Why I Built the Retreat I Couldn't Find

Why I Built the Retreat I Couldn't Find

By Catherine Licavoli, Founder of Rooted Living Retreat

There is a moment I return to often. I am sitting in a beautiful wellness retreat, the kind in a beautiful natural setting, soothing ambiance, and farm-to-table meals and facilitators who speak in soft, knowing voices and I am thinking about a woman I know who needs this but are in a place in life like I was a decade ago that could not easily afford to experience this type of experience. A woman who is exhausted in the way that goes bone-deep. Who has been giving everything to everyone for so long she has quietly forgotten what it feels like to want something just for herself.

She cannot afford to be here. She has to choose between this and a vacation. Between this and her kids' school supplies or family trip. Between this and simply keeping the lights on.

That thought sat with me for years. At my first incredible retreat I experienced such an incredible sweet release, calm and clarity like nothing I had ever felt before and I remember crying warm soothing tears of relief, gratitude for the experience and for the younger me that never would've been able to afford something like that. And it became the seed of everything.

The Career That Taught Me to Design for Humans

Before I was a retreat founder, I spent over a decade in the corporate world as an experience designer for some of the largest car companies and agency in the world. I worked in tech innovation labs conducting user research, establishing product strategy and my entire job was understanding people so deeply that I could build things that actually served them in a way that was streamlined and easy to follow. Not what we assumed they needed. What they actually needed, in their actual lives, at their actual moment of struggle.

I became a Certified Workshop Facilitator. I learned design thinking, the discipline of starting with the human and the problem to be solved, not the solution. I led rooms through processes that helped teams see clearly, align quickly, decide wisely, and move forward together. I was good at it. I loved it.

But something was always pulling at me underneath the work. A question I couldn't quite name: What would it look like to apply this same rigor, principles, frameworks and methods and this same deep care for the human experience to the most important journey of all? The inner one? How can we optimize ourselves to life a more restored, thriving life and not just continue grinding it out and clunking along?

I didn't know yet that life was about to answer that question in a way I never would have chosen.

When My Body Said Enough

In my late 30's, my health collapsed.

Almost overnight, I was navigating multiple autoimmune diseases, Lyme disease, and toxic mold exposure. My world became very small, very quickly. The career I had built, the pace I had maintained, the identity I had wrapped around productivity and performance all of it had to stop. A realization I had when I found myself getting up for work and laying back down on the couch to gain the energy to get in the shower among many other symptoms I'd had for over 8 months but had just began to operate as if all of it was just my new normal.

And in that stopping, something unexpected happened.

My designer brain turned entirely inward. I began to ask the same questions I had always asked about users : Where are you? What feels hard? What do you need? What is feeling overwhelming and why? What would help you move forward?  But this time, I was asking them about myself. I became my own research subject. My own prototype. My own user test.

I began finding doctors that could help me understand what was happening in my body, who were insightful with the labs ordered and suggestions on what to take and do but it was information overload and none of it was organized into a container or flow of steps that could be easily seen and followed. So I created that for myself.

I started learning everything I could about the gut brain connection, nervous system, our natural circadian rhythms we get disconnected from in our busy world, about somatic healing, about what happens in the body when it finally feels safe. I discovered breathwork and sound healing and the science behind why nature lowers cortisol and how the vagus nerve is the body's direct line between safety and restoration. I went on wellness retreats — from Big Sur to Sedona, from Civana to Mount Zion and Canyon Ranch. I sat in circles with other women. I took note of how we were being guided and what felt really helpful for me and what were things I would improve upon. I felt what it was like to finally exhale in a space that was designed for it.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that healing, the idea arrived not as a business plan, but as a feeling.

I never stopped being an experience designer. I just started designing for the human condition and spirit too.

This time, I was the user and the designer. And that changes everything about how you design.

The Woman I Built This For

She is accomplished. She is responsible. She is deeply caring.

She has spent years adapting, achieving, and showing up for her children, family, her partner, her team, her aging parents, her community. She is the one who holds things together. The one who figures it out. The one who says "I'm fine" so automatically she barely hears herself saying it anymore.

Inside, she is carrying something heavier.

She wakes up tired in a way sleep doesn't fix. Her creativity and curiosity for life: the part of her that used to light up daily, that used to have ideas and dreams and a sense of possibility and play seeing the fun to be had in all the things we do, feels distant, like a signal she can't quite tune into anymore.

She moves through her days feeling vaguely disconnected from herself, from her body, from the version of her life she thought she was building toward.

She is somewhere between 35 and 65. She may be in perimenopause. She may have just sent her last child to college. She may be standing at a career crossroads, wondering if the path she has been on is still the right one. She may be grieving something a relationship, a past traumatic experience, a version of herself, a future she had imagined.

She knows she needs something. She has known for a while. But she feels guilty even considering it. Who am I to take three days just for myself?

What she is longing for if she lets herself say it: is to feel like herself again. Not a better version. Not a fixed version. Just herself. Clear. Grounded. Alive inside her own skin.

She wants to stop running on empty and start running on something real.

She wants to come home to herself.

How Human-Centered Design Shapes Every Moment

Most retreat programs are built around a schedule. Sessions are chosen because they are popular, or because the facilitator knows them well, or because they fit neatly into a day.

Rooted Living Retreat is built around a woman within a container that provides a journey flow that feels safe, cohesive, easy to understand and to deeply feel and resonate with core themes and principles in each one.

Specifically, around what her nervous system and bodies channels needs in order to open in the right sequence, at the right pace, with the right support underneath her.

This is where my background in experience design becomes something different in the wellness space. I don't just curate beautiful practices. I sequence them intentionally, the way a designer sequences the steps of a journey, because I know that nervous system regulation must come before creative expression. That the mind must soften before the heart can open. That safety must precede vulnerability, and presence must precede insight.

The retreat moves through four stages Mind, Body, Heart, Resonance and every session, every meal, every moment of stillness is placed within that arc for a reason.

We begin with breathwork and nervous system reset, not because it's a nice opening ritual, but because the analytical mind needs to quiet before anything else can land. We move into sound healing, Tai Chi, somatic movement, and the all-inclusive Sensory Room: a space with a sound bed, crystal mat, Reiki, and a six-hands 4D sound bath that is unlike anything available in the Midwest wellness market. We open into our creativity and ability to create and express ourselves with intuitive art and creative expression, guided dance, cacao ceremony, Jeffersonian Dinners that transform strangers into sisters within a single evening. And we close with re-integration: the practices, the tools, the reflection and clarity to carry this home.

The beach beside Michigan's Great Lakes is not just a backdrop. It is part of the design. Research on blue spaces shows that proximity to large bodies of water lowers cortisol, activates the parasympathetic nervous system, and generates negative ions along the shoreline that support serotonin production and emotional regulation. The Great Lakes are not a consolation for Sedona. They are a genuinely exceptional healing landscape one that most of the women who come to this retreat have lived near their entire lives without ever being offered as medicine.

Nature does part of the work so I don't have to force it. That is good design.

The Thread That Connects Three Worlds

Rooted Living Retreat is the beginning of a larger ecosystem, one that I have come to think of as three doors into the same building.

The Art of Living Well is the personal development companion: live retreat events, a monograph and self-guided learnings built around the same nervous system science and feminine wisdom that animates the retreat, but designed for a woman's daily life. The practices she learns at the retreat become the practices she takes home. The clarity she finds in 1-3 days becomes the foundation of a year.

The Art of Working Well emerged from something I didn't plan. Two senior executives from Ford attended Rooted Living Retreat and walked out saying: This needs to exist for corporate America. They weren't asking for a watered-down version of the retreat. They were recognizing that what they had experienced: a regulated nervous system, a psychologically safe environment, a boost to their higher awareness and emotional intelligence and ability to better observe and express what they are thinking and feeling intentional facilitation, genuine connection was the same thing their teams desperately needed and had never been offered in a professional context.

The big realization as we dove into the work of designing for this is that the personal IS the professional. The nervous system doesn't know the difference between a boardroom and a dinner table. A self regulated woman that can find calm and clarity on demand in intense life and work moments leads better, collaborates better, creates better, and lives better: at home, at work, and in community.

That is the unified philosophy underneath everything I build.

Designed for the Younger Me

I want to say something directly, because it matters to me more than almost anything else about this work.

I grew up knowing what it felt like to have to choose. Between the thing that would nourish me and the thing that was practical. Between the experience that might change my life and the reality of what I could afford.

I watched people with resources access things and have breakthrough moments that was unavailable to people without them. I felt the particular sting of that unfairness: not bitterly, but clearly with a confidence I could change that. And I made a quiet promise to myself, long before I knew what I was promising to build: If I ever create something like this, I will find a way to make sure the door is open wider.

The Community Care Fund is that promise made real.

Through sponsorships and donations, 25% of every Rooted Living Retreat is reserved for women who need financial support to attend. These are not charity spots. They are full participants, fully held, fully part of the circle because belonging should not be contingent on a bank account.

To date, we have been able to support nine women who otherwise would not have been able to come.

Nine women who exhaled for the first time in years. Nine women who went home different. Nine families who felt the ripple. Nine communities quietly shifted by one woman remembering who she was.

That number will grow. That is the commitment.

This retreat is for every woman who has ever needed something like this and had to talk herself out of wanting it. You deserve to want it. You deserve to have it.

The Wisdom Keepers Rising

There is something happening among women in midlife that the culture has not yet found adequate language for.

It is not a crisis. It is not a decline. It is an arrival.

Across the world's oldest cultures: the Haudenosaunee Grandmother Council, the Celtic seers, the Hawaiian kuleana keepers, the Aboriginal Songline guardians: women in their forties, fifties, and sixties were not sidelined. They were called to the center. They were recognized as Wisdom Keepers: the ones whose lived experience, whose hard-won discernment, whose capacity to hold complexity without being destroyed by it, made them essential to the health of the whole community.

That recognition is what Rooted Living Retreat is built around.

Every woman who comes carries pearls of wisdom formed under pressure, over time, made beautiful by the very things that were hard. The Wisdom Keeper's work is not to produce more. It is to discern: which pearls to keep, which to pass on with intention, and which heavy things inherited and experienced were never pearls at all and are finally ready to be set down and the empowerment of knowing we have the freedom to choose.

When women gather in this way, in genuine safety and support, in intentional community, with space to be exactly who they are something happens in the room that science can explain and words can only approximate. Heart rates synchronize. Nervous systems co-regulate. Oxytocin rises. Stress hormones lower, creativity, calm and clarity rise. The body remembers what belonging and just being without always being ON ready to do, react, respond to outside pressures and expectations feels like.

And when one woman softens, heals, and remembers her strength, it quietly gives permission for others to do the same.

She goes home different. Her children feel it. Her partner feels it. Her team feels it. Her friends feel it. The ripple moves outward in ways she may never fully see, but that are real nonetheless.

This is why I believe that investing in one woman's restoration is never a personal indulgence. It is a community act.

Come Home to Yourself

If you have read this far, something in you recognized something in these words.

Maybe you are tired in the way I described. Maybe you have been telling yourself you'll do something like this later when things slow down, when the kids are older, when work settles, when you've earned it, when things aren't so tight.

I want to gently offer you this: later is a story. The tiredness is real now. The longing is real now. You are real now.

You don't need permission. But if it helps to hear it from someone who has been where you are and built this because of it.

You are allowed to want this. You are allowed to have it. You are allowed to come home.

Rooted Living Retreat takes place at leading natural wellness resort locations in Michigan nestled in nature minutes from our Great Lakes Shores for our flagship experiences, as well as one a year that is abroad. All-inclusive. Scholarship support available through our Community Care Fund. Contact us at RootedLivingRetreat@gmail.com for more info

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