June 12-16 | Starting at £1,420The Path of the Eagle: Bajardo, Italy
What to ExpectOnce upon a time, women gathered beneath the moon to share stories, visions, and herbs. That lineage was interrupted, but its ember still burns.
Circle of Awen is a ceremonial return to this ancient act of gathering and healing. Through ritual, creative practice, yoga, and communion with the land, we enter a sanctuary of sisterhood. This is a space where the body remembers its language, fragments are honoured, and each woman is invited to cross the threshold into her intuition, her power, and her highest consciousness.
❋ Ritual with Mother NatureWe guide you back to the earth's rhythms through moon circles, fire rites, and grounding practices—reawakening ancestral knowing and embodied presence.
❋ Sacred Passage & RebirthCarry shadowed pain into unsparing light, kneel at symbolic graves of old selves, gather broken mirror fragments to honour each piece, mourning who we were to claim your authentic self, held safe in ritual embrace.
❋ Creative ExpressionForage earth's palette for botanical inks, paint wild visions with petal and soil, weave stories in creative ink, breathe life into performance, mold clay like lover's flesh. This is nature as mirror, forging fragments into luminous whole.
❋ Yoga & Embodied MovementBodies ripple through yoga flows and primal dances on grass altars and stone terraces, unfurling hips and hearts in Mother Nature's choreography, weaving spirit back into sinew and breath.
❋ Meditation & BreathworkGuided practices syncing your breath with mountain winds and ocean rhythms. Meditations rooted in nature's vast silence to quiet the overstimulated mind, release held tensions, and reconnect with the body's innate wisdom and earth's steady cycles.
❋ Earthbound Sisterhood Reclaim the interrupted lineage of women gathering in circle—passing plates al fresco on valley-gazing terraces, sharing stories by firelight, witnessing each other's raw becoming in fierce, accountable sisterhood to claim what the world withholds.
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Airport transfers to and from Nice Airport, arranged in line with our recommended arrival and departure flights to ensure smooth group transfers.
4 nights of accommodation in an intimate, character-filled house designed for rest and connection.
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner home-cooked daily by an experienced local chef, using fresh, seasonal ingredients from local farms.
A fully curated programme rooted in nature, ritual, yoga, and creative practice, intentionally designed to expand your consciousness and deepen self-connection.
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Sign up and pay the deposit to reserve your place. The remaining balance is payable 30 days before the retreat begins. If plans change, you can cancel up to 14 days to receive a refund for the remaining balance.
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After booking, we'll send you a Welcome Pack with everything you need to know, including detailed schedules, packing list recommendations, and more.
We also offer a 30-minute complimentary call so we can get to know you for this transformative experience, to ensure it is as aligned as possible with your intentions.
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We'd recommend booking your transportation to and from Nice Airport as soon as possible, to ensure you can arrive without any complications or delays.
We will send you the recommended flight details in our Welcome Pack, to ensure a smooth airport transfer.
If you’d prefer to make your own way to the event, just let us know.
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The Birth of the Retreat
I’ve been visiting this mountain for a few years now. One of my best friends, Sally, found the love of her life here, in an unsuspecting bar, while she was visiting for her cousin’s wedding. She uprooted her ties in England and planted them firmly in the Ligurian soil of his olive farm, watering them with the sacred vows of holy matrimony, and she hasn’t looked back since. They are two of the purest, most beautiful and authentic souls I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. They have welcomed me with open palms and beaming smiles more times than I have the capacity to count.
Over time, this place has become my spiritual homeland, the place I go when London has drained most of the life force from my bones, in the way it tends to do so if you stay there too long. It’s where I go to recharge, to remember who I am, and why I’m really here. It’s where I took my sunken soul last year to heal, after a trilogy of loss brought me to my knees.
I travelled there from another friend’s house in Tuscany, magnetised so vehemently by the promise of the mountain’s motherly embrace that I began the pilgrimage on a day of national train strikes sweeping the entire country. Countless cancelled trains, patient platforms, and one hitchhike later, I’d finally made it. There is a particularly special energy on this mountainside, one the locals speak of openly, as if discussing an old friend. I’ve come to know them rather well during my time there. They tell me it is the same energy that drew a Druidic community to these slopes many moons ago.
A few months later, the mountain called me back with that same magnetic pull. As I ascended once more in Sally & Stefano’s yellow steeled steed, the eagle appeared above a lone tree on the distant ridge. It was my familiar sentinel, a sky-scribe etching the story of my unfolding across the vast blue canvas. I couldn’t quite believe my eyes.
Shortly afterward, we pulled over to investigate a haphazard stack of windows leaning against a roadside fence, promising a potentially fertile breeding ground for Sally & Stefano’s ongoing renovations. Amid the cracked panes and dusty frames, something reflective caught our magpie eyes. Sally swooped down and picked up a piece of broken glass to mix her pigments on, I followed in her jet-stream and lifted a broken wing mirror from the gravel peppered tarmac. It was my eighth in total. Each one prior had been spiritually significant omen over the previous 2 years. but the very first I’d found outside my own country’s borders. In that moment, my bone marrow spoke: this trip would remake me. This was one of the intimate languages the universe used to speak directly to my soul.
During those days, I slipped back into my sacred rhythm as the promise of the full moon loomed: visiting Nina’s grave each morning, kneeling to sweep her stone, arranging pinecones and wildflowers, whispering my burdens and half-formed hopes into the marble. Afterward, I’d trek to the roofless church, laying whatever the path offered at its grassy altar: a feather caught in the wind, a conker polished by autumn, a single bloom heavy with dew.
When the full moon swelled to its zenith, with Sally and Stefano slunk into slumber, I sank into the sofa, sipping rose tea, cradling their cat, miele, in my lap. The firelight danced across the room like liquid gold. All day we’d peeled oranges: plump, mountain-ripened jewels bursting with solar fire, laying their rinds tenderly on the hearth. Now the air hung heavy with their alchemy: orange blossom prayer unfurling sweet and thick, threaded through woodsmoke’s ancient, earthen exhalation. It was as if the house itself was alive, weaving silent spells with the help of a conspiring moon.
I carried my intention out to the garden, where the night draped my skin in a robe of inken silk, cool and fathomless. There I quartered the world for my altar: north for the deep cradle of earth that holds all endings, east for air's unseen tides carrying ancestral whispers, south for fire's fierce hunger that devours what must die, west for water's undulating current that carries fragments of wisdom from the subconscious to the conscious. An Esbat ritual took shape between my palms, a Druidic rite rising unbidden from a bloodstream laced with ancestral memory. I scribed my callings onto fragile skin, each word a seed pressed into fertile paper, but crowning them all, etched at the summit in desperate ink: Let my life's purpose present itself to me as brightly as this full moon burns tonight.
I lifted my gaze and spoke to the moon as if she were sitting across the breakfast table on a Sunday morning. She blazed sovereign and unrelenting, wearing the mask of a sun in exile to the night sky. I lit a divinatory spell candle, its wax infused with amethysts, clear quartz and mugwort, the flame leaping as if it knew the weight of what I asked.
Dawn cracked open strangely askew. Sally burst into my room, hurrying me out of bed with an urgency I’d never seen in her. This was not our usual rhythm. We never rushed to town at daybreak, preferring the slow simmer of coffee and porridge over the woodstove. But she waved off my protests. “Come on, Abbie, let’s go into town. It’s a beautiful day! We can grab something at the café.”
So, I followed, half-lucid, as we sipped coffee and sank our teeth into warm pastries, the kind that shatter into golden flakes across satiated fingertips. We wandered up toward the church, pausing in a hidden community garden I’d discovered overlooking the valley just below it, an emerald pocket stitched betwixt seam of stone and soil. Sun poured down like honey, thick and warm against our skin, though December chilled the air in its shadow, laced with the impossible scent of spring. I sank into a puddle of bliss pooling in the centre of my chest, my ship utterly anchored in the eternal now.
At the crown of the mountain sits a small village called Bajardo, and at its centre glows the rarest of crown jewels: a roofless church, its stone walls split open to a boundless sky. In the1800’s, an earthquake that reduced its ceiling to rubble left behind a floor of grass peppered with wildflowers, cascading into an accidental altar where the earth crept in and claimed the nave. Breaching the threshold atop weathered steps, you are held by the contradictory palms of ancient stone and open air all at once, bare-headed beneath a vast blue dome. From there, sun crystals reflecting on licks of the Ligurian Sea, a snow-capped Alpine tapestry, and the undulating valley in hues from olive to emerald unfold like a book held open by the divine—a place so perfect it is as if some unseen hand had been composing it for an eternity.
During that time, I made a pilgrimage there daily. I would trek first from Sally and Stefano’s house through Mother Nature’s veins to the local cemetery, where spiralling foliage, carved marble, and birdsong intertwine in symphonic harmony. I’d stop at the grave of a woman named Nina Pia. I was drawn to it intuitively, before noticing that she’d died exactly six months before I was born. In Italy, each grave is adorned with an image of the person buried beneath it when they still breathed the same air as you and I. Nina’s smile was one that could coax heartbreak from marrow and simmer it down to a nourishing broth. She had lived to the grand old age of 97. I began visiting her as though we were old familiars. I’d tell her my woes while sweeping her stone, arranging pinecones and wildflowers tenderly at her toes, polishing her photo with the cuff of my sleeve, and kissing her forehead gently.
From Nina’s grave, I’d ascend to the roofless church in the cradle of the village, leaving an offering I’d gathered along the way at its grassy altar: he sigh of a feather, the burnished gleam of a conker, the kaleidoscopic scales of a pinecone. I went there to grieve: the loss of the pregnancy I’d terminated a few months earlier, and one of the most violent heartbreaks I’d ever had to contend with. Alongside it, I was holding the impending loss of my grandfather, a man who has instilled a love in me that could transcend lifetimes, that I’d just been told had terminal cancer. And beneath those potent strains ran the thread of another, subtler grief: the death of a version of myself, the death of the maiden. I was stepping into the frequency of mother, and my body was preparing me for it before my mind could grasp it.
On the day I arrived, I went for a run and attempted an old, overgrown trail. The path became thicker and thornier, swallowing my legs in bramble and nettle until my skin stung and scratched and throbbed. Eventually, I understood that Mother Nature was trying to impart some of her wisdom on my tender soul. So, I turned around and surrendered to the mountain’s soft insistence that there was another way.
When I turned, the valley unveiled itself. It was one of the most beautiful landscapes my eyes had ever had the pleasure of beholding. So breathtaking it seared beneath my retina, a secret fresco summonable at will, a painted world folded into an origami swan inside my gaze. I splintered into tears, struck mute by the savage paradox: this tapestry of light and mountain and sea unfurled before me, while grief coiled heavy as lead through my bones. All the duality of the universe compressed into a single view.
At that very moment, a white-tailed eagle began spiralling heavenward in a steady, sovereign arc from the cradle of the valley. I watched intently, breath suspended like dew on a web. I was overcome with a feeling of a love so vast it pressed against my skin from within like a baby turning in the womb, a silent promise that I, too, would rise once more.
Drying corners of eyes with sleeved wrist, I ran onward. First to Nina, where I left a pinecone, then to the roofless church where wild grass grew into wild sky. At its earthen altar, I laid another pinecone and spoke unbidden words, as if the mountain itself had carved them on my tongue: “I am ready for the part of myself that I know must die, to die. I follow the path of the eagle.” Offerings placed in a pact with the walls of that roofless church, I slipped through the right-hand door.
As I did so, I looked up at the sky. Sapphire blue, with the silhouette of a cascading Alpine tapestry behind it. There, the eagle was painted once more, suspended in midair above a stone house, in a Raphael-esque halo of molten gold. My mouth agape, I stood there in my own state of suspension. Gravity fell asleep as I peered into the doorway of the void. My body lost itself. Starlings swooped wildly like arrows beneath it. Time must be moving? But, still. The eagle remained still. As if cradled by the breath of the Gods. I stood transfixed, until a stranger rounded the bend and shattered the spell. The eagle plunged downward, vanishing into the infinite.
Through all those days, the eagle returned like a faithful oracle, materialising in grief's deepest throes to murmur of greater currents beneath.
On the full moon, I climbed again through velvet dark to the roofless church, its floor aglow with silver speckled grass beneath my feet. Mother Nature was my only lantern. Beneath that lunar gaze, I wove a ritual between blades of grass into the wild heart of night, beseeching the path of the eagle to unfurl before me.
We were due at Sally’s mother-in-law’s for lunch, an appointment as sacred and non-negotiable as a blood oath in those parts, where keeping an Italian nonna waiting borders on the diabolical. So, we scuttled down to meet Stefano in the piazza.
On the way, an elderly man approached with eyes so blue they seemed like fractured sapphires, holding fragments of forgotten skies. “D’ove sei?” he asked, his voice carrying the gravel of the mountain.
I told him England, and Sally chimed in—her life rooted here now with Stefano, her Italian anchor. I mentioned my pilgrimages to Bajardo, especially the church.
“Yes,” he said, nodding deeply, “people speak of a very powerful and strange energy here.”
“Absolutely,” I replied. “I feel it too.”
He leaned in, eyes sharpening with intrigue. “Really? Tell me more.”
I opened up then, spilling the rivers of Druidic and pagan lineage plaited through my familial line, this place a holy ground where I performed rituals in collusion with the lunar rhythm. He was captivated, hungry to pull the thread of it. He introduced himself as Arrigo. “Can I invite you both for tea to enquire more about this energy? Your lineage?” I promised we’d return that evening for tea in the studio space of a local artist he was friends with. “Assolutamente,” he agreed.
And so, we did. That night unspooled into hours of stories flowing like mountain streams—his life poured out, mine unfurling, Sally weaving hers between us. I spoke of Awen Sisters, the project born in place of the children I was not yet ready to bring into the world: retreats to help women heal, guiding them back to their centres, their most unfiltered, authentic selves. He listened, awestruck, as if hearing prophecy.
We were artists, both of us, bound by a shared reverence for object memory: how the things we carry through life hold the echo of our tenderness, our sentiment etched into every groove and seam. He told me of his quiet crusade around the beautiful Bajardo, this hidden secret perched like a forgotten oracle on the mountaintop: salvaging the village's once dilapidated houses, pouring years into renovations to preserve their ancient bones. Its population was ageing gracefully, the timeless streets pulsating with the wild abundance of the green hammock it slept within, as if the place had been waiting, veiled from the world below, a secret keeper of profound, sacred energy. But he was determined to awaken it fully, to breathe community and art back into its patient veins.
The next morning, he invited us for breakfast at dawn. We trekked up as the sun crested the horizon; his address clutched like a talisman in my palm. When I reached his door, tears began to collect in the well where eye meets nose, before rolling down the underside of its bridge. My body recognized it in that intuitive physiological instant, half-a-heartbeat before my mind could grasp it.
This.
This was the exact house the eagle had been suspended above two months prior, wings spread angelic in October’s full moon sunlight, haloed like a celestial arrow, as if the sky itself had been pointing here all along.
Inside, a morning fire crackled tenderly. Coffee steamed on a woodstove alongside a table etched with woodgrain wrinkles of ancestral memory, lined generously with panettone and dishes of plump dates. After indulging in culinary and conversational delights, he began to walk us though his living pièce de résistance: houses he’d painstakingly revived, each room a living museum. He’d excavated ancient objects from the village’s hidden corners—tools, vessels, fragments of lives—and restored them with hands that seemed to channel reverence itself, hanging them like icons saturated in story.
He drew me to one wall: a child’s patchwork dress, framed like a relic. “Lean in close,” he urged Sally and me. “Do you see it? How poor they were—count the patches.” I couldn’t speak. He traced the story: a mother’s fierce love refusing the cold, every stitch an extension of the warm embrace keeping her daughter safe. It was devastatingly beautiful.
He did this again and again: axes worn glassy by desperate hands, chopping boards hollowed by generations of shared meals, tools smoothed like river stones by nothing but the sheer human will to endure. You could feel the humanity pulsing through every object, each one breathing the memory of the person whose hands had caressed it. I wept openly at nearly every one, struck silent by our shared fragility transfigured into something eternal.
Among the restored wonders, the houses themselves felt like ribcages of a great, sleeping animal, each room threaded with an eclectic constellation of books, furniture, paintings, ornaments, rugs, a whole inner solar system of colour and story. In one, a single chair was painted to echo the subject of Van Gogh’s famous composition, its curves and yellow bones so exact I recognised it in an instant. The air vibrated with one overwhelming sensation: authenticity—that word Arrigo carried on his tongue like a prayer, spoken so often it seemed to seep into the plaster. In every house hung a small sign he’d crafted himself: “Be who you are.” I’d never encountered a more perfect distillation of light.
Rising among the houses, the castello stood like a heart restored, its vaulted chambers and stone arches now thrumming with untapped possibility. In my mind, scenes began to whirl into motion, swirling in symphony like the brushstrokes of Van Gogh’s night skies: workshops where voices rise in circling chorus, bodies ripple through ritual and yoga, creativity spills uncontained in paint and ink and raw, trembling word. I could already see it: Awen Sisters gathered there, weaving ancestral memory into a coven of modern reclamation, a living tapestry of women remembering themselves.
And nestled in the centre, the roofless church—open to the heavens, its grass-grown floor an eternal altar—called like a throat ready for song. It begged for performances under constellations, moon rites that let music spill down the valley, grief ceremonies where we kneel bare and salt-streaked, held in a bowl of stone and starlight, the mountain rising around us as an ancient, wordless choir.
A few steps away, an open terrace clung to the church’s flank, a stone palm outstretched toward where ocean and Alps lean into one another in endless embrace. From there, the sun bleeds gold into amethyst and indigo, light scattering like a handful of diamonds across the distant Ligurian sea. I saw us gathered there, eating al fresco as our foremothers once did—bowls of slow-cooked food from Bajardo’s own hands, steam mingling with dusk, plates passed from sister to sister, stories loosened by laughter, the simple alchemy of being nourished and witnessed beneath a darkening sky.
As night deepened, fires would flare alive along that terrace, bright arteries of flame threading the circle. We would dance around them—song rising, hips swaying, manifestations spoken and unspoken riding the sparks upward. The place itself felt like a living temple, a vessel already humming with intention, waiting for us to arrive and remember. These were so much more than spaces rescued from ruin. They were bones of a sanctum, quietly consecrated for the work and the wildness still waiting to be born.
At the end of our tour, I told him the eagle’s story—my vow to the moon, how my life’s purpose had blazed forth, how I’d met him the very next morning as if on cue. He listened in awe, as if witnessing the threads of fate weave live before him.
On our last day, as he led me to the final house, he stopped abruptly. He seized both my shoulders and turned me to face him, his eyes blazing with something that felt like benediction. “Abbie,” he said, “if I should die tomorrow, I will die happy knowing that you have found your life’s purpose.”
Standing there on that mountainside, with Nina’s grave at my back, the eagle’s arc still holding me in its loop, the roofless church yawning open to the sky like a wound made holy, the patched child’s dress whispering of a mother’s relentless devotion, and Be who you are reverberating through my bones—I finally understood what that purpose was.
I wanted to birth a space that hasn’t yet drawn breath. A living wound turned altar, midwifed by Mother Nature’s wild hands as women carry their pain into unsparing light and transmute it through creative fire and ancient ritual. A sanctuary of fierce celebration to mourn what we’ve lost and hold each other accountable for what the world refuses to give. A space to kneel beside the graves of “who we used to be”, tracing the eagle’s arc—hovering in suspension, plunging in freefall, rising in rebirth—and be witnessed bare in every phase. Where we step fully into the wild women Mother Nature forged us to be.
