MY STORY

Why Sages Retreats exists

Before Sages existed, I was already deep in the retreat world, managing someone else's brand, learning the industry from the inside. I'd moved to Bali in my early twenties; at some point it stopped being a decision and became simply where I lived. I knew how retreats worked. What I didn't know yet was how different it would feel to build one.

When I started Sages, I found out just how different. There were years of learning skills I didn't know existed - the marketing, the sales, the bookkeeping, the supplier relationships, the calls at midnight when something goes wrong. Every hat, all at once. And there were real doubts. The kind you don't talk about publicly but that keep you up at night. Someone said to me once, in one of those moments: fortune favours the brave. I've held onto that ever since. I started telling myself during the dark moments: no one can work this hard and not see results, surely the world doesn't work that way. I went all in. Things started to shift.

The kind of persistence that keeps you going when it would be easier to stop. That's what this took, and there is no sugar coating it. It never really stops, the building. But when you love what you do and watch it change people's lives, the work carries you rather than depleting you.

I started Sages because I kept seeing the same thing: brilliant, capable women pouring themselves into everyone else's wellbeing and leaving nothing for their own. Women who were "fine" on paper; good jobs, full lives, people to take care of… but who had stopped taking care of and feeling like themselves.

I knew that feeling. And I knew that a week away wouldn't fix it on its own, unless it was the right kind of week. One built around not just what you do, but who you do it with.

Retreat after retreat, what I've witnessed is always the same: women arrive thinking they're coming for the yoga. They stay for the friendships they didn't know they were going to make.

That's not a happy accident. That's The Sages Method at work.