Retreat for High Achieving Women in Northern California: Breathwork and Coaching in Mendocino County
You've climbed the ladder. Built the company. Led the team. Exceeded the goals. On paper, you're crushing it. But late at night, when the accomplishments grow quiet, the questions emerge: Who am I beyond what I achieve? What do I truly want when I stop performing? How do I integrate my professional power with my personal truth? If these questions resonate, The Catalyst Retreat was designed for you.
Taking place April 16-19, 2026, this retreat for high achieving women offers something rare: a container designed specifically for leaders, founders, and high performers seeking deeper alignment between external success and internal authenticity. Unlike generic wellness getaways, this women in leadership retreat in Mendocino County, Northern California, is facilitated by Harvard Business School graduates Christine Raschke and Monique Pearson who intimately understand your world—the pressures, the patterns, the particular challenges of high-performance environments. Through strategic coaching, holotropic breathwork, yoga, sound healing, and the grounding wisdom of ancient redwood forests, you'll move through a three-part arc designed to help you connect with essence, reclaim what got lost in the climb, and calibrate your next chapter from genuine alignment rather than external expectation. Discover this and other transformative executive women's retreats at Spirit Camp's retreat calendar.
When Success Isn't Enough: The Catalyst Retreat for Women Ready to Integrate Achievement with Authenticity
A Uniquely Designed Experience for Leaders, Founders, and High Performers Seeking Deeper Alignment
There's a particular loneliness that accompanies high achievement. You've worked incredibly hard to get where you are. You've developed exceptional skills, navigated complex challenges, built something meaningful. Yet somewhere along the journey, you notice a gap—between who you are at work and who you are when no one's watching, between what you've accomplished and what actually fulfills you, between the power you wield professionally and the peace you crave personally. This personal transformation retreat California addresses that gap directly.
The Catalyst Retreat begins Thursday evening April 16th and concludes Sunday afternoon April 19th, 2026, at Spirit Camp in Mendocino County. The timing itself is intentional—arriving Thursday evening allows you to transition from workweek energy into retreat space without rushing, while the Sunday conclusion gives you the drive home to begin integrating insights before Monday's return to responsibilities. This retreat for women in leadership Mendocino experience isn't about achieving more. It's about connecting with the essence that exists beneath all your accomplishments, reclaiming parts of yourself that may have been sacrificed for success, and calibrating what comes next from a place of embodied truth rather than external validation.
What makes this high achiever personal growth retreat uniquely suited for women like you? First, your facilitators understand your world firsthand. Christine and Monique have held leadership positions in tech, startups, and consulting—they know the 60-hour weeks, the constant problem-solving, the weight of responsibility, the difficulty setting boundaries when you're the one everyone depends on. Second, the approach honors how leaders think and process. This isn't about abandoning your analytical capabilities or your drive; it's about integrating them with body wisdom, intuition, and authentic self-expression. The structure provides clear frameworks (Connect, Claim, Calibrate) that your strategic mind can work with, while the somatic practices like holotropic breathwork create access to wisdom that thinking alone cannot reach.
The weekend unfolds through three interconnected phases. You'll Connect—identifying patterns that once served your climb but now limit your wholeness, while rediscovering unique strengths that may have been overshadowed by the narrow definition of "professional success." Then you'll Claim—through curated coaching exercises and deep inquiry, you'll articulate who you actually are today, separate from roles and achievements, and clarify what genuinely matters to you. Finally, you'll Calibrate—getting clear about what you want to bring forth in your next chapter and taking tangible steps to make it real. Throughout the weekend, holotropic breathwork, yoga, sound healing, movement practices, and guided visualizations create multiple pathways for accessing the deeper intelligence your busy mind often overrides.
Your comprehensive retreat package includes a private 1:1 coaching session with Christine or Monique before the retreat begins (crucial for setting personal intentions and feeling seen before joining the group), three nights of accommodation at Spirit Camp, all organic vegetarian meals prepared by a private chef, complete programming with coaching, breathwork, yoga, and integration sessions, plus a post-retreat group coaching session to help translate insights into sustained change when you return to your regular life. Limited to just 14 participants, this women's transformation retreat near Oakland creates the intimate container necessary for genuine vulnerability and breakthrough.
Holotropic Breathwork: The Executive's Portal to Embodied Wisdom
Why High-Achieving Women Are Turning to This Powerful Practice for Breakthrough and Integration
If you're someone who lives primarily in your head—excelling at analysis, strategy, and intellectual problem-solving—you may have noticed a limitation: some of your deepest wisdom, most authentic desires, and most transformative insights don't come through thinking. They emerge from a different kind of knowing. Holotropic breathwork offers high-achieving women a particularly powerful portal to this embodied intelligence. Developed in the 1970s by Stanislav and Christina Grof, this practice creates access to non-ordinary states of consciousness through controlled breathing techniques, offering a non-pharmacological pathway to the kinds of insights and breakthroughs that logical processing alone cannot access.
Here's why holotropic breathwork retreat Northern California experiences resonate so deeply with leaders and high performers: the practice temporarily bypasses your thinking mind's control. For someone whose intellectual capabilities have been your greatest asset—the source of your career success, your problem-solving prowess, your strategic advantage—this can be both uncomfortable and revelatory. Through accelerated breathing patterns, you create physiological changes that shift consciousness, often allowing unconscious material, creative insights, and emotional releases to emerge. Many high-achieving women report experiencing breakthroughs on issues they've "thought about" for years but couldn't resolve through analysis alone. The patterns that keep you stuck, the fears driving your overwork, the grief you've been too busy to process, the intuitive knowing you've been overriding—breathwork creates space for all of it to surface and move through.
The physiological process is straightforward yet profound. Accelerated, connected breathing creates temporary changes in blood chemistry—specifically the ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide—that alter brain chemistry and shift consciousness. Unlike traditional meditation practices that ask participants to gradually quiet the mind over months or years of practice, breathwork creates immediate shifts into non-ordinary states. These altered states are often accompanied by intense physical sensations, powerful emotions, vivid imagery, and psychological insights. Some sessions feel cathartic and releasing; others bring clarity and vision; still others create profound states of peace and connection. The experience is different for each person and can vary from session to session, but consistently, participants report accessing wisdom they couldn't reach through their usual modes of thinking and planning.
Within The Catalyst Retreat's carefully designed sequence, holotropic breathwork serves as one of several powerful modalities that Christine and Monique integrate with coaching and structured reflection. This combination is crucial for high achievers: the breathwork creates the breakthrough experience—the emotional release, the insight, the shift in consciousness—while the coaching provides frameworks for integration and action. You're not just having a profound experience and then returning to business as usual; you're translating what emerges during breathwork into clear understanding and concrete next steps. For women accustomed to driving results, this marriage of breakthrough and integration, of somatic experience and strategic planning, creates transformation that actually sticks. Learn more about holotropic breathwork at the Association for Holotropic Breathwork International.
Photo of Deer Haven, one of the our many unique cabin spaces. This cabin has three beds. Cabins have between 1 to 8 beds each and provide several different sleeping arrangements for high achieving women retreat. All cabin spaces are included in women in leadership retreat.
Photo of Group Glamping Tents Setup in Sunset Meadow. We have 10 Glamping Structures that can be added with 1to 3 beds each. This can increase bed capacity of campus to 50 guests across 20 unique accommodation spaces.
Facilitators Who Understand Your World: Christine Raschke and Monique Pearson
Harvard-Trained Leaders Who've Walked the Path from External Achievement to Internal Alignment
Christine Raschke and Monique Pearson don't just understand high-achieving women theoretically—they've lived the experience. Both are Harvard Business School graduates who held senior leadership roles in tech, startups, and consulting before dedicating themselves to executive coaching and transformational work. They know intimately the particular pressures facing women in high-performance environments: the imposter syndrome that persists despite accomplishments, the difficulty setting boundaries when you're the most capable person in the room, the tendency to override body signals and push through exhaustion, the constant internal drive to do more, be more, prove more. They understand because they've navigated it themselves, which means they can meet you exactly where you are without judgment or platitudes.
What makes Christine and Monique exceptional facilitators for this leadership retreat for women North of Bay Area is their refusal to ask you to choose between your intellectual gifts and your embodied wisdom, between your professional excellence and your personal truth. They're not suggesting you abandon your achievements or diminish your capabilities. Instead, they guide you toward integration—bringing your strategic mind, your professional power, and your accomplishments into conversation with your body's intelligence, your intuitive knowing, and your authentic desires. They're fluent in the language of business and strategy while also being deeply trained in somatic practice, emotional intelligence, and spiritual inquiry. This rare combination allows them to hold space for both your Harvard-educated analytical mind and the parts of you that need to cry, rage, rest, or simply be without purpose.
Through this professional women's retreat California coast experience, Christine and Monique create what high achievers often discover they've been missing: permission to be fully human. Permission to not have all the answers. Permission to feel deeply while still being competent. Permission to want something different than what you thought you were supposed to want. Their coaching style balances structure with spaciousness, strategic questioning with compassionate witnessing, challenge with profound acceptance. Follow @thecatalystretreats to connect with Christine and Monique and explore their approach to transformation.
Spirit Camp: Where High Performers Come to Remember They're Human Beings, Not Just Human Doings
The Redwood Forest Setting That Naturally Slows Down Even the Busiest Minds
Something remarkable happens when high-achieving women arrive at Spirit Camp in Mendocino County. They pull up with minds still spinning—to-do lists, pending decisions, people depending on them, problems to solve. Then they step out of their cars, and the redwood forest begins its work. Within hours, sometimes within minutes, participants report a palpable slowing down. The ancient trees themselves seem to exert an energetic effect, a gravitational pull away from productivity mode and toward simply being. For women whose worth has been tied to output, this initial slowing can feel disorienting. Then, gradually, it feels like relief.
The accommodations at Spirit Camp are designed specifically to support this transition. You'll choose from private spacious cabins perfect for high achievers who need solitude to process, private cozy cabins offering comfort without excess, or three-to-four person shared cabins with quality bedding for those traveling with friends or open to community. Each cabin features oak hardwood floors, luxurious cotton sheets and linen bedding, personal electric heaters you can control, and thoughtfully placed blue-blocking lights. The aesthetic is beautiful but not distracting, comfortable but not luxurious in the spa-resort sense. For people whose daily lives often include business-class flights, expensive hotels, and curated experiences, there's something profoundly refreshing about this balance—quality without pretension, comfort without excess. The clean communal bathhouses evoke simpler times, inviting you to release the need for private everything and remember the ease of shared human experience.
The Sanctuary serves as the primary container for the retreat's deeper work—a copper-roofed architectural gem with a central skylight and 20-foot south-facing windows that flood the space with natural light. High achievers often appreciate good design, and the Sanctuary delivers: the structure itself creates a sense of being held without feeling confined, supported without being constrained. Here you'll gather for breathwork sessions, coaching circles, guided visualizations, and sound healing, surrounded by the redwood canopy visible through floor-to-ceiling windows. The space manages to be both beautifully structured (appealing to those who value excellence in all things) and profoundly spacious (creating room for whatever emerges when you stop controlling outcomes).
Throughout the weekend, you'll share nourishing organic vegetarian meals prepared by a private chef—whole foods designed to support intensive inner work without weighing you down. The meals themselves become part of the practice: sitting at communal tables in the Redwood Lodge, actually tasting your food instead of eating while checking email, engaging in real conversation without agenda or networking goals. For many high performers, the simple act of eating slowly while present to both nourishment and community represents a radical departure from rushed lunches at desks or dinner meetings that double as work. This, too, is part of the recalibration—remembering that you're a human being who needs sustenance, rest, and connection, not just a human doing optimizing for productivity.
Mendocino County: Northern California's Best-Kept Secret for Transformation
Just Three Hours from Silicon Valley, a World Away from the Hustle
If you're reading this, you likely live and work in one of Northern California's innovation hubs—San Francisco, Palo Alto, San Jose, Menlo Park, Oakland, or Berkeley. Your environment is defined by ambition, acceleration, disruption, and the constant drive toward the next milestone. Mendocino County offers the perfect counterpoint: ancient redwood forests that have stood for hundreds of years, Pacific Ocean rhythms that follow tides rather than quarterly reports, and a pace that honors natural cycles rather than artificial urgency. This personal transformation retreat California setting provides exactly what high achievers need most—distance from the environment that reinforces your patterns, immersion in natural beauty that dwarfs your problems, and space to remember who you are when you're not performing.
The practical logistics matter to planners and organizers: Spirit Camp sits approximately three hours north of the Bay Area via scenic Highway 101 or the dramatic coastal Highway 1. You can drive up from San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, or Palo Alto in a single afternoon, arriving for Thursday evening's opening circle. The retreat center is accessible from San Francisco International Airport (SFO), Oakland International Airport (OAK), or Santa Rosa Airport (just two hours away—often the quickest option for those flying in from elsewhere). Located in Mendocino County on California's North Coast, Spirit Camp occupies 27 acres of second-growth redwood forest, positioned just one mile from the Pacific Ocean and ten minutes from the historic town of Mendocino with its cafes, galleries, and natural food stores.
Here's the value proposition for busy professionals constantly weighing time investments: you can leave Thursday afternoon or evening, immerse completely in transformational work for three nights, and return Sunday afternoon having done deep personal work—all without international flights, jet lag, extended time away from work, or the exhaustion of long-distance travel. No passport required. No malaria prophylaxis. No 14-hour flights. Just a scenic drive through increasingly beautiful landscapes that naturally begin the unwinding process before you even arrive. For leaders accustomed to optimizing every resource, this executive women's retreat offers exceptional return on investment: minimal travel time, maximum transformation potential. Continue exploring transformative retreats at the Spirit Camp calendar.
What High Achievers Want to Know About The Catalyst Retreat
Practical Details for Women Accustomed to Planning and Preparation
How do I prepare for this retreat, especially the breathwork?
This question itself reveals the high achiever's mindset—the desire to prepare thoroughly, research in advance, optimize the experience, show up ready to excel. The beautiful challenge of this retreat is that unlike work projects, it asks you to arrive with openness rather than preparation. There's nothing to study, no pre-work to complete, no way to "get it right." The pre-retreat 1:1 coaching session with Christine or Monique helps you set personal intentions and feel connected before joining the group, but that's about relationship and clarity, not performance preparation. For holotropic breathwork specifically, there are no prerequisites or prior experience needed. The facilitators guide everything—how to breathe, what to expect, how to work with whatever arises. Your main preparation is actually the hardest thing for high achievers: giving yourself permission to step away from productivity mode and into receptive presence, showing up as you are rather than as you think you should be, allowing yourself to not know, not control, and not optimize. This itself becomes part of the transformational work.What is the balance between structured programming and free time?
High achievers often oscillate between two extremes: packed schedules that maximize every moment and complete collapse into exhaustion. The Catalyst Retreat offers a third way. The weekend includes structured sessions that provide clear containers and progression—morning practices like yoga or breathwork, coaching exercises that build on each other through the Connect-Claim-Calibrate arc, afternoon activities like nature walks or group sharing, evening experiences like sound healing or integration circles. This structure serves the transformation by creating intentional sequencing. However, unlike corporate agendas designed to fill every moment, this schedule deliberately includes spaciousness. There's time for walking alone among the redwoods, journaling about insights that emerge, sitting in the Sanctuary simply processing, or resting in your cabin when your body asks for it. The free time isn't "extra"—it's essential. Breakthroughs often happen in the spaces between structured activities, when you stop trying to make something happen and allow insights to surface naturally. For women accustomed to driving outcomes, learning to value spaciousness as much as structure represents its own form of growth.How does the post-retreat integration support work?
This question demonstrates sophistication—you understand that peak experiences don't automatically translate into sustained change. High achievers often excel at intense experiences (you've probably crushed bootcamps, masterminds, leadership intensives) but sometimes struggle with maintaining new patterns once regular life resumes. The post-retreat integration group coaching session addresses this precisely. After you've returned home and encountered the reality of reintegration—the demands that haven't changed, the people who relate to you in old ways, the work environment that reinforces previous patterns—Christine and Monique gather the group virtually to process together. This session helps you translate retreat insights into concrete actions and commitments, address challenges arising when the retreat glow fades, troubleshoot obstacles to implementing new boundaries or practices, and maintain connection with the community formed during the weekend. For a women's transformation retreat near Oakland participant returning to demanding work environments, this follow-up makes the difference between a beautiful memory and genuine transformation.
Two Restorative Experiences to Extend Your Mendocino Journey
Continue Your Transformation Through Nature and Creativity
Van Damme State Park: Finding Brilliance Within Constraints
Just south of Mendocino town, Van Damme State Park offers one of California's most fascinating ecological phenomena—a landscape that speaks directly to themes of adaptation, constraint, and unique expression. The park's 5-mile loop trail (with shorter options available) takes visitors through remarkably diverse ecosystems: beginning with a lush fern canyon where towering ferns, moss-covered trees, and a year-round creek create a Jurassic atmosphere, then climbing gradually to the renowned pygmy forest where environmental conditions have created something extraordinary.
In the pygmy forest, you'll encounter ancient cypress and pine trees that stand barely waist-high despite being decades or even a century old. The highly acidic, nutrient-poor soil of this elevated marine terrace has created severe constraints—yet rather than preventing life, these conditions have produced a unique adaptation. The trees are fully mature, complete with cones and seeds, simply expressed at a dramatically different scale than their counterparts in richer soil. For high-achieving women learning to work with rather than constantly fighting against their circumstances, this ecosystem offers a profound metaphor. What looks like limitation might actually be ecological brilliance. The question isn't always "how do I get different terrain?" but rather "what unique expression emerges from my particular conditions?" Many retreat participants find that extending their stay to walk through Van Damme's ecosystems provides continued space for contemplation—allowing the weekend's insights to settle while still surrounded by Mendocino County's natural beauty.
Point Cabrillo Light Station: The Power of Grounded Presence
North of Mendocino town, Point Cabrillo Light Station stands as both historic landmark and powerful metaphor for leadership. This beautifully preserved lighthouse, perched on a dramatic coastal headland, offers an easy 1-mile walk from the parking area along bluff trails with expansive Pacific views. Along the way, you can explore tide pools teeming with sea stars and anemones, watch for migrating gray whales (winter through spring), and visit the small museum documenting the lighthouse keepers' lives.
What makes this destination particularly resonant for the leadership retreat for women participant is the lighthouse itself as metaphor. Consider: a lighthouse doesn't move. It doesn't chase ships or prove its worth through constant activity. It simply stands present, grounded in its foundation, offering steady light regardless of weather or circumstance. The most powerful guidance comes not from frantically doing but from being clear, present, and consistent in your truth. Ships navigate by the lighthouse's unwavering presence, not its hustle. For high-achieving women who've built careers on constant motion and proving value through output, the lighthouse invites a different model of influence—one rooted in grounded presence, clarity of purpose, and trusting that your authentic expression is itself the beacon others need. The walk to Point Cabrillo offers perfect space for integration and reflection, allowing you to contemplate what grounded leadership might look like in your own life and work.
Ready to Move Beyond Achievement Into Alignment?
You've built an impressive career. Exceeded ambitious goals. Proven yourself capable of remarkable things. Now it's time to ask the deeper questions: Who are you beyond all that achievement? What do you actually want when you stop performing? How do you lead from wholeness rather than proving? The Catalyst Retreat offers high-achieving women something increasingly rare—a structured yet spacious container for reconnecting with the essence that existed before the accomplishments and will remain long after.
Join Harvard-trained coaches Christine Raschke and Monique Pearson April 16-19, 2026, for three nights in Mendocino County's ancient redwood forests. Through strategic coaching, holotropic breathwork, and somatic practices designed specifically for leaders seeking integration, you'll move through the Connect-Claim-Calibrate arc toward greater alignment between your professional power and personal truth.
Limited to 14 participants. This retreat for high achieving women fills quickly.
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