Letting Go
Just before our February 2024 retreat, Kelli had a mole biopsied.
It had been six years, almost to the day, since her first melanoma. That melanoma followed a prolonged period of acute stress, which played a significant role in the cancer cells forming. We weren’t aware before that experience, but there is a material amount of research linking stress and skin cancer.
Late 2023 to early 2024 was a particularly intense and stressful period for Kelli, both running her clinic and in her personal life. There were a lot of parallels to the lead-up of her melanoma in 2018.
So as Kelli and I walked down the dusty road in the heart of Playa Guiones before the February retreat, we were on edge about how this biopsy would come back.
A lot of questions swirled around our minds.
Is everything ok?
What if it isn’t?
How are we in this situation again?
It felt like life was holding up a mirror, showing us that our current path wasn’t sustainable. And when Kelli received the call that she did, in fact, have another melanoma, we couldn’t look away any longer.
Fortunately, the melanoma hadn’t spread and was fully removed with the first procedure.
But we were shook by its wake.
Deep reflection and conversation followed over the next few weeks. We felt fortunate the first two melanomas weren’t life changing. We weren’t sure that we’d have the same luck if it happened a third time, so rather than waiting for it to happen, we decided to pay attention to what life was showing us and make intentional changes to our lives with the goal of reducing day-to-day stress.
I do my best thinking with a whiteboard, so we busted out the three 3′ x 4′ whiteboards we keep in our closet. At the top of the first whiteboard, I wrote “Life Audit 2024”.
Below that, I wrote the following question:
“What would life look like if we truly put our physical, mental, and emotional health first?”
We started listing out everything that came to mind. Patterns and themes emerged. We began bucketing them and combining the ideas that felt duplicative. We translated the ideas into actions.
Seven categories emerged. They were:
- Intentional rest
- Our rhythms
- Community
- Physical living space
- Things we consume
- Household products
- Finances
Within each of those, we had a list of concrete actions to start taking that would reduce the stress that was impacting our health.
We started taking steps to address the lowest hanging fruit, when three weeks later, my brother and his wife traveled from Charlotte to visit us in LA.
Kelli has been friends with my brother’s wife before Ben and I were in the picture. Spending time with two of the people we’re closest with was the medicine we didn’t know we needed.
That Saturday morning, Ben and I were the first ones in the kitchen. We hugged good morning – typical in our family – but it was more of a prolonged embrace than usual. It’s tough to describe what I felt in that moment other than to say it still brings tears to my eyes. I was overcome with a sense of connection, of belonging, and peace that I hadn’t experienced in so long.
The feeling lingered for the rest of the weekend. When Kelli and I arrived home after dropping them off at the airport Sunday morning, the whiteboards with our “Life Audit 2024” were still leaning against the wall in our bedroom.
An undeniable truth surfaced.
If we moved to Charlotte, it would instantly solve for 80% of the ways we wanted to reduce stress in our lives. We’d be closer to both of our families, still have access to incredible nature, and be in a place with great weather.
There were a million reasons to ignore what life was showing us. We had just signed a two-year lease for Kelli’s clinic in Santa Monica. We loved living next to the beach and our lifestyle. We had great friends in the area.
It was a lot to wrap our heads around.
Fortunately, we had an 11-day trip planned to Joshua Tree two weeks later. We spent that time hiking, staring at mountains and stars, meditating, practicing yoga, painting, reading, and ultimately working through what a move to Charlotte would mean.
At the end of the trip, we FaceTimed my brother.
“Do you have any plans to leave Charlotte in the near future?”
“No. Why?”
“We’re going to move there.”
And on August 5th, 2024, we did.
That personal transition – which felt more like an upheaval – was the backdrop for two very challenging experiences of letting go that I had at the same time.
On May 11th, Kelli and I were 11 miles into a 15 mile hike when I rolled my ankle and felt a pop. It was one of those sensations where you know something bad just happened.
We had four miles left, and having seen a helicopter rescue in nearly the same spot just a couple months beforehand, there was zero question I was going to get off the mountain by myself. I went deep into the proverbial “pain cave”, and 2.5 hours later, we got back to the car.
My ankle looked like a purple softball. As I wallowed on the couch that night, my head was spinning with the implications of what just happened. “Catastrophizing” is probably the best word to describe that night.
I wouldn’t be able to work out for months. I had to run a retreat in Costa Rica in three weeks, followed by a corporate retreat four weeks after that. We were moving in 12 weeks.
I was despondent that night. Angry at my body. Pissed at the situation. We had enough going on – I didn’t want to deal with it all on crutches.
But something shifted in me the next morning. As I noticed my ankle, there was a subtle change in my perception.
It wasn’t my ankle that was injured. I was injured.
I saw my ankle as a part of me, rather than apart from me.
Up to that point, my relationship with my body had been one where I would push it till it broke, then repeat the process. Lift more weight. Run farther. Bike faster. Hike longer. Resting was an excuse to do less. The pushing became an end unto itself.
How hard could I push myself? How sore could I get? How depleted could I feel?
I saw my body as separate from me, rather than seeing it as my home and a place to listen to and take care of.
But the morning after my injury, as I looked at my ankle, I shifted my perspective. I knew that regardless of how I felt emotionally, I would spend the next few months with a physical injury.
The question was – how do I want to experience it?
Do I want to be angry at my ankle, holding tension and frustration? Or do I want to let go of that mindset, be kind to myself, grateful for what I can still do, and give myself the grace to heal?
In that decision, I found a tenderness for my body I’d never experienced before.
Every morning after meditating, I began spending time gently massaging my ankle. I felt a little crazy, but I would audibly talk to it. I would let it know that I see it, I acknowledge it, and am there to be with it. I practiced daily body scans – something I still do to this day – to check in with the rest of my body and express gratitude for the trillions of cells and billions of functions it performs every day, 99.99% of which I’m unaware of, to support my life and offer me a home to experience this existence.
I was patient with my recovery, discerning when to push and when to offer myself rest. It took 10 months for my ankle to fully heal from the tear, but I’m so grateful for every second of that experience.
Letting go of my old operating system profoundly reshaped my relationship with my body.
And at the same time, I was actively reshaping my relationship with Sand and Salt Escapes.
At the beginning of 2024, the business was flourishing. Our retreats were fully sold out for the year. We had multiple corporate retreats planned. We were properly profitable.
Yet I had this growing sense that we were outgrowing the business model. Direct-to-consumer retreats were taking so much of my time and energy, while our corporate work was begging to grow. Housing these two services within the same entity caused our messaging to become compromised as we struggled to speak to both audiences with clarity.
After three advisors agreed with what I was seeing, I jumped straight into action. I quickly decided I would build out a second company, which would serve corporate clients, and return Sand and Salt Escapes back to its roots as a direct-to-consumer company.
I set an arbitrary deadline to do this by the beginning of August, which would coincide with our move to Charlotte.
As I assessed the scope of work to make this happen, it felt doable. After all, we were already offering corporate retreats – the work ahead was just to separate it.
Two weeks after our April ’24 retreat, I built a brand identity and put it in front of a few advisors. The response was unanimous:
“I don’t know what this is. It’s not communicating anything substantive.”
I worked on it for another two weeks, and around the time of my ankle injury, put it back in front of each advisor. Again, a unanimous response:
“You need to slow down.”
Three different people who I trusted deeply, none of whom knew each other, all told me the same thing.
Slow down.
The moment I had to slow down my body because of my ankle, I was being told to slow down my brain.
But I had a deadline – the beginning of August. There was a lot to do to make that happen. Refining the brand identity. The administrative setup. Building a website. Getting the systems in place.
Struggling with this tension one afternoon in late May, I hobbled on my crutches over to the beach just south of the Venice pier.
In the wide-open space, I felt suffocated.
Taunted by the infinite possibilities ahead, feeling the same absence of direction I felt when I quit my job.
We were leaving LA with no idea of what laid ahead.
I wasn’t able to be physically active.
I had grown a business that outgrew itself.
And in that, I only knew one thing.
It was time to let go.
Time to slow down and let life unfold.
As human beings with a finite capacity, in order for the new to arrive, we have to let go of the old.
So I let go. Of my expectations. Of self-imposed deadlines. Of old ways of being and thinking.
And I slowed down. For the next few months, I only worked “in” – not “on” – the business. I ran the retreats we still had on the calendar. I planned and managed our move while Kelli transitioned her clinic.
I read. I journaled.
I stopped trying to solve for the challenge I saw in the business, and instead, created room for the idea to come to me.
It was a massive trust fall. But I knew that the way I was approaching it – trying to white-knuckle my way through – wasn’t getting me anywhere.
This wasn’t my turn to lead life. It was life’s turn to lead me.
And after a few months of sitting in the emptiness, life did just that.
I woke up the morning of September 26th, 2024 and went straight to my journal. I had clarity around what the next step for the business was.
It was like I had downloaded something while I was asleep.
I wrote 10 pages, ate breakfast, and filled three whiteboards.
For the next seven months, we continued running corporate retreats while I was hard at work shaping what’s next.
And with that, Ritual Retreats was born.
