Hi friend,

Today’s episode is something a little different—and very special.

Instead of me telling you what a retreat can do, I wanted you to hear from someone who’s lived it. Not just the three days away… but the months after. The “when life gets lifey” part.

Em is a longtime client and dear friend. We first worked together back in 2019, and in 2025 she came back into my world through retreat and integration work. She’s a single mom to twin girls, a homeschooler, a full-time online student at Liberty University, and a retired Marine officer who spent half her adult life in a rigid, male-dominated, high-tempo environment.

This is her story of life after letting go—of the Marine machine, of hypervigilance, of inherited emotional patterns—and how that changed not just her capacity, but her daughters’ lives, too.

From high-tempo Marine officer to “who am I now?”

Em describes her life before retreat as a collision of two worlds:

• A career in a toxic, high-tempo, male-dominated environment where she flourished by being invisible, efficient, and endlessly capable.
  
• A childhood soaked in “you’re fine, figure it out,” emotional disregard, and the classic generational mix of Gen X / elder millennial survival patterns.
  

That combination created a version of her that could:

• function at a relentless pace
  
• carry everyone else’s emotional weight
  
• excel in systems that rewarded self-erasure
  

And then she left.

Retirement didn’t just mean a career change. It meant identity shock. Culture shock. The realization that the self she built to survive that world… was not actually healthy.

She kept feeling this pull:

“I want to return to self. I want to come home.”

But “home” wasn’t a place. It was a nervous system state she’d never actually known.

When “healing” is just rumination in disguise

One of the most powerful things Em shared was this:

Retreat helped her see that what she thought was “healing” for years was actually just rumination and intellectualizing.

She could:

• explain her story
  
• identify patterns
  
• trace point of origin
  
• “understand” her trauma
  

But her body was still living in:

• hypervigilance
  
• high alert
  
• constant emotional bracing
  

Somatic work at the retreat—especially breathwork—became the stoplight moment:

“It took me from ruminating and intellectualizing into actually feeling. It was like my body said: we don’t do that anymore.”

From that point on, feelings didn’t just live in her head as concepts. They started surfacing in her body as waves, like scuba bubbles rising from the depths. And instead of analyzing them to death, she began to let them wash over her.

Sometimes without naming them.
Sometimes without needing to know why.

Just: this is here in my body, and I’m allowed to feel it.

That shift alone was decades worth of work.

The walkup, the retreat, and the integration: why “after” matters the most

We talked a lot about what I call:

• The walkup (the lead-up and pre-work)
  
• The experience (the retreat itself)
  
• The integration (the months after)
  

For Em, all three mattered.

In the walkup, Voxer became a place where she could share the “nitty gritty” pieces she’d never voice in a room full of people. That safety let her arrive already cracked open, already honest.

During the retreat itself, she loved that:

• It wasn’t crammed with back-to-back sessions.
  
• There was structure and breathing room.
  
• She could soften and then retreat to be with herself.
  
• There were a mix of modalities—breathwork, nature, writing, connection, ice baths, rage release—each feeding a different part of her.
  

As an ex-Marine and high-functioner, she needed:

• enough containment to not disappear
  
• enough space to actually feel
  

Then, in integration, things really detonated (in the best way).

As the brain-based “explain it all” healing loosened its grip and the body-based work settled in, Em started to see:

• how deeply hypervigilance had shaped her motherhood
  
• how much emotional weight she’d been carrying from other adults
  
• how much of her inner narrative was actually inherited from emotionally immature people in her life
  

Those realizations didn’t come in a neat bow during the weekend.
They came weeks and months later—on walks, in the kitchen, in moments when her kids were melting down and she suddenly responded differently.

That’s the part of retreat people don’t see on Instagram.

“Equipped” for the first time in her healing journey

When I asked Em how she felt now, the word she used was equipped.

Not:

• “fixed”
  
• “done healing”
  
• “never triggered again”
  

Equipped.

“This is the first time in my healing journey I don’t feel like I need a security blanket. I’d love a good program or retreat, but I don’t need one. I feel stable.”

Her “security” used to live in:

• the next program
  
• the next coach
  
• the next external container
  

Now, it lives inside her:

• in the way her body can hold emotion
  
• in the way she can witness old coping patterns without fusing with them
  
• in the way she can slow down instead of spinning up
  

The external work led to an internal shift.
The thing she’d been seeking outside finally became something she could source within.

Motherhood, generational healing, and refusing to pass down hypervigilance

One of the most emotional parts of our conversation was when we talked about her daughters.

Em is divorced from a man she describes as broken. Both she and her ex-husband come from homes where kids carried the emotional weight of the adults—where hypervigilance, people-pleasing, and centering emotionally immature parents were the norm.

Her choice to leave that marriage and do this work wasn’t just about her.

It was about her girls not learning:

• that their role is to keep the adults okay
  
• that their feelings are “too much”
  
• that love requires self-erasure
  

Instead, in her home, they are learning:

• they can express their feelings without distortion
  
• they are not responsible for the emotional climate
  
• they have a mother who has actual capacity
  

That’s generational healing.

“What if this is the tiniest pocket of freedom for my children—to not carry the emotional weight of the parents?”

Her life didn’t suddenly become easy.
But her stance did change.

She laughs more now.
She can cook with her kids without feeling like she’s slipping into psychosis.
Messes don’t send her into shutdown.

The same life, the same responsibilities—
met with a different nervous system.

Turning off the “all access pass”

Before this work, Em’s life (like so many women’s) looked like this:

• Everyone had an all-access pass to her time, her emotional labor, her attention.
  
• Every text felt like a demand she had to respond to.
  
• Every request from others felt more important than her own bandwidth.
  

After retreat and integration, she started treating herself like:

• a human with limits
  
• a home that deserves protection
  
• an operation that requires resourcing to function
  

Her filter now sounds like:

• Does this serve me or my kids?
  
• Does this nourish me, support our income, or deepen a reciprocal relationship?
  
• If not… it’s a no.
  

Not a “maybe later if I have extra capacity” no.
A real one.

That has meant:

• fewer relationships—but more honest ones
  
• less chaos, more quiet (which is wild and unfamiliar when chaos used to be the baseline)
  
• radically higher standards for who gets access to her
  

She’s not interested in being the woman who can hold everything.
She’s interested in being the woman who holds what actually matters.

The body will eventually make the call

One of the most real things Em said was this:

“If you don’t choose to slow down, midlife will do it for you.”

For years she lived as the woman with “octopus arms,” managing everything and everyone. Now?

• Two people texting her at once can feel like too much.
  
• Her body throws up a hard stop at things she used to white-knuckle through.
  

That’s not weakness.
That’s wisdom.

It’s her nervous system finally saying:

“You’re not in charge anymore—I am. And we’re not doing this.”

Retreat didn’t make her fragile.
It made her honest.

And honesty with your capacity is the doorway to a life that actually feels like yours.

Why this matters for you (and why Surrender exists)

If you’re listening and thinking, “I’m in some shit,”—carrying too much, over-functioning for everyone, living in constant emotional high alert—I want you to hear this:

You don’t need to “deserve” rest to say yes to it.
You don’t have to hit a breaking point before you decide to be your own number one.

That’s why I create these experiences.

The Exhale retreat that Em attended was designed to help women release what they’ve been gripping so tightly.

The upcoming Surrender immersion in Tulum is about:

• recalibrating your relationship to success, safety, and self
  
• letting go of control as your only survival strategy
  
• learning to trust your body more than your hustle
  

Not for the woman who wants to keep white-knuckling her way to “more.”
For the woman who knows something has to change—and is brave enough to answer that call.

Because when you choose you, your people don’t lose anything.
They finally get you at full capacity.

xx, Ash

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