DESCRIPCION

At some point, something shifted. Maybe gradually, maybe all at once. The place you called home started to feel foreign. The life you built started to feel borrowed. You kept moving, kept showing up, but somewhere underneath all of it, a quiet question took root.
Do I actually belong here?
Not just here as in this city, this relationship, this chapter. Here as in — this body. This life. This version of yourself you've been living.
That question is not a problem to solve. It's an invitation. And this retreat is the space to answer it, not with words, but with your whole body in motion.

Belonging is a 6-day, 5-night immersive retreat on the shores of Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. We will dance the 5Rhythms. We will sit in ceremony with cacao and coffee, medicines this land has held for centuries. We will be moved by sound, by water, by volcanic earth that has been here long before any of us had names for what we were searching for.
This is not a vacation. It's not a workshop you attend and forget. It's six days of going somewhere real inside yourself, and finding out you were never as lost as you thought.

Lake Atitlán is not a backdrop. It's a participant.
The lake sits over five thousand feet above sea level, cradled by three volcanoes: Atitlán, Tolimán, San Pedro, that rise out of the water like something ancient and deliberate. The Tz'utujil and Kaqchikel Maya have lived on these shores for centuries. Their wisdom isn't history here. It breathes. It shows up in the morning light on the water, in the smell of copal burning, in the unhurried way the people of this land move through their days.

There is an energy in this place that strips away what isn't yours and gives back what is. People come to Atitlán and find themselves saying things they didn't know they needed to say. Deciding things they didn't know they were ready to decide.
We go in October because October at the lake is its own kind of magic. The rains are releasing their grip. The sky opens up. The air gets sharp and clear, the light turns long and golden, and the volcanoes, often hidden in cloud, finally show themselves fully. It is the season of transition. The land itself is exhaling. It's the right moment for the kind of work we'll be doing together.

Each day, we dance.
5Rhythms is a movement practice, not a choreography, not a performance, not a fitness class. It's a map of the inner life made physical. Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, Stillness. Five energies that move through every human being, every single day, whether we're aware of them or not. In the practice, we become aware. We stop managing our experience and start moving it through.
You do not need dance experience. You need a body, and a willingness to let it speak, which, if you're reading this, you already have somewhere in you.

We'll also journey with cacao and coffee, approached not as wellness trends but as the plant medicines they truly are in this land, ceremonially, intentionally, with respect for what they open in us. One evening, a gifted sound practitioner will guide us into the deepest listening most of us rarely allow ourselves. Expect to be reorganized.

I've been teaching 5Rhythms in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2014. I'm a certified Heartbeat teacher. I've built a community here that I love deeply. And I've also stood exactly where many of you are standing, in the gap between who I was and who I was becoming, not sure the ground beneath me was solid.
I know what it takes to move through that. I also know you can't think your way out of it. You have to dance your way through.
That's what this is.

This retreat is for practitioners who want to go deeper than a weekly class allows. It's for people who've never danced 5Rhythms but feel something stirring when they hear about it. It's for anyone who is in the middle of a transition, a move, a loss, a reinvention, and needs more than a weekend to actually land somewhere.