By the time I landed, after a canceled flight rerouted through Miami and twelve hours of restless layover under fluorescent airport lights, the excitement I'd once felt for this retreat had curdled into dread. I sat near Gate D23 with my phone charger, my journal, and a half-eaten protein bar, wondering if the universe was sending a firm message.
A woman nearby was making a friendship bracelet out of boredom. "First time to Nicaragua?" she asked.
"Wellness retreat," I said.
"Ah. Searching for yourself?"
"More like trying to remember where I left me."
We laughed, a little too loudly for the hushed terminal. She handed me a neon green bracelet before I boarded. A quiet token of shared purgatory. I wore it the whole trip.
What the drive taught me before the retreat even started
Something shifted on the drive from the border. The air was warm and heavy, the kind that wraps around you like an unspoken welcome. My driver, Manuel, had the weathered face of someone who's seen everything and judged none of it. "You will feel different when you leave," he said simply, as if reading a weather forecast rather than my emotional future.
We passed a man walking his pig on a leash. Not a small, Instagram-worthy pig, but a massive, mud-caked creature trotting alongside him with surprising dignity. "That's Fernando and Juanito," Manuel said. "They walk every day at this time." Of course the pig had a name. Everything here moved with its own natural rhythm, unbothered by urgency. I noticed my shoulders drop for the first time in months.
When you bring all your old habits to a new jungle
The retreat was beautiful. Villas built into a hillside overlooking the Pacific, bougainvillea in fuchsia and coral, open-air architecture that seemed to grow from the landscape. I thought, finally, I can relax. That lasted about five minutes.
Most of the group was from a boxing gym in Harlem and moved as a tight unit. I felt like an outsider immediately, and every old pattern activated. I became overly agreeable. I made myself smaller. I chose the small pool by our villa instead of the big communal one, just to avoid a particular energy I didn't want to navigate. I went into town when I wanted to stay at the resort, because someone else had suggested it and declining felt like making a statement. I had traveled thousands of miles and packed my people-pleasing right alongside my yoga mat.
One night I wrote in my journal: stay with yourself. Do not abandon your peace to make others comfortable. I wrote it because I needed the reminder. I'd been watching myself do the exact thing I came here to stop doing, and I couldn't quite stop. If you're a people pleaser, a fixer, someone who has spent years tending to everyone else first, a wellness retreat will not automatically switch that off. The patterns follow you. What changes is that you start to notice them in real time. And noticing, I was learning, was its own kind of progress.
Sixteen hours of sleep and a sloth outside my window
My first night, I slept for sixteen hours straight and woke up imprinted on the sheets like a crime scene chalk outline, groggy but lighter. My body had finally stopped negotiating.
A few days later I looked out my villa window and saw a sloth stretched across a branch, completely unbothered. I'd been half-jokingly calling the sloth my spirit animal since the sabbatical began, shorthand for the slow, ungraceful version of rest I'd been practicing. And here one was, outside my window, like a wink from the universe.
What breathwork actually did
The retreat centered on breathwork, and having done yoga for twenty years, I thought I knew what I was in for. I didn't. The facilitator guided us through patterns that, while familiar in theory, my body had apparently forgotten how to access fully. Twenty minutes in, my hands curled involuntarily and my chest heaved with sobs I didn't understand. I'd been holding my breath for years. Not literally. But close enough. That session didn't fix anything. It gave me a small release, a loosening of something tightly wound, and sometimes that's all you need to keep going.
Dulce, who taught me about unapologetic rest
On the last evening we had a sunset horseback ride. My horse was named Dulce, which means Sweet, though her temperament suggested the name was aspirational. She lay down in the sand multiple times during the ride, defiant and completely unapologetic. She was tired, and she wasn't performing otherwise for anyone watching. I admired her for it in a way I couldn't quite articulate at the time.
What I was actually carrying home
On my birthday eve, the group surprised me at breakfast with a muffin and a candle, and, in true Black fashion, someone pulled out a phone and played Stevie Wonder right there at the table. I laughed, shaking my head, feeling embarrassed and deeply seen at the same time.
When we crossed into Costa Rica, the group headed to their flights and I got into another car alone, heading to my next stop. My new driver asked how the retreat went.
"I don't know yet," I said honestly. "But I think I remembered how to breathe."
He nodded. "That sounds like a beginning."
It was. I'd brought every old pattern with me to Nicaragua. I'd also watched myself do it, in real time, clearly enough to write it down. And that mattered.