From Burnout to Building Gathering Roots: My Story
I didn't start Gathering Roots because I wanted to host retreats.
I started it because I reached a point where I could no longer ignore the disconnect between how my life looked and how it felt.
On paper, things were working. I had a solid career, credibility, and a trajectory that made sense. I was capable, dependable, and good at navigating complex systems. I knew how to lead, how to perform, how to push through.
Before: Leading from performance, disconnected from my body.
What I didn't know how to do was say "enough" without guilt. Or listen to my body. Or tell the difference between my own ambitions and what society had trained me to believe was success.
My Journey Through Corporate Burnout
Burnout didn't arrive as a dramatic breakdown. It showed up consistently, week after week—as panic attacks, disorientation, and a persistent sense that I was living slightly outside myself. I could do my job, but I felt increasingly disconnected from why I was doing it, and what it was asking of me in the process.
I was functioning, but I wasn't present. I was successful, but I wasn't alive.
The Moment Everything Changed
Gathering Roots came from that moment of honesty.
Finding my roots
During an ancestral ceremony in Mexico.
Not from a desire to escape responsibility, but from a deeper question I couldn't unsee anymore: What does a sustainable, embodied life actually look like—especially for women who have spent years being strong, capable, and carrying the weight of unrealistic expectations?
This work is based on the understanding that burnout is not just about overwork. It's about nervous systems that have learned to equate safety with productivity. It's about identities shaped around being useful, reliable, and high-functioning often at the expense of truth, joy, and intuition.
Why Women Need Embodied Leadership Now
The systems are breaking. The old models of leadership of push harder, sacrifice more, perform better are no longer sustainable. And women are feeling it first.
We've been taught to override our bodies, ignore our instincts, and keep going no matter what. But that approach doesn't just lead to burnout, it disconnects us from the very power we need to lead through what's coming.
Embodied leadership means leading from truth, not performance. From presence, not productivity. From your body's wisdom, not society's expectations.
When we unearth our individual patterns and rewire our beliefs, we create a ripple in the collective and give birth to a conscious future.
What Gathering Roots Offers: Retreats, Ceremony, and Community
Gathering Roots exists to create space for women to slow down without fear To examine what they've been carrying. To reconnect with their bodies, their inner authority, and the parts of themselves that were sidelined in the name of success.
This isn't about fixing anyone. It's about remembering who you are.
Through transformational retreats in Oaxaca, Mexico, ancestral healing practices, sacred plant medicine ceremonies, and nervous system work, we support women in becoming rooted, certain, and unshakeable.
What I'm Building Now
What I'm building now goes beyond retreats.
Gathering Roots is becoming a broader body of work. It is one that supports women through burnout, transition, leadership shifts, and reinvention in a world that's changing faster than most of us have been taught to adapt.
The throughline is simple: understanding before expansion. Truth before performance. Belonging before achievement.
If This Resonates, Join Us
If you've read this far and it resonates, I hope to meet you at our upcoming retreat.