Awakening Your Awareness Through the Five Senses
Presenting Awakening Your Awareness Through the Five Senses - Powered by BEI
What happens when ancient wisdom traditions meet contemplative practices geared for every-day life…We are beckoned back into our body through embodied practices, awakening awareness through the five senses.
Through…
- Sound, we align our inner voice with how we authentically express ourselves
- Taste and smell, we open doorways to nourishing experiences and precious memories
- Touch, we reignite our inner flame (La Chispa), reconnecting to ourselves and self-love
- What we behold, we open the mind’s eye and experience its qualities and expressions
- Intentional living, we integrate wisdom practices to bring into our daily lives
Start Your Path Towards Awakening Your Awareness
April 25 – March 2, 2026 | Santa Fe, New Mexico (Casa de Sueños)
Registration Closes April 23, 2026
The Gap We're Closing
Here’s what you already know: You go on retreat. You have breakthroughs. You return home refreshed and inspired having had an incredible experience. And by the following day, you’re wondering if it was all just a beautiful dream.
Here’s the catch. Most retreats create opening without necessarily offering you integration and practices to take back into the various contexts you navigate at home. They give you peak experiences without a bridge back to your actual life— obligations the one with a never-ending stream of deadlines, work demands, family commitments, and to the people and projects in your life.
The Experience: Five Days, Five Senses
A 5-day experiential retreat awakening the five senses as gateways to mindbody awareness, embodiment, and integrating wisdom practices into modern life. Gain insight into where you’re operating on autopilot and where you can consciously navigate differently.
Each day explores each of the five senses as a portal.
Embodiment:
- Using all five senses as gateways to embodied presence
- Vocal expression as a tool for authentic expression
- Moving from heady approaches to feeling-based experience
Wisdom Practices for Modern Life:
- Grounding practices and daily rituals
- Learning to communicate with alignment and radical acceptance
- Building sustainable practices rather than temporary highs
Integration Strategy:
- Focus on “how does this work in my daily life?”
- Calibrate internal rhythms and create every-day rituals
- Build practical bridges between retreat insights and real-world application
- Learn how to gain clarity in what you want, so you can navigate challenging circumstances with trust
Time Commitment & Investment
Daily Retreat Flow
- Morning practices weaving meditation, voice work, and movement
- Culinary workshops connecting food to each day’s sensory theme
- Experiential outings into Santa Fe (hot springs, labyrinths, art galleries, and sacred spaces)
- Spacious integration time—because your nervous system needs breathing room
- Evening offerings from intimate dinners to solo reflection
- Practices you’ll put to use when you return to your life
We won‘t hand you a schedule broken down by the hour. We’ll tell you what you’ll experience—voice work, embodiment practices, nourishment as ceremony—but we’re leaving room for what wants to emerge. Because one thing we know: women who lead are often over-scheduled. This is practice in being present without controlling every moment.
Practical Details
Dates: February 1-7, 2026
Arrival: Saturday evening, February 1 (Opening Circle)
Departure: Saturday morning, February 7 (After Closing Circle)
Location: Santa Fe, New Mexico
Group Size: Maximum 10 women (small group by design)
What's Included
- All facilitated sessions and offerings
- Light Breakfast daily + 1 Shared Meal each day (Lunch or Dinner) at the retreat venue, Casa de Sueños
- Access to retreat venue kitchen, common dining and gathering areas, labyrinths, and surrounding nature
- Pre-retreat preparation and retreat materials
What's Not Included
- Travel to/from Santa Fe
- Accommodation (list of nearby Airbnb recommendations provided)
- The other main meal of the day, lunch/dinner
- Personal transportation to/from retreat venue (carpooling encouraged and facilitated)
- Activities & Outings in the Santa Fe area (e.g., meals shared offsite, hot springs, art galleries, etc.)
Registration Closes April 23, 2026
Introductory Pricing: $1000 USD (20% off) until 12/31/2025
Regular Retreat Price: $1250
Meet your Retreat Guides
S. Michele Nevarez
Michele Nevarez brings 25+ years of executive leadership and 32+ years of Tibetan Buddhist practice to her pioneering work in Embodied Emotional Intelligence. Author of Beyond Emotional Intelligence: A Guide to Accessing Your Full Potential and Founder of Beyond EI, a coaching and training firm, she translates ancient contemplative wisdom into science-based practices introducing people to what they have direct agency over within themselves.
Michele Nevarez, SPHR has spent 25+ years in organizational development and senior leadership roles working with Fortune 500 companies in investment management, healthcare, manufacturing, and management consulting. A founding member of Rangjung Yeshe Institute, a university based in Nepal, Michele has served on the Boards of Directors of non-profit organizations ever since and has been practicing Tibetan Buddhism for the last 32 years.
Michele founded Beyond EI, a coaching and training firm, to address what traditional approaches to leadership and emotional intelligence often miss, the integration of embodied practices with an approach towards habit change that creates opportunities to put theory into practice. As an author and thought leader, she has pioneered frameworks to help leaders understand the hidden mechanics of perception—where they’re on autopilot and where they have emotional agency.
Her work includes the Awareness Matrix, the Mindbody Map, and the 12 Self-Discoveries, methods for practicing awareness and sense-making. Michele has spent her life attempting to bridge ancient wisdom practices with science and leadership theory to provide secular yet powerful ways for people to embody their own wisdom and follow their inner guidance system.
Lidia Lins
Lidia Lins is a Brazilian artist and voice activation coach based in Portugal. With a PhD background in science, she bridges empirical knowledge with ancient healing through her “medicine music” and signature voice work that helps women communicate authentically from the heart.
Lidia Lins is a Brazilian Voice Activation Coach & Singer and Songwriter currently living in Lisbon, Portugal. With a background in sciences, therapy and yoga, Lidia found a way to express her most genuine emotions and tap into her intuition through the power of activating her true voice. Currently, Lidia works in two fronts: she has merged her therapy and singing skills into her own version of voice activation, a powerful tool to bring us closer to our authentic selves and improve how we communicate with others, and she delivers powerful medicine music concerts with the intention to bring us back to our hearts and our most authentic selves. She believes in the power of the voice & sound as a healing tool.
Lidia has been singing since the age of 12, but because of societal expectations, she thought that pursuing a career as a scientist would make her more successful. She worked as a scientist for 15 years, and it was only when she embarked on a spiritual journey with sacred plants, that she discovered that her purpose was somewhere else: she wanted to bring more healing to the World through her music and voice work.
In 2022, Lidia started coaching others into exploring their voices and in 2024 she consolidated her 12-week program: “Your Naked Voice Mentorship”.
Lidia has also published her first album in 2023 called “Libertad” (freedom), and since then she has been performing in several national and international festivals and retreats.
Florencia Ramirez
Florencia Ramirez is author of Eat Less Water and creator of Casa de Sueños writing retreats. Her Santa Fe sanctuary on 5 acres offers the perfect container for transformation—complete with labyrinths, an adobe altar space, and farm-to-table nourishment.
Florencia Ramirez is the author of Eat Less Water and the forthcoming The Kitchen Activist (Red Hen Press, Fall 2026), books that reveal how the choices we make in our kitchens ripple outward to regenerate the planet. She is the host of The Kitchen Activist Podcast, where she invites listeners to reconnect food, water, and joy through everyday acts of sustainability.
As the founder and director of the Pesticide-Free Soil Project, Florencia leads community efforts to transform school food systems and advocate for policies that protect children and ecosystems from harmful pesticide exposure—especially in communities near schools and farmland.
For more than a decade, Florencia has also guided women through Casa de Sueños Writers’ Retreat in Santa Fe, helping them uncover their voices through embodied writing practices. Her five-acre property—with two labyrinths, an adobe altar room, and spaces designed for reflection—is both sanctuary and catalyst, a place where women shed who they thought they should be and step into who they truly are.
Questions?
We live this work. Michele’s journey as a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, mother of four, and executive to entrepreneur, walking the path of Embodied Emotional Intelligence. Lidia‘s leap from research scientist to sacred musician & voice activation coach. Florencia merges her paths as an educator, activist, and writer to inspire change in her community and beyond. We know transformation isn’t linear, comfortable, or predictable. We’ve each embarked upon the path of the unexpected, turning towards fear, and giving it a look up and down before continuing on the journey.
We honor your intelligence. You’re not here for watered-down spirituality or corporate jargon dressed up as wisdom. Michele brings embodied practices grounded in science and a translation of the ancient wisdom tradition she has practiced for over 30 years. Lidia bridges scientific rigor, sound, and somatic traditions. Florencia connects sustainable living practices, bringing our agency back into our kitchens and the food we prepare each day. You’ll leave with practices you can explain and implement.
We’ve built in spaciousness. Silent moments integrated into each day. Time to rest when you need it. Permission to skip an offering if solo reflection serves you better. Because we know something crucial: being present costs energy. Developing new awareness requires integration time. As women who lead, this is your invitation to do less, not more.
The work extends beyond the weekend. You’re not escaping your life—you‘re practicing new ways of being while living your life. Staying off-site is intentional. Venturing out into Santa Fe is part of integrating what you’re discovering in yourself. You’ll learn to carry these practices into “regular life” while still held by the container we’re creating together.
We’re addressing a real gap. People go to retreats, or sacred ceremonies, have profound heart openings, then return to their apartments completely unprepared for how to live with an open heart in their actual context. This retreat provides the footpath and the bridge—how to stay open in the coffee shop conversation, the difficult meeting, the moment your teenager pushes every button you have.
- You’re accomplished but recognize that success without embodiment feels hollow
- You’ve done the therapy, read the books, attended workshops—and you’re ready to integrate these insights into daily life
- You’re willing to be uncomfortable in service of your own growth—facing and turning towards
- You understand that caring for yourself isn’t selfish, it’s how you sustain your impact
- You’re tired of insights that evaporate and ready for practices that stick
- You want methods that work in life, not just on meditation cushions
Questions?
