I’ve watched hundreds of women arrive at their first retreat with the same look on their face. A mixture of excitement and mild panic. Usually somewhere between “I can’t believe I’m actually doing this” and “what exactly have I signed myself up for.”
If that sounds like you right now, good. It means you’re paying attention.
The truth is, most women who come to Sages have never done anything like this before. They’ve never travelled solo, never booked a week away just for themselves, never spent six days with a group of strangers. And almost all of them, by day two, wonder why they waited so long.
Here’s what you actually need to know before you go.
You don’t need to be at a certain fitness level
This is the one I hear most often. “Am I fit enough?” Yes. Full stop.
Sages is not a boot camp. The morning movement sessions (whether you choose yoga or boxing) are designed for all levels, all bodies, all starting points. I’ve had women who haven’t exercised in years and women who train five days a week, in the same group, leaving equally happy. The point isn’t to push you to your limit. It’s to help you feel good in your body by the end of the week. Those are very different things.
You don’t need to know anyone
Solo travellers make up the majority of every Sages group. Not a small minority, the majority. So if you’re worried about being the only one who came alone, you won’t be. You’ll be in excellent company.
What I’ve noticed, retreat after retreat, is that arriving alone is actually an advantage. You’re more open. You’re not defaulting to someone you already know. You show up as yourself, without the version of yourself that exists in your everyday life, and something about that makes the connections that form feel unusually real.
By day two, you won’t remember who arrived alone and who didn’t.
It won’t feel like a holiday, but in the best way
A regular holiday is great. You rest, you explore, you come home and go straight back to exactly where you left off.
A retreat is different. The structure of the week (the movement, the meals together, the slower pace, the lack of the usual to-do list) creates something a holiday doesn’t. Space. Real space to hear yourself think, to remember what you actually like, to sleep properly, to eat well and feel it.
Women often tell me afterwards that they didn’t realise how depleted they were until they started to refill. That’s not something you can plan for. It just happens when the conditions are right.
The connection part will surprise you
Most people don’t come to Sages for the other women. They come for the break, the movement, the destination. The connection is what surprises them.
There’s something that happens when a group of women, all living full busy lives, all used to putting everyone else first, spend six days together without the usual noise. The conversations that happen over dinner, around the pool, on the yoga mat at 7am, are not the conversations you have at home. They go deeper, faster, than almost anything in ordinary life.
I don’t fully understand why. I just know it happens, every single time.
You will wonder why you waited
I say this not to make you feel like you’ve missed out on something, but because it’s the most common thing I hear when women leave. Not “that was wonderful,” though they say that too. But a kind of quiet disbelief that it took them this long to do something just for themselves.
If you’ve been thinking about it for a while, that’s usually a sign. The ones who wait longest are almost always the ones most glad they came.
Sages Retreats runs small group retreats for women in Bali and Portugal. If you have questions before booking, chat to Lucy directly on WhatsApp. She answers every message herself.