The Aliveness Experience

THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT!

A deeply intimate weekend inside my home in East Nashville, to slow down, come back to yourself, and remember the woman underneath everything you carry.

📍 My home, Nashville, Tennessee
🗓️ Friday, September 18 through Sunday, September 20
👭 Limited to 8 women
💛 Investment: $695 (payment plan available)

When was the last time you felt fully alive?

Not caught up. Not finally through your inbox. Not the good kind of tired you get from checking everything off the list.

I mean alive. The kind where your shoulders drop an inch you didn't even know they were holding. Where you taste your food instead of just eating it. Where a conversation goes somewhere real and you don't notice the time passing.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

Because if you're anything like the women who end up in my living room, you carry a lot. You're the one who remembers everything, holds everything, makes the calls nobody else wants to make. Your calendar is full. Your mind is fuller.

And somewhere in the middle of taking care of everyone and everything...

you stopped experiencing your life and started managing it.

Not because you did something wrong. Because there simply wasn't any room left to do anything else.

This is how it happens...

No one loses themselves all at once. It's quieter than that.

It's answering one more email at lunch. It's a podcast in your ears instead of your own thoughts. It's a vacation where your body is on the beach and your mind is still at home, still managing, still one step ahead of itself.

You get so good at running your own life that you stop noticing you're in it.

What the weekend actually feels like...

I'm not going to hand you a rigid itinerary because that is not what this is. We will move through this together in real time, fluid and attuned to YOU. But here is the shape of it.

🍽️ FRIDAY EVENING...

you arrive and there's nothing to do but exhale. We'll tune in together around the Circle, and then migrate to the kitchen. I'll be cooking something delicious (I ran a farmers market for five years, so we're doing this right), and we'll eat slow, by candlelight, with questions that will create an instant bond with the other women.

🔥 SATURDAY ALL DAY...

this is where the magic begins to unfold. Gentle movement. Breathwork. Meditation. Art. Room to create, to reflect, and let your wisdom bubble up to the surface. This day is about bringing your senses back online to help you drop into the clarity you are after. We'll close the day around the fire pit for a heart centered fire ceremony.

🧘‍♀️ SUNDAY MORNING...

we come back together to close it out slow, unhurried, over coffee. We connect back in with your breath and your body, and you'll head home by early afternoon, not the same way you arrived.

Why my home?

Nine years ago, right after my divorce, I bought a 1920s house in East Nashville with exposed brick and ceilings tall enough to let the light all the way in.

I didn't know it yet, but I was building myself a cocoon.

I filled it with plants until the whole place breathed like something alive. I picked out art that was a little funky and a lot beautiful, because I wanted a home that finally looked like the truest version of me. Not the version I'd been performing. And then I started filling it with people. Breathwork circles on the living room floor. Masterminds around my table. Years of one-on-one intensives in the very chair you'd sit in.

Every woman who has walked through that door has left something behind in these walls. I swear you can feel it the second you step inside.

"Being with Mary is like holding up a mirror to who I am and who I am meant to be. It's a powerful experience... I would highly recommend Mary as a guide for others seeking clarity and a renewed sense of purpose."

— Rebecca Hay

This is not a staged, magazine-perfect house you're afraid to touch. It's lived-in. Blankets thrown over the arm of the couch, candles burned down past halfway, art hung because I loved it, not because it matched the room. And it's also, unapologetically, beautiful.

I think beauty is medicine. I've spent nine years steeping this house in it on purpose, choosing every plant and candle and color, so that the second you walk through my door, your body can start to soften before I've even said hello.

Last year I redid the backyard after a trip to Greece that cracked something open in me, a retreat built entirely around the senses, around coming back into my body and my own femininity and the natural world. Now there's Mediterranean stone under your feet and a wood-burning fire pit where we'll do our releasing ceremony, and everything I planted last spring is finally blooming.

The table we'll gather around is old English barnwood that's been in my family for decades.

It seats twelve, so it's one long communal table, nobody tucked off in a corner, nobody out of reach of the conversation. Some of the most honest, unraveling, healing conversations of my life have happened at that table, long after the plates were cleared, candle wax dripping down, somebody still talking.

I want you to actually taste what I put in front of you.

I'll pour something local into your glass and ask you to notice it before you drink it. Let the wine coat your tongue. Swirl it around. See if you can find the blackberry in it, or that edge of oak underneath. That's not a wine lesson. That's a nervous system lesson. That's what it feels like to be fully present in your own body for five straight seconds, maybe for the first time in months.

I ran a farmers market in Nashville for five years, so the menu will be built around whatever September actually gives us. Char on the vegetables. Herbs that taste nothing like the ones going wilted in your fridge at home. Bread that tastes like something when you're not scrolling between bites. I'll be the one in the kitchen, and there is something about being cooked for, actually cared for in that specific way, that softens a woman faster than almost anything else I know.

"It was a top-notch experience in every way possible, from the sessions to the food to the location. Everything was put together so thoughtfully and intentionally to make me feel safe, seen, and known as soon as I walked in the door."

— Jessica Bannister

I'm a Southern woman, and I really believe I was put on this earth to love on people. To welcome them in, feed them, notice what they need before they say it out loud, and make sure they leave feeling cared for down to their bones. That's what this weekend is. Belonging, comfort, and beauty, all working on you at the same time.

WHY "ALIVENESS?"

Here's what nobody told me for a long time: clarity doesn't start in your head. It starts in your body.

When you slow down enough, your senses come back online. Food tastes like something again. You notice the light. Your breath drops out of your chest and down into your belly. And somewhere in all of that quiet...

You start hearing yourself again.

Not the loud voice that tells you what you should be doing. The other one. The quiet one that's been waiting underneath all the noise this whole time, patient, a little tired of being ignored, still exactly right.

That voice isn't a personal development concept to me. It's the whole reason I built this life. And it's what I want to hand back to you.

You're not the only one who is tired.

Here's the part I don't think gets said enough: healing doesn't only happen in solitude. Some of it only happens in a room full of other women who are also tired of holding it all together.

There's a particular kind of exhale that happens when you realize you're not the only one. When the woman next to you says the exact thing you've never said out loud, and you both just look at each other for a second. That's not small talk. That's sisterhood, and it's healing in a way that no amount of journaling alone in your own house will ever quite reach.

For three days you'll be surrounded by seven other women doing their absolute best, all reaching for the same thing you are. Rest. Clarity. A reason to exhale. We'll cook together, sit around the fire together, tell the truth around that big wooden table together.

And here's what tends to surprise people. You start hearing your own voice again, not despite the company, but because of it. There's something about being deeply seen by other women that makes it finally safe to hear yourself.

"The retreat provided me a magical and safe space with other fabulous women to regain alignment to my true self. I left with a transformation and confidence in who I am."

"The biggest surprise was realizing how much wisdom I already have inside me. I spent so much time believing I needed to think harder or find the right answer externally... Working with Mary gave me a much deeper understanding of myself, helped me trust myself, and gave me practical tools I'll carry with me for the rest of my life"

What I hope you leave with...

Not a notebook full of action items. Something quieter than that.

Something even more powerful.

I hope your mind feels less loud. I hope you trust yourself more than you did on Friday. I hope you remember, in your body, what it feels like to belong somewhere without performing for it.

Mostly, I hope you feel like yourself again. The version of you that existed before you got so good at managing everything.

This is for you if...

You're carrying a lot, and you rarely give yourself permission to put it down.
You catch yourself thinking, "I don't even know what I want anymore."
Life looks good on paper, and you still feel disconnected from it.
You're craving real conversation, not small talk. Belonging, not networking.
You know you need clarity, but you can't hear yourself over the noise of your own life.
You're ready to stop managing your life and start living inside it again.