth century, the knowledge and traditions of the Maya endure through the strength and devotion of their people.

Maya wisdom is rooted in the understanding that human beings are not separate from nature, but an integral part of the living web of creation. The Earth, the elements, the cycles of the moon, and the movements of the cosmos all participate in a sacred dialogue with life.

Throughout this journey, we will have the honor of learning from Nana Ixkik, Nana Rosalia, and Nana Amalia — Maya K’iche wisdom keepers and ancestral midwives of lineage who continue to safeguard and transmit these teachings through ceremony, prayer, and their deep relationship with the land.

These teachings are not offered as ideas to be analyzed, but as living practices that invite us to listen more deeply — to the Earth, to the ancestors, and to the wisdom that lives within our own bodies.

Through fire ceremony, sacred faja initiation (woven belts for the womb), obsidian healing for sexual trauma and wounds, conscious conception teachings, Mayan oracular practices, cacao wisdom, and moments of shared prayer, we reconnect with ancient ways of honoring life and remembering our place within the greater harmony of the natural world.

We feel deeply honored to call these women our sisters and to walk in relationship with these Maya guardians of wisdom. It is our heartfelt invitation for you to weave the golden thread of sisterhood with them. Their presence has been a profound blessing in our lives, and we trust it will be a blessing in yours as well.

This is a place where we connect with the deep flows of the feminine current that lives in our blood and our bones.

Each morning there will be an optional yoga practice in one of the gorgeous yoga shalas. 

You will connect to the roots of somatic experiencing, which invite you to move your body, express your feelings, and step into deeper layers of embodiment.

Our schedule will weave together spaces for movement, dance, and expression as part of shaking off old patterns and reclamation of your feminine rights. 

Transformation deepens when it is witnessed and supported in community.

Throughout the retreat we will engage in carefully facilitated group processes rooted in Gestalt psychotherapy, art therapy, and participatory facilitation practices inspired by the Art of Hosting. These approaches create a safe and supportive space where personal insight, emotional expression, and authentic connection can naturally unfold.

Gestalt-based practices invite participants to bring awareness to their present-moment experience — sensations, emotions, thoughts, and relational patterns — allowing deeper understanding and integration to emerge organically. Rather than analyzing the past, we learn to listen to what is alive within us now.

Through creative expression, reflective dialogue, somatic awareness, and experiential group exercises, these sessions support the integration of the retreat experience while strengthening the sense of trust and connection within the circle.

Group dynamics become a powerful mirror. As we listen, share, and witness one another with compassion, we begin to recognize parts of ourselves reflected in the stories of others. This shared field of presence often opens pathways for healing, insight, and transformation that are difficult to access alone.

These processes are held with care and professionalism, creating a container where each woman is free to explore her inner world at her own pace while being supported by the wisdom of the group.

Within the circle, we remember that healing does not happen in isolation — it happens in relationship.

For many ancestral traditions, beauty is not superficial, it is a spiritual pathway.

Sacred Beauty rules in the heart center. Developing this area of our lives helps us create devotion to a divine, beautiful life. 

The awakening of the gateway of sacred beauty opens the eye of divine aesthetic harmony, and rids us of a mundane vision of the world. It allows us to transform our world and everything in it for the good and the beauty of humanity. This gateway attunes us to the unlimited possibilities of divine beauty as a healing balm.

We are invited to reconnect with the feminine art of honoring the body, the senses, and the natural cycles of life through devotion, presence, and self-care.

Throughout our time together, we will explore practices that awaken the body as a temple and beauty as a form of prayer. These rituals may include herbal baths, yoni steams (womb steams), facial and hair mask, anointing with sacred oils, flower offerings, flower baths, adornment, and intentional moments of self-connection.

Rather than being practices of external perfection, these practices guide us into a deeper relationship with our own radiance and sensual vitality that come from the inside.

When approached ceremonially, beauty becomes a way of remembering our inherent worth, reconnecting with our bodies, and celebrating the sacred feminine that lives within each woman.

In honoring beauty as a spiritual practice, we reclaim the simple yet profound act of tending to ourselves with love, reverence, and presence

~It’s such a blessing to be a woman, here, now. I am sacred woman, my body, my soul is a Rainbow Chalice of Life, my body is an Altar, I honor, remember and celebrate that truth~

Your body is a sensitive, intelligent, and beautifully designed instrument for navigating life. 

Yet many of us carry a collective wound that has taught us to ignore, mistrust, or suppress the natural intelligence of the body.

Somatic awakening is part of the reemergence of the feminine spirit — a return to listening through sensation. Rather than approaching healing only through the mind (a “top-down” approach), somatic work invites healing to arise from the body itself.

Through simple somatic practices, we reconnect with sensation and allow what has been stored within the body to gently surface and release. As awareness meets these places with compassion, the body begins to restore its natural connection to safety, presence, and vitality.

What has been stagnant is offered attention and permission to transform in the presence of love.

Somatic healing is a powerful way to support the nervous system. By bringing awareness to the body, we can begin to soften patterns of chronic stress — the fight, flight, or freeze responses — and gradually create new pathways of ease, trust, and resilience.

At the same time, somatic awareness invites us to cultivate the sensations we wish to experience more of: gratitude, pleasure, satisfaction, and connection.

As we learn to listen to the body as a compass rather than relying solely on the thinking mind, something profound begins to shift. When the body feels safe and clear, the quieter signals of intuition, presence, and inner guidance naturally begin to emerge

Within every woman lives a heroine. She is part of the architecture of the human experience. 

Across cultures, many of us are familiar with the story of the Hero’s Journey—a mythic path where the hero ventures outward, facing trials that require strength, endurance, and conquest.

The Heroine’s Journey tells a different kind of story.

Rather than seeking victory through battle, the heroine turns inward. She descends into the inner world, bringing compassionate awareness to the places within that have been forgotten or wounded. Through this process she reconnects with intuition, embodiment, and the deeper rhythms of life.

As the journey unfolds, she learns to integrate the many aspects of herself—both feminine and masculine—restoring a sense of wholeness that does not rely on domination or striving.

When the heroine returns, she carries a different kind of power: a wisdom rooted in self-knowing, presence, and relationship with life itself.

The Heroine’s Journey reminds us that transformation is not found by going further away from ourselves, but by returning home to the body and listening to the intelligence that has always been there.