The San Juan del Sur Retreat That Reminded Me How to Breathe Again

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 had 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 has 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. 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. 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 because it kept me out of a particular energy I did not 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 had been watching myself do the exact thing I came here to stop doing, and I could not quite stop.

If you are 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. I 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 had been half jokingly calling the sloth my spirit animal since the sabbatical began, a shorthand for the slow, ungraceful, thoroughly inelegant version of rest I had been practicing. And here one was, outside my window, like a wink from the universe. I took it as confirmation.

What breathwork actually did

The retreat centered on breathwork, and I had been doing yoga for twenty years so I thought I knew what I was in for. I did not. 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 did not understand. I realized I had been holding my breath for years. Not literally. But close enough.

That session did not fix anything. But it gave me a small release, a loosening of something tightly wound. Sometimes that is 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, completely unapologetic. She was tired and she was not performing otherwise for anyone watching. I admired her for it in a way I could not 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 had brought every old pattern with me to Nicaragua. I had also watched myself do it, in real time, clearly enough to write it down. And that, I was beginning to understand, was not nothing.

Sometimes change does not announce itself. It just leaves a small crack in the armor. Barely noticeable. But there.