The Thing I Didn't Know I Needed

A bench at Kripalu, where I have spent many hours in meditation.

A few months after we moved to Massachusetts, I went to Kripalu alone.

We had just left behind everything we'd built over decades on the West Coast: our community, our routines, the version of ourselves that fit so naturally into that life. The move was right. I knew it was right, but I was also completely unmoored in a way I hadn't fully let myself feel until I pulled into the Kripalu parking lot, sat down on that bench in the quiet.

I was harried and disconnected from myself in a way I recognized because I help other people recognize it every day, and I needed a hard reset.

So I took it. For three days I left my phone in the room. I stepped away from the internet completely. I took yoga classes in the morning, and walked alone in the forest in the afternoon, following paths through the trees with no particular destination. I sat in meditation and watched over the three days as the spinning finally stilled.

I had a treatment (or two! shhhh!) in the healing arts center, because I have learned the hard way that taking care of yourself is not optional when your work is taking care of others. I ate Kripalu's extraordinary food, slowly, at long tables with strangers who were also doing their own versions of the same thing I was doing.

By the third day something had shifted. The harried feeling was gone, and in its place was something I can only describe as myself: the version of me that knows what she thinks, what she wants, where she's going. The clarity that had been obscured by the noise of a major life transition came back quietly, almost without announcement. I knew, sitting in that dining room with the late afternoon light coming through the windows, that I was going to expand my work to more retreats, more women, and more of this. I left with energy I hadn't felt in months. (Stay tuned for news on new stuff coming...)

A few months later I came back, but this time with Geoff to lead a room full of people ready to do real work on the relationships that mattered most to them. Some were couples, others were individuals, all of them were hungry for more connection with themselves and with the people they loved.

Geoff came to be my assistant, and what I didn't anticipate was what it would mean for us.

He watched me work in a way you simply can't when you're just hearing about it secondhand over dinner. He saw the moments when something clicked for someone, when people who had come in guarded and careful started to soften, when someone laughed at themselves with genuine recognition and something loosened in the room. He reflected back to me what he was seeing, and those conversations on the walks we took down to the lake and wandering the woods between sessions became some of the richest we've had about the work I do and the work we still need to do ourselves.

Because here's the thing about leading this kind of retreat: it grounds you. Standing in front of people who are being honest about what they need, who are doing the brave and uncomfortable work of actually trying, has a way of holding up a mirror. Geoff and I came home more connected than when we left, not because we'd done a retreat ourselves, but because we'd been in the presence of people choosing their relationships on purpose, and that is contagious in the best way possible.

We all need to take time to reconnect with ourselves and each other. Especially right now in this scary, messy world, we need a minute to lose the noise and reconnect to each other and ourselves.

The research on this is unambiguous, and I say it every chance I get: the quality of your relationships is the single greatest predictor of your health, your happiness, and how long you live. It is not your income,your fitness routine, but your relationships that determines health, productivity and happiness.

The people who feel genuinely connected to others get sick less, recover faster, live longer, and report higher levels of meaning and satisfaction in their lives. And yet we treat our relationships like they'll take care of themselves, putting them last behind the job and the kids and the ten thousand things that feel more urgent in the moment, waiting for the right time to invest in them, which turns out to be never.

I watched this truth unfold at Kripalu, and I am reminded anytime I take time with myself and Geoff, and when I help my clients reconnect to themselves and each other.

So, this September I'm bringing the Fire It Up retreat back to Kripalu, and I'd love for you to come. Come alone, come with your partner, come with someone you want to go deeper with.

Come because your most important relationship right now is the one with yourself and it deserves your full attention.

Come because the world is loud and divided and exhausting and you need a few days to remember who you are when you're not managing everything. Come and take the time, because your relationships, every single one of them (especially the one with yourself!) will thank you.

The Fire It Up Weekend Experience at Kripalu runs September 11-13, 2026. Learn more and register here.