When I first signed up for the OMNoire Retreats Academy, our founder told us, “Plan the retreat that you would need.”
That advice stayed with me. Every retreat I’ve created since then has spoken to the specific versions of me — the one I’ve been, and the one I’m becoming. And each one has centered around a question I was actively wrestling with. Something that felt like a doorway. Something I knew that, if I could sit with it fully, might help me unlock a version of myself I hadn’t yet met.
For The Purpose-Driven Retreat, we explored:
“What does it take to do the work I love without burning out?”
For The Soft Life Retreat:
“Do I have to struggle in order to feel like I deserve success?”
And each time, we didn’t just talk about the answer — we lived inside it. We woke up each morning and tried it on. Surrounded by softness, water, sisterhood, and beauty, we laid down our survival strategies and experimented with a new way of being. What would it mean to live from that place — even for six days? What if you could choose your next-level self before everything felt certain?
That process brought me to a deeper, more vulnerable question — one I realized I’d been sidestepping for a long time:
“What would it look like to trust that it’s all going to work out?”
That’s the question that gave birth to The Magic Life Retreat.
Now, full disclosure: I am a thinker, a doer… some might say a chronic overthinker. When I feel uncertain, I want to plan, budget, strategize, and have a 7-step spreadsheet for how to feel safe. But I’m also a mindfulness teacher — and I know the difference between control and surrender. I know that when I chase certainty, I might be shutting the door on possibility.
So this retreat? This is an invitation to loosen your grip.
To remember what it’s like to live from trust instead of tension.
To take a deep breath and say: “I don’t know what’s coming… and I’m still open.”
To let life meet you where you are.
Planning a retreat — and booking one — is a declaration. You’re telling the universe what you want. And then suddenly, everything in your life starts surfacing as either aligned… or not. (Soft Life guests will definitely tell you when something is not giving soft life.)
When I set the intention to live The Magic Life, I thought I’d start manifesting more right away. Bigger wins. More certainty. Flashy signs.
But that’s not what happened.
What happened instead was deeper. Quieter. Harder.
I didn’t start manifesting more. I started letting go.
Letting go of the need to hustle for safety.
Letting go of things that weren’t working, even when I wanted them to.
Letting go of the belief that the only way to feel secure… is to have all the answers.
And in that letting go, I didn’t always feel magical.
I felt tender. Raw. Exhausted.
But I also felt honest. Present. Human.
In that letting go, what I found wasn’t instant ease or clarity.
It was fatigue. Frustration. A strange, quiet kind of grief.
I didn’t feel powerful or enlightened. I felt like someone trying to breathe through the in-between.
And yet — every now and then, something beautiful would slip through the cracks.
A moment on an OMNoire retreat in Ghana, where just as I thought to myself “I’m going to shift something in my finances before I leave,” I found a single cedi note. It was crumpled on the windowsill, like a little confirmation: "The money is on the way."
Feeling moved to pray in a holy shrine, and a gecko rushing out to meet me as soon as my knees touched the ground. I felt like something was saying "We see you, keep going."
Or on that same retreat, when I was trying to open a PDF on my phone. I had been inspired to look for the work of one of my ancestors, and the only resource I could find was behind a university paywall. But by some cosmic chance, the person sitting next to me –– who’d I’d cried with for days, who I’d met for the first time on this trip –– worked for the exact institution that had published a key to my family’s history.
These little moments reminded me of something I’d forgotten:
Retreats feel magical not because you control every detail — but because you don’t. You don’t know the country. You don’t know who will show up. You don’t know how the meals will taste or how the conversations will unfold.
But somehow, it all aligns. Every time.
As an attendee (and even as a leader), you surrender so much — and the magic rushes in to fill the space.
And maybe that’s what I’m still learning to trust in my everyday life.
That I don’t have to grip so tightly.
That I can let go a little.
That life knows how to hold me, even when I don’t know what’s next.
It’s not perfect. It’s not polished. But somehow, it’s still aligned.
And learning to trust that it will happen is the real magic I’m discovering.
