Luminous In Taos
Sunday July 21—Saturday July 27, 2024
come home to yourself—mind, body, and soul
you are a treasure
your body is a miracle
the world is your oyster
this life is a gift
Ready to feel these truths on your skin, through your veins, in your bones?
Longing to live as if this life really is your One Wild & Precious?
Then join us, in the Land of Enchantment, for Luminous in Taos.
WHAT IS LUMINOUS IN TAOS?
Well: it’s beyond a retreat.
It’s an awakening. A re-membering. A homecoming.
LIT is an experience that will remind you who you really are.
I found myself again ... This retreat provided the space and support to figure out what I have been missing, where I have disconnected from myself and what really matters to me...
It gave me tools to take with me to navigate the changes that I wish and need to make. It restored my joie de vivre. I am so grateful for the safe, loving, supportive environment.
—
Heather Downey
WHY ATTEND?
Because you are made of stardust, and that’s easy to forget when you’re hustling through everyday life.
Because sometimes, to remember who you really are and clarify what you really want,
you need to feel the earth beneath your feet, and open to the skies above your head.
Because you are ready to be more than comfortable in your skin.
You want to illuminate every room you walk into,
magnetize the people, places, and opportunities that support your next evolution,
and shine with confidence that repels any and everything that would try to hold you back.
Because you long for an extraordinary pause of busyness-as-usual:
and are so hungry to hear yourself think,
to stop giving giving giving giving giving, and open instead to receive, to nurture your blossoming self-trust,
and to enjoy ample, delicious, deeply restorative time with your whole self.
REMEMBER WHO YOU REALLY ARE
What happens at a LIT retreat?
In a word? Magic.
In many words:
Deep self-honoring and courageous self-exploration.
Soul-feeding connection with inspiring, like-hearted people.
Rest. Whole-self expression. Adventure. Life-changing conversations. Art.
Extraordinary coaching.
All these ingredients alchemize into an experience that changes everything:
how you see yourself
how you treat yourself
how you move through the world.
This retreat has given me permission to be who I am, to scream it out loud and to own who I am and who I'm becoming.
To walk in my glory and shine my light bright and I am forever grateful for that.
—
Terri Donohue
HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE LIT?
LIT 2024: THE ART OF WHOLE SELF LOVE
Luminous in Taos is always about radiant whole-self-expression,
body, heart, and soul.
This year’s LIT ignites a bright, bold, transformative fire
in how you love, listen to, and look at your body.
You’ll deeply embody through exhilarating and nourishing experiences
(hot springs, massage, hikes, sound baths, fresh air, desert sun, and the best home-cooking you’ve ever had)
Through daily coaching, you’ll connect with your intuition & body wisdom,
and build the kind of whole-self-honoring mindset that makes you electric, luminous, magnetic.
Also, you’ll sit for a sweet, intimate 1:1 portrait session with fierce & gentle artist Ashley Trabue.
They’ll capture your beauty, wholeness, and energetic signature in a figure drawing,
and you’ll experience the liberating, emboldening, healing power of Showing Yourself.
MEET YOUR HOSTS
Ashley Trabue (she/they) is a queer, multi-disciplinary artist and educator raised in Southern Kentucky and based in Portland, Maine.
They’re committed to co-creating a more vibrant, nurturing world through art & creativity.
Natalie Miller (she/her) is a feminist mindset coach who helps changemakers get fully grounded in their power.
She coaches entrepreneurs, artists, and thought leaders to stop pushing themselves, and instead learn to trust their way into sustainable, potent, whole-self-honoring generativity.
BECOME THE WORK OF ART YOU ARE
As the retreat works its magic, you’ll begin, as Mary Oliver puts it,
to let the soft creature of your body love what it loves.
From this place of whole-self-love, you’ll be celebrated through a unique-as-you work of art.
Yes, that’s right.
Your retreat includes a 1:1 figure drawing session with Ashley Trabue, an internationally-collected artist and creator of Shameless, a community art project dedicated to helping women & non-binary folx experience their bodies in a whole new way.
WHY ARE WE GETTING NAKED?
First of all: of course you don’t have to be naked for your portrait, if you don’t want to be.
The foundational and transformational ethos of LIT is You Can Always Do WhatEVER You Want
However.
We do hope you will take advantage of the opportunity to Show Yourself, in all your luminosity.
We have discovered that the key to the most powerful glow ups is loving and celebrating ALL our parts:
especially the ones our dominating culture tells us to hide
to mask
to control
to make smoother, lighter, less noticeable
to plump or to snatch
or even to excise all together.
The parts they want us to hide are psychosocial aspects of our identity:
our brazen parts, our angry parts, our desirous parts, our self-centered parts, our needy parts.
They’re also aspects of our physical embodiment:
our thighs, our bellies, our skin, our breasts, our faces, our flesh.
We’re told that our most pleasing selves are the most lovable.
That beauty is just a few workouts, purchases, injections, nips, tucks, and/or Whole 30’s away.
But we find, again and again, that this just isn’t true.
We learn that the dominating standard of beauty is cruel and unusual, violent and unreachable.
We discover that to shrink and fold into our supposedly-most-pleasing selves is to suffocate.
So.
If what we want is to feel luminous, vivacious, supported, and bone-deep beautiful,
we need an immersion in inspiration, vivacity, support, and earthly beauty.
If what we want is to make the most of our One Wild & Precious,
we to rekindle our wildness, and honor our preciousness, now.
Not someday. NOW.
Your portrait session - however naked you are for it - is exactly that.
“It's hard to put into words what it feels like as a person in recovery from an eating disorder to have a custom painted portrait of myself in my home. It is an absolute treasure and brings me incredible joy every time I look at it.
Ashley creates a unique and empowering experience throughout the art-creating and buying process.
Anyone who gets the privilege of working with her to create a custom piece is very lucky.”
— AMILIA
"Ashley was awesome. I’m not really a person who would feel comfortable nude in front of a stranger, or coming up with my own poses, but she lead me through the whole session and I absolutely loved every single one of the paintings she did.
She did an excellent job bringing me out of my shell. I appreciated the communication prior to the session. She asked about my reasoning for doing it, and what I hoped to feel when looking at the paintings. She captured all that I hoped to feel.
Don’t think twice, book this experience now! As a bonus, you get to meet and hang out with a woman who has a free, open, and kind soul!”
— STEPHANIE
At the beginning of your portrait sitting, Ashley will explore what kind of art you want to make, and what vibes you are kindling in yourself.
You’ll establish an intention for your session, and any boundaries you’d like around the process.
You and Ashley will chat, laugh, and enjoy your favorite music as she guides you through a few personalized movements and poses.
And sketch by sketch, penstroke by brushstroke, Ashley will pull your angles, curves, beauty, and energy onto the page.
You’ll feel wholly seen, deeply celebrated, and wildly alive.
At the end of your session, you’ll choose a favorite sketch to become a finished work of art.
Ashley will take the piece back to her studio, and then ship it - finished and matted - to your doorstep,
ready to frame, hang, and remind you daily Who You Really Are.
It will be an extraordinary, exhilarating experience of life lived to its fullest.
“A woman cannot make the culture more aware by saying “change,”
but she can change her open attitude towards herself,
thereby causing devaluing projections to glance off.
She does this by taking back her body,
by not forsaking the joy of her natural body,
by not purchasing the popular illusion that happiness
is only bestowed on those of a certain configuration or age,
by not waiting or holding back to anything,
and by taking back her real life and living it full bore, all stops out.”
— DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS
ESCAPE TO REALITY
WELCOME TO MABEL’S
Taos, New Mexico is a magical place: the earth cool and steady, the sky bluer than you can imagine, the sunlit air sparkling and alive.
Nestled at the end of a quiet road near the town plaza is Mabel Dodge Luhan's house, a rambling hacienda that served as a vibrant homebase for all sorts of Creatives in the early 20th century.
Ansel Adams decided to become a photographer here. Georgia O'Keeffe made her first paintings of New Mexico. Willa Cather, D.H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley wrote; Carl Jung pondered; Martha Graham danced into the electric atmosphere.
Today, Mabel's house is an inn and retreat center that continues the tradition of bringing together people who want to be more fully expressed, personally and professionally.
This place is beyond charming: welcoming with its adobe construction and quirky interiors, and inspiring with its history and magic vibes.
There’s no place like it on earth.
Summer is gorgeous here, with bright, warm, sunny days and cool desert evenings and occasional spectacular thunderstorms passing through.
We'll spend 7 days and 6 nights at Mabel’s, soaking up the grounded, nurturing, spacious, inspiring energy of this extraordinary place.
“Mabel’s place beats anything you can imagine about it—it is simply astonishing.”
— GEORGIA O'KEEFFE
SETTLE DOWN TO WAKE UP
Our daily schedule is grounded and spacious,
designed to help you cultivate the deep self-connection that sparks profound inspiration.
We’ll commune in Mabel's cozy dining space for extraordinarily delicious, healthy, and prepared-with-love breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Each day offers you opportunities to expand and explore inside and out, either in community or by your own sweet self.
(You’re always fully welcome to opt for alone time, if that’s what you need. The best move is always the move you WANT.)
The sweet Taos plaza is an easy 7 minute walk away, with pretty streets, boutiques, and art galleries.
And Mabel’s house is made for dreaming, writing, napping, Being.
When Mabel asked people to Taos, she invited them to “Escape to Reality.”
While your LIT experience will at times feel out-of-this-world,
it will also leave you feeling alive, free, and grounded in the very real truth that YOU are the author of your life.
My daily group coaching sessions will help you hear, with crystal clarity, that small, still voice that’s been urging you in a more self-honoring direction.
Creative, right-brain-focused coaching - including visualizations, metaphor work, and SoulCollage - will help you kindle your courage, spark your creativity, and own your truth.
Like a snake shedding her skin, you will free yourself from too-small identities, gently slough away what’s no longer alive for you, and emerge more vitally connected with yourself, the earth, everything.
Ready to take the next step?
Having a full week to pour into myself with sleep, good food, no distractions, and the tea taking care of me, gave me the rest I needed to fill up my cup and be in a place where clarity became easy.
This retreat helped me gain confidence in my dreams - the ones which I secretly wrote in my journal but was scared to step out and act on.
Jennifer Battle
When I decided to sign up for LIT, I didn’t really know why or what I was doing, or if I was being a bit ummm . . . wildly impulsive. But I knew there was something inside me telling me to be there.
I met 12 amazing people, yeah including me! I feel connections in myself that had never coalesced before. I actually believe the answers are inside me, and I can trust myself. I think I was meant to learn that in coach training, but now I feel it in my fucking bones!
Gina Gatto
Luminous in Taos has made me feel like myself again. I felt supported, seen, inspired, and I’m so grateful.
The community of women that Natalie has brought together is unbelievable. It was the most uplifting group of women I have ever encountered.
Elizabeth Luck
MY RETREAT PHILOSOPHY
I say retreats are for receiving, with abundance and without inhibition.
So I give us all plenty of space, and never a packed schedule.
You have ample freedom to do and not-do whatever you like.
Ample free time.
Full encouragement to heed what’s calling you:
alone time / adventure / deep work / creative expression / sleep.
I truly believe in the power of your desires, epic and everyday.
I know for sure that your best path forward
is revealed when you do what you WANT.
I am so honored to help you radically practice this
whole-self-honoring, entire-life-altering, way of being
for an entire glorious week . . . and maybe even for the rest of your life.
BE YOUR WHOLE SELF,
IN VIVACIOUS COMPANY
My pioneering group of Taos retreaters coined a term to describe what happens in our retreats:
EnMabeling.
At her best, Mabel Dodge Luhan was a visionary badass who lived intensely and artfully, and generously invited others to do the same.
In this retreat, you too will EnMabel: become more and more confident in both your generosity and your self-assertion.
Throughout the week, we'll endeavor to do what Mabel's guests have done for more than 100 years: become more fully and audaciously self-expressed, in intentional community.
It’s life changing. It's life altering. It's life giving. It wakes you up to yourself. You know, a lot of us are doing our own personal development, we're doing this, we're doing that, but we're doing it one-on-one or we're doing it solo.
It's really different getting to connect with people and their insight and wisdom . . . it’s like a big ass pot of confidence and love and realness.
Monique Floyd
I have gained clarity that I have been seeking for . . . years.
It has been gentle, profound, supportive, and revitalizing. I do not say this lightly.
Holland Colvin
There's something about Natalie that just brings about ease and self-trust in myself. It's just, it's incredible. It’s transformational, really.
I go to a lot of things, but this is the first time that I think I have felt so incredibly vulnerable and safe to be vulnerable with a group of women that I've pretty much just met.
Jelisha Gatling
WHEN YOU COME HOME
Maybe you read that and thought, “Ah, the post-retreat, when I get home from Mabel’s.”
But I’m actually talking about when you home to YOU.
My 6 years of leading retreats to Mabel’s shows me that’s what happens at LIT:
you rekindle your dreams and feed your hungers and own your unspoken truths,
and you let all this lead you back to yourself.
You cannot, any longer, pinch and squeeze yourself into a too-small life.
With clarity, you’ll make the decisions you’ve been agonizing over.
With courage, you’ll take the steps you’ve been pussyfooting around.
And with surprising ease, you’ll create lives, work, and relationships
that are as extraordinary and vivacious as you are.
A DAY IN LUMINOUS
Get a felt sense of Luminous In Taos through these reflective video journals.
DAY TWO
DAY THREE & FOUR
DAY FIVE
WHAT’S INCLUDED
Between Sunday, July 21 through Saturday, July 27, 2024, Luminous In Taos includes all these delightful experiences:
Single-occupancy lodging - with en suite bath - for 7 days, 6 nights at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House
All ground transportation, including to and from the airport
Every breakfast, lunch, and dinner: all fresh, delicious, and accommodating your dietary restrictions
Creative, evocative, evolutionary group coaching sessions with Natalie
Myriad embodying experiences, including hiking, yoga, and several surprises, too!
A healing, empowering portrait session with Ashley Trabue
Your finished, matted-for-framing portrait, shipped to your home
A luxurious 90min massage
A day trip to Ojo Caliente Resort & Spa
A beautiful sunrise hot-air balloon ride, if you’re feeling courageous!
Ample time and opportunity to connect with Natalie, Ashley, and fellow stellar retreaters
THE MONEY PART
PAY IN FULL
$10K
PAY IN PARTS
$1K/mo
for 10 months
A WORD ON CANCELLATIONS
Precious few spots are available in LIT, so when you claim one, it's yours.
Meaning:
Once you register and make a payment for LIT, we do not offer any refunds for any reason.
We encourage you to purchase travel insurance to protect your retreat investment.
Hey, gorgeous. For real:
if you’ve read this far,
this is a real possibility for you.
LIT is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,
a next-level experience for a next-level you.
Let’s talk about it!
BURNING QUESTIONS
-
No more than 20: up to 14 retreaters, and up to 6 support staff.
In Natalie’s experience, this is a great size for both intimacy and diversity. -
If you're a fan of Natalie and/or Ashley, you definitely share the vibes and values of the folks who are attending. Also? Luminous in Taos is designed to help you worry less about fitting in, and get more excited about shining out. We say the more YOURSELF you are, the more magnetic & confident.
-
We are happy to split your payment into installments at no extra charge. Natalie always makes Equity and Inclusion rates available - please inquire for details by writing to connect@mindwitchery.com.
-
Unless you’re driving, you’ll want to fly in and out of ABQ, which is 2.5 hours from Taos. We’ll pick you up at the airport on Sun, 7/21, and drop you off on Sat, 7/27.
-
Be our guest! Remember: this retreat is all about you doing what you WANT.
-
Do you! We will love you no matter what.
-
Do you . . . and/but it doesn’t have to be nude, and/but Natalie definitely wants to talk to you about why you’re hesitant!
-
We will all be very sad. Thank you for understanding that all payments are nonrefundable.
-
Please reach out! Email us: connect@mindwitchery.com