$29 USD/CAD
The Art of Staying
Featuring > Natalia & Mike Chang
Dream it.
Lead it. Live it.
The Family
That Make Us
Whole
On grief, chosen family,
belonging, and why slowing
down changes everything.
Dear RetreatBoss Community,
I almost didn’t write this letter.
Not because I didn’t have words.
I always have words. That’s what I
do. But this time, the words kept
dissolving before I could catch them
because the person I would have
called to read them to first is gone.
My mom passed away recently, and
the world has been both very loud
and very quiet ever since.
Grief is a strange companion. It doesn’t
knock. It doesn’t wait for a convenient
moment. It sits down across from you
at the breakfast table, rides with you in
the car, waits for you just before sleep.
And yet — if you let it — it brings with it
something extraordinary: the full, vivid
weight of everything that was good.
Grief, at its most honest, is just
love with nowhere left to go.
And this issue of RetreatBoss
Magazine is my attempt to give
it somewhere to land.
Family Is the Lens
I’ve been thinking a lot about how family
shapes the way we see everything.
The lens we look through — how we
interpret generosity or scarcity, how
we receive love, how quick we are
to trust or protect ourselves — that
lens was ground and polished by the
people who raised us, loved us, hurt us,
and held us. Family is not just where
we come from. It is how we come to
understand the world.
And here’s what I believe: that lens
can be adjusted. Widened. Cleaned.
Shared. When we come together
— truly together, not scrolling-in-the-
same-room together — we shift each
other’s perspective. We let new light in.
We become capable of seeing what we
couldn’t see alone. That is how families,
in all their beautiful, complicated forms,
change the world. Not with grand
gestures. With presence.
Who Gets to Be Family
A letter from the
EDITOR
This issue asks a quietly radical question:
who counts?
Family can be blood — the ones who share
your last name and your particular brand of
stubbornness. It can be chosen — the friends
who showed up in the middle of the night, the
mentor who believed in you before you believed
in yourself, the community that said welcome
and meant it. It can be both, woven together in
ways that are impossible to separate and make
no sense to try.
Family can be your people. Your places. The
coffee shop where you do your best thinking,
the trail that puts you back in your body, the city
that made you who you are. Family can be your
pets — let’s be honest, sometimes they love us
better and judge us less than anyone else does.
Family can be your things: the worn quilt from
your grandmother, the record that still sounds
like summer, the book that found you exactly
when you needed it.
Connection and belonging don’t live in a
bloodline. They live in the moments when
something — or someone — makes you
feel less alone in this world. This issue is a
celebration of all of it.
An Invitation
Losing my mom has reminded me — with a
clarity that grief has a particular gift for — that
nothing is waiting. The call you keep meaning
to make. The dinner you keep meaning to host.
The trip you keep meaning to take with the
people who matter most. None of it is waiting.
So here is my invitation to you, from this issue
and from the marrow of a grief that is still very
fresh: reach out to your people this week.
Break bread. Share a story. Sit with someone
long enough that the conversation stops being
polite and starts being real. Let your family —
whoever that is for you — know that they are
your foundation. That they are the reason the
world looks the way it does through your eyes.
That you are grateful.
Because that is what a retreat lifestyle really
means. Not five-star accommodation, not
Instagram-worthy vistas, not productivity in a
beautiful location. It means choosing, again and
again, to be fully present with the people and
places and things and animals that make life
feel like it means something. It means slowing
down enough to actually feel it.
My mom taught me that. And I intend to keep
learning it.
With ,
staying close
the art of
Agni Zotis | Amanda Jennings | Amy Civica | Catherine Kontos
Charlotte Tweed | Crystal Adair-Benning | D’Angelo Thompson
Denise Ropp | Emily Johnson | Eugenia Pantahos | Gil Petersil
Karla A. Brooks | Kristina Carrillo-Bucaram | Lenora Edwards
Marie Jane Lewin | Michal Naisteter | Dr. Stephanie Grunewald
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RetreatBoss Magazine is more than a publication, it’s a gateway
to transformation, cultural immersion, and holistic well-being.
Designed for retreat seekers and those drawn to travel,
self-discovery, and personal growth, RetreatBoss Magazine
brings the retreat experience to life through inspiring stories,
expert insights, and curated recommendations that explore
the world’s most transformative retreats, wellness practices,
and cultural experiences. It also serves as a trusted resource
for retreat leaders, facilitators, and wellness entrepreneurs,
offering industry trends, strategies, and success stories to
support those shaping the future of retreats. More than
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well-being, exploration, and purpose thrive.
Contributing Writers
OUR MISSION
Crystal Adair-Benning
Editor-in-Chief
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Marketing Director
linkedin.com/in/catherinekontos
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Founder
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Contents
Table of
feature
Natalia &
Mike Chang
40
The Art
of Staying
16
The Language
Beneath the Life
Lenora Edwards, M.S.
28
A Life Fully
Lived.
Karla A. Brooks
20
The Wellness
Industry Fixed
Everything Except
Amanda Jennings
36
Families Evolve
Beyond One Place
Charlotte Tweed
27
Books, Games, &
Ideas That Bring
Families Closer
24
The Luxury of
Feeling Well
D’Angelo Thompson
32
5 Questions Every
Retreat Leader
Should Ask
Emily Johnson
68
The Table That
Creates Family
Amy Civica
56
Curation Creates
Connection
Michal Naisteter
64
Blessings
in Zakynthos
Eugenia Pantahos
52
The Table Is the
Treatment Room
Marie Jane Lewin
51
Top Reads for
Bold Leaders
60
Come Home.
Your Family’s Waiting.
Denise Ropp
40
The Art
of Staying
Catherine Kontos
75
RetreatBoss
Magazine
Playlist
80
The Nature of
Reconnection
Dr. Stephanie Grunewald
86
You Can’t Rush
Connection
Gil Petersil
70
What We
Pass Down
Crystal Adair-Benning
76
Our Love
Defines Us
Agni Zotis
84
Sunshine In
A Bowl
Kristina Carrillo-Bucaram
90
Top 5 Wellness
Resorts for
Families
16
17
LANGUAGE
BENEATH
the Life
The
here is a moment that most people
do not register as significant, not
because it lacks impact, but
because it is so deeply woven
into the fabric of daily life that
it passes without examination. It does not
announce itself as a turning point, nor does
it arrive with enough intensity to demand
attention. It simply occurs, quietly, in the
middle of otherwise ordinary interactions.
You might be responding to a message, sitting
across from someone you care about, or moving
through a routine task you have done countless
times before. Nothing changes externally in
any obvious way, yet internally there is a shift. A
thought forms, often quickly and without friction,
and the body follows it before there is any
opportunity to question it.
I should be handling this better. That didn’t land the
way I intended. Something about this feels off.
The moment itself remains unchanged. The
environment is the same. The relationship is the
same. And yet the experience of it is no longer
neutral. Something has been interpreted, and
that interpretation begins organizing everything
that follows.
We tend to believe that our lives are shaped
primarily by events, by what is said, by what is
done, by what unfolds around us. In practice,
what shapes us more consistently is the
meaning we assign to those events, and that
meaning is constructed through a form of
internal language that most people rarely
examine with any precision.
This internal language is not random. It is built over
time, influenced by earlier experiences, reinforced
through repetition, and eventually stabilized
to the point where it feels indistinguishable
from truth. It determines whether a moment
feels manageable or overwhelming, whether
feedback feels informative or threatening, whether
connection feels steady or uncertain. Over time,
it becomes less of a reaction and more of a lens
through which everything is filtered.
And once it becomes a lens, it is no longer
experienced as interpretation.
It is experienced as reality.
This becomes especially clear in moments that
appear, on the surface, disproportionate.
I worked with a woman who was, by any external
measure, highly capable. She was organized,
dependable, and accustomed to handling a high
level of responsibility without difficulty. There was
18
nothing in her life that would suggest she was unable to manage
what was in front of her, yet she found herself increasingly
overwhelmed by situations that, objectively, were well within
her ability to navigate.
During one of our sessions, she paused in the middle of
describing something relatively minor and said, almost under
her breath, “I don’t think I can take care of this.”
It was not said with drama. If anything, it carried a kind of quiet
certainty, as though she were stating something factual rather
than interpretive.
But the response in her body told a different story.
There was a tightening in her throat, a contraction through her
chest, and a subtle withdrawal that shifted her out of presence
and into protection. The sentence itself was not the issue. It
was the speed and authority with which it reorganized her
internal state.
So we stayed with it.
Not the situation itself, but the sentence.
“I can’t take care of this.”
We slowed it down enough for her to begin noticing it, not as
truth, but as something that was happening inside her. And
as that happened, the familiarity of it became clear. This was
not a new thought. It was practiced, reliable, and well-timed. It
had learned to appear precisely when pressure increased or
uncertainty entered the moment.
And as we followed it back, not analytically but experientially,
it led somewhere that had very little to do with the present.
It led to earlier experiences where being overwhelmed did not
simply mean having too much to handle.
It meant being alone inside it.
This is where most approaches attempt to intervene at the level
of thought, to correct it, replace it, or challenge its accuracy. But
the persistence of the pattern was not due to faulty reasoning.
It was maintained by the body’s learned association between
overwhelm and isolation.
Until that association shifts, the thought will continue to feel
true, regardless of how much evidence exists to the contrary.
So the work was not to convince her that she could handle what
was in front of her. It was to help her develop the capacity to
remain present in the moment where her system assumed
that she could not.
To stay with the sensation.
To stay with the tightening.
To stay with the thought, without immediately organizing
around it.
Not to override it.
But to hold space for it, without letting it take over.
We returned, gradually, to those earlier internal experiences,
not to analyze or reinterpret them, but to change how they
were held. Where there had been isolation, there needed to
19
be a felt sense of support. Where there had been instability,
there needed to be something steady enough for her system
to register.
Not as an idea.
As an experience.
Over time, the sentence did not disappear, but something more
important changed.
It lost its authority.
“I can’t take care of this” still arose, but it no longer functioned
as a command. It became something she could notice without
immediately believing, something she could stay with without
being moved by.
There was more stability around the thought. And that stability
changed everything.
From the outside, nothing dramatic had occurred. There was
no visible breakthrough, no moment that could be pointed to
as the turning point. But internally, the shift was unmistakable.
The reaction slowed. The urgency softened. The need to
immediately adjust, fix, or withdraw began to loosen. And in its
place, there was space. Not created through effort, but available
because it was no longer being overridden.
This is the work that often goes unrecognized, because it does
not present as transformation in the way people expect. It
presents as stabilization. The capacity to remain present in
moments that previously triggered contraction.
The ability to experience intensity without immediately
reorganizing around it. The willingness to stay, even when the
familiar impulse is to move away.
In retreat environments, this distinction becomes particularly
important. It is relatively easy to access states of clarity,
openness, or connection within a supported setting. What is
more difficult is maintaining those states when returning to the
conditions of everyday life.
This is often interpreted as a loss of progress. In reality, it is a
reflection of capacity. Access is not the same as the ability to
hold. And the work is not to recreate the experience.
It is to expand the ability to stay with it.
This expansion does not happen through intensity or effort.
It happens through repetition, through small moments where
something familiar arises and is met differently.
A pause before responding.
A recognition of a thought without immediately following it.
A willingness to remain present for a few seconds longer than
is comfortable.
These moments are easy to overlook but they accumulate. And
over time, they begin to change what the system expects it can
handle. What once required protection becomes tolerable.
What once triggered withdrawal becomes navigable. What once
felt overwhelming becomes something that can be held. The
result is not a different life. It is a different relationship to the life
already being lived. And from that place, something becomes
available that was not accessible before. Not because anything
external has changed. But because you no longer have to leave
in order to stay.
VIEW THEIR FULL PROFILE ON RETREATMATCH.COM ---------
Lenora Edwards, M.S., is a keynote speaker, published
author, and expert in emotional eating and identity work,
guiding individuals to shift patterns, language, and internal
narratives.
20
Fixed
Everything
The Wellness Industry
Except What Matters Most
21
e have created an entire
industry focused on individual
w e l l - b e i n g — o p t i m i z i n g
everything from supplements
and sleep trackers to cold
plunges and nervous system regulation. Despite
this intense focus, we have completely missed the
most significant factor for long-term health and
happiness: the quality of our closest relationships.
The science is clear. Strong family connection is
consistently linked to lower cortisol levels, a stronger
immune system, reduced anxiety, and a longer life.
It’s one of the hardest health metrics we have.
Yet the wellness and travel industry, for all its
sophistication, largely treats the family as a logistics
problem rather than a therapeutic unit. The modern
retreat model is to keep the kids occupied, make
sure the grandparents are comfortable, and build
the actual wellness around the
adults. It treats the family as a
complication to manage, rather
than the whole point of the trip.
I grew up watching my Italian
grandmother naturally do what
the wellness industry is only just
starting to figure out. She didn’t
use words like intentional living or nervous system
regulation. She just cooked with whatever the
season gave us, made sure everyone was involved in
the process be it collecting the orchard vegetables
or making the pasta, and kept us lingering around
her table for as long as possible. The connection
that happened in her kitchen and the olive grove,
without an agenda or a rigid schedule, was the most
profound wellness practice I’ve ever seen.
That practice is what led me to found Oliveto
Estate in Le Marche, Italy. It’s the lens through
which I’ve designed every retreat for the past
decade. After organizing more than 250 of them
across wellness, gastronomy, corporate offsites,
and multigenerational family travel, I’ve realized
something crucial: wellness doesn’t start at a retreat
center. It starts at home. It lives inside the family, in
the relationships that shape us more than anything
else. If we’re serious about wellness, we must start
designing for families.
The Disconnection We Don’t Talk About
There is a particular kind of loneliness that nobody
warns you about. It arrives not when you are alone,
but when you are surrounded by the people you love
most, and still feel somehow separate from them.
I have watched it arrive through our gates more
times than I can count. Families with genuine warmth
between them, real love that is not in question. And
yet something has calcified. The rhythms of daily
life, work, school, screens, schedules have quietly
eroded the connective tissue. They are together
constantly and yet not truly connected.
This is not a personal failure. It is a structural one.
And it is one of the most significant and under-
discussed wellness challenges of our time.
What I observe, without intentional
design, is that families fragment
within hours of arriving. Everyone
drifts toward what is comfortable
and familiar; the teenager to her
phone, the grandfather to a quiet
chair, the parents to the logistics
of managing everyone else. They
reconvene at mealtimes, exchange pleasantries,
and drift apart again. It looks like togetherness. It
rarely feels like it.
The problem is not that families do their own thing.
Every generation needs space and restoration on
their own terms. The problem is that rarely are
the moments in between designed. The itinerary,
when there is one, has been built around a single
idea of what the holiday should look like, rather
than around the distinct needs of each person in
the group, with deliberate opportunities woven
through it for them to come back together through
shared doing.
Nobody consulted the 14-year-old about what
she actually wanted. Nobody checked whether
Grandad’s hip would manage the activities.
Nobody acknowledged that Mum hadn’t had
genuine silence in months. And nobody designed
the moments that would bring all of them
“What 250 Retreats
Taught Me About
Family Wellness”
22
genuinely, naturally back to each other.
Everyone was invited to the holiday. But nobody was
really heard, or more probably not asked what they
needed from it before it began.
The Consumer Insight Behind the Problem
My background is in consumer insight, which is
essentially the art of digging past what people say they
want to find out what they actually need. In family travel,
that gap is significant.
Families say they want a holiday. What they genuinely
need is to remember why they love each other and
ultimately connection.
They need the conversation that never happens on
a random Tuesday at home. The moment a teenager
says something so insightful it quiets the whole table.
The evening that stretches hours past bedtime because
nobody wants it to end. My grandmother never explicitly
planned those evenings, but she curated the conditions
for them. The family travel industry could learn a lot
from her.
Doing Things Differently Can Yield
Completely Different Results
The foundational shift in everything we do at Oliveto is
this: we design from the inside out.
Before a single activity is planned, we understand who
is in the group. What each generation is carrying. What
they need to feel safe enough to be genuinely present.
When you begin there, you stop building a programme
and start building the conditions for real connection.
The most visible evidence of this is what happens to
the screens.
On a conventionally organised family holiday, devices
are a constant battlefield. On our retreats, phones and
iPads simply stop being reached for; not through rules,
but because what is happening is more compelling
than anything a screen can offer. The conversation, the
activity, the laughter, the challenge of learning something
new alongside someone you love. When people feel
genuinely seen and involved, the pull of the device
dissolves. We have seen this with teenagers who arrived
visibly reluctant. The shift is not enforced. It is earned
through design.
What 250 Retreats Taught Me About Family Wellness
You can’t schedule a breakthrough moment. But you
can absolutely build the environment for it. We do this
by designing from the inside out. Before we plan a single
activity, we figure out who is in the group and what each
generation is carrying. When you start there, you stop
building an itinerary and start building a foundation for
real connection.
It requires three deliberate layers.
Layer One: Individual Restoration
You cannot design for collective connection until
you’ve sorted out individual restoration. Every person
arrives carrying weight and what interests they have.
The grandmother brings decades of exhaustion she’d
never dare complain about. The teenager is carrying the
invisible, heavy stress of constant digital comparison.
The parents are just carrying everything, having put their
own needs last for years. A family only connects when
each individual feels rested enough to actually show up.
That’s step one.
Layer Two: The Bridge Experiences
This is where the travel industry fails families the hardest.
Bridge experiences are shared activities that completely
dismantle the generational hierarchy. Nobody is the
expert. The playing field is entirely level.
At Oliveto, maybe it’s making pasta with a local who’s
been rolling dough for fifty years. Maybe it’s a foraging
walk where the oldest person in the group suddenly
becomes the MVP. Or a ceramics class where a ten-year-
old totally outshines her dad, and everyone just laughs.
The activity itself isn’t what matters, it’s the equality it
creates. Roles dissolve. Guards drop. This shared novelty
is one of the most powerful bonding mechanisms in
human psychology.
Layer Three: Unstructured Togetherness
Nobody flies home talking about the yoga session.
They talk about the night the 14-year-old taught her
grandfather a new card game at 11 PM, laughing louder
than her parents have heard in years. They talk about the
father and son who finally reconnected while riding bikes
through the hills. Or the grandmother opening up about
the war, while the grandkids sit completely mesmerized.
You can’t put these moments on a spreadsheet. They
only happen when people feel safe and unhurried.
23
My grandmother understood this. It was never just about
eating the dinner, it was shelling beans on the doorstep
in the sun, or walking to the market together. She knew
that doing unhurried, ordinary things side by side created
a bond that simply sitting across from someone couldn’t
replicate. She just called it an ordinary day. But she knew
enough of those days would melt away the distance life
had put between us.
Wellness Begins at Home
The future of family travel is not another resort with wellness
facilities available on request. It is a genuine rethinking of
what family time is for, and a design philosophy that treats
the family unit as the primary wellness environment it has
always been.
When you design from genuine need outward, something
consistent and beautiful happens. The teenager who
arrived disconnected is teaching her grandmother
something by day three. The grandfather talks for an
hour about the olive harvest and why it mattered to his
own father. The parents look across the table and quietly
recover something they had been too busy to find.
This is what my grandmother was doing all along. Not
wellness as a trend. Not luxury for its own sake. Just the
restoration of the most important unit in human life;
through food, through nature, through time doing things
together, and through the radical act of genuinely listening
to what each person at the table needs.
Because wellness that doesn’t reach the people sitting at
your own table isn’t really wellness at all.
VIEW THEIR FULL PROFILE ON RETREATMATCH.COM ---------
Amanda Jennings is the founder of Oliveto Estate
in Le Marche, Italy. She has led 250+ retreats
across wellness, gastronomy, and family travel,
helping retreat leaders create transformational
experiences in untouched Italy.
24
The Luxury
of Feeling
Well
25
Like many of you, summer is
my carefree season—a time to
reconnect with friends and family.
It’s also a time to reconnect with
my own body.
I find myself getting more pedicures and manicures, using fewer
heavy products on the skin and hair, and becoming extremely
conscious of what I eat.
Instead of depriving yourself, think of summer as a time to
detox, reset your body, and allow your skin and hair to breathe.
Many physicians suggest introducing more fruits and
green juices into your daily routine. Evaluate your vitamin
supplements to ensure they are truly working as promised.
Also, consider an alcohol detox for 90 days—this can help reset
your body. There are many non-alcoholic concoctions perfect
for summer brunches and BBQs.
In dealing with my own health, introducing many of these
practices into my daily routine has helped immensely. I lost up
to 10 lbs. in a month by cutting out meat, eating only fish and/
or organic vegetables, preparing lots of homemade meals, and
now, as I approach the 90-day mark of a full alcohol detox, my
energy and skin have truly bounced back.
Start paying attention to foods that may cause breakouts,
bloating, skin and/or scalp irritation, or make you feel sluggish.
These are foods you should avoid or consume in moderation.
Keep in mind—this is different for everyone; it’s always best
to consult a nutritionist.
For Summer Hair
• Avoid hot tools—allow your natural texture to shine.
• Try protective styles like braids or top knots.
• Use shampoos that don’t strip your hair; conditioners
and hair serums are your friends.
• Explore organic hair care companies like Yarok Hair.
• Trim dead ends as needed.
For Skincare & Body
• Exfoliate regularly—it promotes smoother skin and
better shaving.
• Wear lighter foundations, like Illusion by Hourglass
Cosmetics, that include SPF.
• Look for healthier, alternative SPF 30 options at wellness
shops or spas.
• We get Vitamin D from the sun, and it’s essential for
overall health and bone strength.
• Morning walks or runs are a beautiful way to start your
day—even when it rains, the sun is still there.
• Wash off makeup and products at night. Don’t skip your
nightly skincare routine—think of it as replenishing your
skin while your body rests.
• Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate—drink plenty of water, and
add lemon, cucumber, or berries for flavor and an extra
vitamin boost.
Lastly…
Treat yourself—and your friends—to the spa. Whether monthly
or every other month, take the time.
Feed your soul.
D’Angelo Thompson is a celebrated creative artist
in beauty, fashion, film, red carpet, and television.
He is also an author, educator, and speaker who
has worked with some of America’s top universities
and corporations.