Retreats
The room where you stop performing. The conversations that only happen in a room without men.
A women's spiritual retreat is a few days in a small, women-only group with a host who holds the schedule and a shared field at the centre of it. Gentle practice sits alongside long empty hours and shared meals, and that field is where the work happens, because women talk differently when the room is only women. Coming alone is the normal way to arrive here.
2026–2027
28 retreats from my lists for 7 places, with the next dates and the price. The leader, the practices and the organizer's site are on the list of each place.
Retreat Curator is this site’s own project
Our next retreat
Miami, FloridaApril 2027$2,600 per womanSee the retreat
Sedona, Arizona
ArizonaAll retreats in Arizona
California
Hawaii
Colorado
Texas
FloridaMost retreats on these lists are wellness retreats in the plain sense: 2 to 7 nights in a house or at a center, yoga in the morning, yoga nidra or a sound bath in the evening, walks, meals cooked for you. I keep only the ones whose days also hold practice of the field: a ceremony, a circle, breath.
On these lists, from $375 to $6,299 per woman, depending on the nights and the room. What a retreat costs
Here healing means work with the soul: a rite of passage on the Big Sur cliffs, a fire ceremony in a Rocky Mountain ashram, reiki and a release ceremony by the ocean, women's circles on the islands. Each card names the practices the way the organizer names them.
01
Not because men are the problem. Because of what a room does to a woman's attention. In a mixed group most women, without deciding to, spend part of themselves on how they are coming across, on softening a sentence, on making sure nobody is uncomfortable. Take that job away and the extra attention goes somewhere, and it usually goes inward within about a day. There is also subject matter. Bodies that changed, mothers, miscarriages, ageing, money and shame about money, being the one everybody leans on, wanting less than you are supposed to want or more than you are allowed to. These come up in a women's group in the first evening and in a mixed room often never. None of this makes a women's retreat superior. It makes it a specific tool, and if that is the conversation you need, no other format substitutes for it.
02
Less than the brochures suggest and more than you expect. A typical day has an early practice, breakfast that nobody rushes, a long open middle, and an evening gathering when the light drops. That gathering is the recognisable part. Everyone sits, one person speaks at a time, nobody advises, nobody fixes, and the rest listen without arranging their reply. That last rule is the whole technology. Around it sit the ordinary things, walking, cooking together or being cooked for, swimming if there is water, sleeping in the afternoon without apologising for it. Somewhere in the middle days the room changes register. Women who introduced themselves by their job on the first night stop doing that. Tears are common and are not the goal. So is laughing far too loudly at dinner, which is the part nobody writes about.
A house decides about half of how a retreat feels, and the half that decides it never photographs well. One common room big enough for the whole group to sit together without anyone dragging furniture around. Somewhere to disappear for twenty minutes that is not your own bed. Distance from the nearest road, so what you hear at night is weather rather than traffic. A kitchen that can actually feed the group, so meals never turn into a logistics problem eating the host's attention. Bathrooms, honestly, and enough of them. Heating in spring, shade in summer, and nobody wandering through the quiet with a lawnmower. When a house has all of that, you stop noticing the house by the second day, and noticing nothing is exactly what you came for.
Ask three things before anything else. How many women will be there. Who is leading and what she has actually done. And what the day looks like hour by hour, including how much of it is free. Size decides more than the programme does. Then read how they write. Warm and specific is a good sign. Vague and grand is not. The signs to walk away from are consistent: a promise that you will heal something by the end, pressure to sign up for the next level while you are still on this one, a leader whose story is the centre of everything, group sharing you cannot opt out of, photography of you without being asked, and prices that appear only after a call designed to make refusing awkward. One more, less obvious. If nobody asks you anything about yourself before taking your money, nobody is building the group on purpose, and the group is the product.
Where to go
Real places that run this themselves, on their own ground, with their own dates and programs.
Rhinebeck, New York
Hudson Valley campus running hundreds of summer workshops, including the Omega Women's Leadership Center.
Phoenicia, New York
Tibet House US retreat center in a Catskills valley, with a spa built around Tibetan medicine.
Mineola, Texas
Women-only retreat center on 30 acres of East Texas pines, hosting all-inclusive weekend retreats since 2004.
Then you are in the majority of any given room. Nobody checks your practice history, and the women who arrive convinced they are the least spiritual person there are usually the ones the group relaxes around. You will not be asked to say anything you do not want to say. Passing when your turn comes is a normal move and a good host will name that out loud on the first night so that nobody has to be brave about it. You do not have to be flexible, calm, or good at sitting still. If you cry, that is ordinary here. If you do not, that is ordinary too, and it means nothing about you. The only thing genuinely required is that you turn up and stay for the awkward second day, because that is the day everything is decided.
In her own words. I run women's retreats in the United States and I keep the groups small, so that by the second morning I know how each of you takes her coffee. You get a house that is quiet in the evenings, one room where the whole group sits together and nobody has to move a sofa, and somewhere to walk off on your own when you have had enough of people. On the first evening I am there, beside you, and that is the evening that decides everything if you came alone and knew nobody an hour ago. After that the group carries itself. You leave with days that belonged to you and with one thing that had been stuck for years and is not stuck any more.
Questions
It is the most common way to arrive. Most of the room came alone, so there is no established group for you to break into. It also works in your favour, because nobody there knows the version of you that everyone at home expects, and dropping that version is half of what you came for. The awkwardness lasts about one evening. A good host plans for exactly that evening and stays close to the women who came by themselves.
No. Passing is a normal option and should be stated as a rule on the first night, not granted as an exception later. Plenty of women listen for two days and speak on the third, and plenty never say much at all and still leave with what they came for. What you should refuse is any format where sharing is compulsory or where a facilitator pushes someone who has said no. That is not depth, it is pressure, and it produces material people regret having said.
Only if the retreat requires agreement, and a good one does not. You can sit through a practice without believing anything about it and still get the rest, the quiet, the company and the days without decisions. A retreat that treats your scepticism as a block you need to work through has already told you what kind of place it is, and you have saved yourself the trip.
On the lists on this page women's retreats in the US cost from $375 to $6,299 per person, depending on the length, the room and what is included. Our retreat costs $2,600 per participant, with the house and the whole programme in the price. The page on what a retreat costs shows what to check before you pay.
Where next
Small women's retreats in a house Milena stands behind, with her there from the first evening. A good retreat somewhere else is still a good retreat, so the directory names those places too.
A retreat after which the thing that would not move for years has finally moved.
Read here as a language of symbols. Medical, legal and financial questions belong with a professional.
Curated retreats, practices, and expert gatherings in the United States.
