You Can't Build Wealth From a Body Still Stuck in Survival Mode: The Real Story Behind a Retreat

Every retreat season, I find myself in two places at once: Smiling and completely buried in details. Someone will see the photos - the beach, the dinners, the laughter - and say, "this looks so beautiful." And they're right. But what they see only scratches the surface . They have no idea what it took to get there, or what almost didn't make it there in time.

Yesterday I was on a call about accommodations and menus, making sure there's something for everyone. Today it's transportation logistics and a backup plan for the backup plan. There were a hundred small texts. A few moments of "okay, what am I forgetting." The kind of stuff nobody puts in the highlight reel. And while I'm managing a ton, none of it has ever been just me. It's a whole group of women holding this up - in the Virgin Islands, Florida, South Carolina, Kenya, and Asia - each one doing her part so that, by the time a woman lands or arrives, she already feels cared for.

I wanted to write this not just as a behind-the-scenes peek, but as a real answer to a question I get a lot: is a retreat actually worth it? So let's talk about what actually goes into one and why, despite how much it takes, I think it's one of the most important investments a woman can make in herself.

The Part Nobody Sees

A retreat that feels effortless for three days (sometimes 7-10) is usually the result of months of invisible work. Before anyone packs a bag, someone has already:

• Visited the venue in person, because how a space feels matters as much as how it photographs

• Negotiated contracts and reviewed liability and insurance details

• Built (and rebuilt) a budget that accounts for everything from welcome gifts to emergency transportation

• Tested menus to make sure dietary needs are covered without anyone feeling like an afterthought

• Coordinated flights, ground transportation, and excursions across multiple time zones

• Interview and secure speakers, partners and facilitators

• Schedule the posts, share the posts, boost the posts

• Create the event, set up the LIVE, confirm the partners

• Review the menu, contact the businesses, walk through the logistics

• Organize the team, meet with the team, follow up with the team

• Review the waitlist, set up the survey, adjust the agenda

• Built a backup plan and then a backup plan for that backup plan...

  
  

Are you picking up what I'm putting down? None of this is a complaint - it's actually the whole point: A retreat is supposed to be the one place where someone else has already thought of the thing you didn't even know you'd need.

Why It's Worth It — The Numbers Behind the Feeling

It's easy to think of a retreat as a luxury, something extra. But the data tells a different story about how people are actually prioritizing this kind of travel right now. In its 2026 State of Retreats report, BookRetreats.com found that retreats have become the top planned wellness spend among U.S. travelers in 2026, ranking ahead of spa and wellness treatments, supplements, gym memberships, and even therapy sessions. Nearly half of people surveyed said a retreat was where they planned to put their next wellness dollars.

That's not a small shift. People aren't just adding retreats to their wishlist - they're treating intentional time away as a real, prioritized form of self-care, on par with or above things we usually think of as "essential." And the people who go say it actually delivers. The same report found that more than half of retreat-goers said the experience improved their mental and emotional wellbeing, while about a third pointed to ongoing physical health benefits like better sleep and reduced pain. A meaningful share also said a retreat gave them the clarity or support to make a real life change afterward.

This isn't a niche industry, either. The global wellness tourism market was valued at roughly $990 billion in 2025 and is projected to climb toward $1.09 trillion in 2026, with the wellness retreat segment specifically expected to grow from about $248 billion in 2025 to over $270 billion in 2026. People all over the world are voting with their time and money for the same thing: space to step away and come back to themselves. And women, specifically, are leading that shift. Industry data shows women account for roughly two-thirds of all wellness retreat bookings worldwide - which tells me we already intuitively understand something that's hard to say out loud: we are tired of being the ones everyone else leans on, and we're starting to claim space to be poured into instead.

Rest as a Reset, Not a Reward

There's a deeper layer to this conversation I don't want to skip, because it's the one closest to my heart. For a lot of women - especially women of color, women in underserved and marginalized communities, women in rural areas and women in places like the U.S. Virgin Islands that have carried generations of economic hardship - rest has never been positioned as something we're allowed to need. It's been positioned as something we earn after every other obligation is met, which for many of us means it never actually arrives.

Research on burnout among women of color points to something a lot of us already know in our bodies: many of us were raised to treat strength as survival, to put everyone else first, and to keep functioning no matter what we're carrying. Over time, that pattern of constant output without recovery is linked to chronic stress, and chronic stress doesn't stay abstract - it shows up as anxiety, high blood pressure, disrupted sleep, and a body that's perpetually braced for the next thing.

When you've spent years, or generations, in that kind of survival mode, your mind naturally narrows in on what's immediate: the bills due in two weeks, the next obligation, the next fire to put out. That's not a character flaw - it's what survival mode is designed to do. But it also means that anything outside of immediate need can start to look like indulgence, even when it isn't. A retreat can get filed in the same mental category as something frivolous, while a depreciating car payment or another round of overtime gets filed as "responsible," simply because one is familiar and the other isn't.

I think that's worth naming out loud, because it's not really about the price tag. It's about whether we believe we're allowed to take up space outside of survival at all. The gentle confronation is this: You cannot think your way out of a scarcity mindset while your nervous system is still operating like it's under threat. Rest isn't what happens after you've earned abundance - for a lot of us, it's the thing that has to happen first, so that abundance becomes something we can even recognize when it shows up. A retreat, at its core, is intentional space for the nervous system to finally come down off high alert. That's not a luxury. That's the groundwork.

So when I think about why this work matters most for women who look like me and the women in my own family - women of color and women from communities that have been historically under-resourced - it's because reclaiming rest is part of reclaiming the belief that we are worth investing in, period. Not after the bills are paid. Not after everyone else is taken care of. NOW.

This is also where wellness and wealth actually meet, because they're not two separate conversations. We talk a lot about building wealth - generational wealth, financial literacy, breaking cycles - and all of that matters. But wealth was never only a math problem. Before we can build a wealthy life, we have a mindset to build first: the belief that we are deserving of abundance, not just responsible for survival.

A scarcity mindset doesn't just affect how we spend. It affects what we believe we're allowed to receive. If the only investments that feel justifiable are the ones tied to obligation - the bills, the next paycheck, the things that keep the wheels turning for everyone else - then abundance will always feel slightly out of reach, no matter how much money is actually in the account. You can't build a wealthy life from a mindset that still operates like it's in danger. The body and the bank account end up speaking two different languages.

That's why I see something like a retreat as part of the wealth conversation, not separate from it. Stepping into intentional space, even for a few days, is practice - practice receiving instead of only giving, practice believing you're worth being poured into, practice letting your nervous system experience what abundance actually feels like before you're asked to build a life around it. You can't recondition a mindset from poverty to abundance while you're still operating purely in survival. Rest is where that reconditioning actually begins.

"But Is It Worth Four Figures?

I want to address this directly, because I think it's the actual question underneath a lot of hesitation. When someone sees a price tag in that range, it's natural to compare it to a flight and a hotel and think, "that seems like a lot for a few days." But a retreat price was never built the way a personal vacation budget is built. It's built the way a transformational experience is built because, behind the scenes, that's exactly what it is.

Across the retreat industry, venue and accommodations alone typically eat up something like a third to nearly half of the total budget. Food and beverage is usually another 20–30%. Then there's transportation, activities and excursions, facilitator and staff time, insurance, contingency funds for the things nobody can predict, and the months of coordination that happen long before anyone checks in. None of that is optional, and very little of it is visible in a photo.

This is also why pricing a retreat responsibly isn't the same as pricing it cheaply or pricing an event or seminar for that matter. A retreat priced too low isn't a deal - it's a sign that something in that list got cut, usually the safety net: the contingency fund, the staff-to-guest ratio, the quality of food, or the host's own ability to keep showing up well after the first group session ends. A sustainable price isn't about extracting more from guests. It's about making sure the experience can actually hold what it promises to hold.

So when I think about the cost, I think about it as two investments happening at once. There's the financial risk on the side hosting it - the deposits paid months in advance, the contracts signed without knowing exactly who will fill every seat, the work that happens whether or not it ever turns a profit. And there's the investment on your side - the version of you who finally gets three days where you don't have to plan, manage, or hold anything for anyone else.

That second kind of investment is harder to put a number on. But it's the one I think about most, because it's the one I get to watch pay off in real time.

Why I Keep Doing This Work

People ask me sometimes why I keep doing this, knowing how much it takes - the contracts, the spreadsheets, the late nights, the hundred small fires before anyone ever sees a single photo (shoot - I ask myself the same question sometimes too! lol).

The answer is simple. I know what it's like to be the one everyone leans on. And I've watched what happens when a woman finally gets to set that down, even for a few days. She laughs differently. She sleeps better. She remembers things about herself she'd forgotten were there. That's not a soft, vague benefit. It's measurable - in the data, and in the women I watch walk out my retreats a little lighter and more liberated than when they arrived.

A Question Worth Sitting With...

So if you're reading this and you're someone who's used to being the one holding everything together for everyone else - I want to ask you something:

When was the last time you actually invested in yourself like that?

Not a candle. Not crossing "self-care" off a list at 11pm between everything else. I mean really stepping out of your routine long enough to hear your own thoughts again.

You don't have to figure out when or how right now. Just sit with the question because behind every photo of a retreat is months of someone making sure that, for once, you don't have to plan a single thing. And the research backs up what I've seen with my own eyes: that kind of space isn't indulgent. It's one of the most direct paths back to yourself.

If any part of this stirred something in you or if you recognized yourself in the survival mode, the justified car payment, the retreat you've talked yourself out of more than once...I want to personally invite you to join us for Well A.N.D. Wealthy Girlfriendism Retreat on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands this summer .

This retreat was built for exactly this moment: for the woman who's ready to stop treating rest as something she earns after everything else is handled, and start treating it as the foundation everything else gets built on. We'll spend our days together doing the inner work of reconditioning the mind toward abundance, and our evenings simply being held, cared for, poured into, with every detail already taken care of before you ever arrive.

You don't have to have it all figured out to come. You just have to be willing to believe, even for a few days, that you're worth preparing for.

Come be well. Come be wealthy. Come be reminded of who you were always meant to become...xoxo

References

BookRetreats.com. (2026). The state of retreats 2026 report. https://bookretreats.com/blog/the-state-of-retreats-report/

GitNux. (2026). Wellness retreats industry statistics: Market data report 2026. https://gitnux.org/wellness-retreats-industry-statistics/

Grand View Research. (2026). Wellness tourism market size & share report, 2026–2035.https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/wellness-tourism-market

Naboo. (2026). Corporate retreat budget: A complete cost guide for 2026. https://www.naboo.app/en-us/blog/corporate-retreat-budget

New Growth Behavioral Health. (2025). Reclaiming rest: How burnout is impacting women of color.https://www.newgrowthbehavioralhealth.org/post/reclaiming-rest-how-burnout-is-impacting-women-of-color

Offsite.com. (2026). Understanding retreat costs: A practical guide for effective budgeting.https://www.offsite.com/blog/retreat-cost

The Business Research Company. (2026). Wellness retreat market report 2026. Research and Markets. https://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/6024479/wellness-retreat-market-report

About The Author: Dr. Khnuma Simmonds - aka ‘Your Girlfriend, Dr. K’ is the Founder and SHE-EO of Girlfriendism International, LLC - a global love and liberation movement created to elevate women’s wellness through culture, creativity, consciousness and a community of ‘girlfriends’. With 20+ years of experience in entrepreneurship, nonprofit leadership, mental health counseling, the arts and advocacy for survivors of domestic and sexual violence, she creates safe spaces for women to connect, heal, and thrive through Girlfriendism retreats, wellness memberships, and travel experiences. She is also the Founding Executive Director of Girlfriendism’s non-profit: H.O.P.E. Incorporated, a best-selling author and international speaker.