How learning to be a woman among women shaped the retreats I create today
I have this memory from when I was 23 years old that keeps coming back to me. I’m sitting at a bar with my boyfriend at the time and some of our mutual friends – all guys.
One of them turned to me and said, “Milla, when are you going to introduce us to your girlfriends? Come on, some of them must be single.”
My boyfriend replied without missing a beat: “She doesn’t have girlfriends.”
He wasn’t being cruel. He was just stating a fact.
I was mortified.
Of course there were women in my life – university friends, colleagues, volleyball teammates – but they weren’t those close friendships you see in movies and series, they didn’t feel as strong as my male friendships.
That moment feels like a turning point as that’s when I started to really analyse why I had ended up in that situation. And the truth was, I’d spent most of my life feeling like I didn’t quite fit in the woman’s category and because of that I struggled to surround myself with women.
I felt like an outsider among them.
The Girl Who Didn’t Fit the Mold
From day one, it was clear to me and my family I was no ordinary girl.
My childhood was spent outside, hitting a ball against the wall, running around the garden, getting dirty and sweaty.
I had girlfriends growing up, but I felt more relaxed around boys, like I could truly be myself with them and I had no interest in the doll situation at all.
Now, maybe if I’d grown up today, this wouldn’t have been remarkable. Maybe people would have simply said I was energetic, sporty, outdoorsy.
But this was small-town Italy in the eighties and nineties, and there was only one word for girls like me: tomboy.
And that word didn’t feel like a neutral description – it felt like evidence that something about me was wrong. That I wasn’t doing “girl” correctly.
Things didn’t really change when I turned into a teenager who lived in jeans, Nike Air Max, and hoodies.
I owned no skirts, no dresses, no high heels. I wore no makeup, didn’t care what my hair looked like, and was obsessed with sports.
I had close girlfriends at this point, but once again I somehow felt like an outsider in that group and without even realizing I distanced myself once high school finished and I could start over with university.
I do think it wasn’t entirely my responsibility for feeling this way.
Growing up in the nineties I was constantly confronted with images of what a woman should look like (think Kate Moss) and I had a nagging voice in my head repeating on a daily basis that my body was supposed to look different.
I hated my muscular legs.
I hated the fact I had hips.
I hated the hair on my legs, my arms that felt too big,.
I was insecure about every single aspect of my body and personality.
An additional layer that made me feel I wasn’t a true woman.
Looking back now, I can see how much of that feeling also came from the silence in my household.
The Things We Don’t Talk About
I come from a family of women – a small one, but one where the only male role model was and still is my father, an exceptional human being.
I have an older sister, a fun, hardworking auntie who never married and has lived alone since she moved out of my grandparents’ place, and a mother with whom I’ve had a very complicated relationship for all my life.
She loved to tell me that the reason I existed was because my dad really wanted a child – and they’d really hoped for a baby boy.
But despite being surrounded by women I felt I didn’t have anyone to talk to about what it meant to be a woman.
My mother was unable to have an honest, open conversation about hormones, periods, fertility, sex.
She assumed I gathered all the information I needed from other sources and seemed really uncomfortable any time I tried to approach any of these subjects.
Luckily, having a sister ten years older came with some benefits, so I eventually found some things out from her.
But by the time my period came, my sister no longer lived at home, and the whole event went unnoticed in my house. I simply started using the pads I could find in the bathroom and eventually asked my mother to get me more. That’s as far as the conversation went.
The same thing happened with contraception. I got on the pill, and put it on my nightstand for my mother to see. She never asked me anything or made any comments about it.
As a result, I internalised the fact that talking about periods, hormones, our bodies and sex was wrong. That as women, we are expected to just get on with it and accept whatever our bodies do to us physically and emotionally.
Finding My Way Back
I can’t tell you exactly when things started to change for me – when I started to truly appreciate myself, my body, my personality, and embrace myself as a woman.
It probably happened very slowly when I started traveling and finally got exposed to women who were very open to talking about bodies, hormones, and relationships.
Women who spoke without shame about their periods, their desires, their frustrations with their changing bodies. Women who held space for each other’s anger, grief, and confusion without trying to fix it.
It was revelatory. Not because these conversations were particularly profound or therapeutic, but because they were normal.
Because these women treated the realities of being a woman as something worth talking about rather than something to endure in silence.
And from that point on, women appeared in my life more and more.
Some of them appeared organically but I believe I also started to look for those deep connections because I had finally experienced how powerful and beneficial it is to be surrounded by women who get it.
Women who don’t judge you for being too much or not enough.
Women who understand that womanhood is complicated and messy and doesn’t fit into a single mold.
That shift allowed me to look at myself from a completely different point of view and slowly start embracing my feminine side – not the version I thought I was supposed to perform, but the one that actually felt like me.
When Your Dreams Don’t Match the Script
But there was still one more layer to unpack.
One more way I felt like I was failing at being a woman.
It took years before I could finally say out loud that having children was not something I was interested in exploring.
For a while, this realisation sent me spiralling back into those old familiar questions: What type of woman was I if I didn’t want a marriage, a house and kids? Was I broken somehow? Was there something fundamentally wrong with me?
It was difficult – heartbreaking, even – because all I could hear were my mother’s words echoing in my head. She never hid the way she felt about women without children: “They are simply less women.”
For years those words made me question everything.
Made me wonder if choosing a different path meant I was choosing to opt out of something essential to womanhood itself. That my lack of interest in the traditional script was evidence of some deficiency in me.
It took time – and a lot of inner work – to understand that there is no single way to be a woman.
That my worth isn’t tied to whether I have a ring sitting on my finger or if I give birth. That choosing a different path doesn’t make me “less” – it just makes me honest.
Those words from my mother no longer influence me the way they once did but I do realise it might not be the same for everyone.
I understand the complexity of this topic and the weight it carries.
The grief of choosing a different path.
The guilt of not wanting what we’re “supposed” to want.
The loneliness of feeling like you’re the only one questioning the narrative.
Coming Home to Myself (and My Sisters)
What I know now is that having a network of close girlfriends has improved my life tremendously.
It has been incredibly beneficial in finally getting to accept my body, the way my mind works, my dreams, my peculiarities.
There is a level of acceptance and care that only the women in my life have been able to provide.
I still love being in men’s company but when I started Beyond Dharma and decided to co-create retreats, I had very clear in my mind that I wanted my retreats to be for women.
I wanted to recreate in a retreat setting that familiarity, that comfort, that coziness, that openness and authenticity that only groups of women offer.
Because I’m pretty sure I’m not the only woman navigating this path.
In fact, I know every woman carries her own version of this weight.
I’m sure every woman out there has struggled in one way or another with what it means to be a woman in this society, in these specific times.
How hard it is to deal with the way our bodies look and feel especially as we grow older.
How difficult our roles as daughters, sisters, mothers, partners, wives are.
How incredibly frustrating it is to navigate every choice, every crucial moment, every turn in our lives under that additional pressure coming from our families, cultures, traditions.
Sometimes it truly feels like a never-ending, exhausting journey where we take a step forward only to get challenged over and over again.
As children we were taught to hold our tongues, hold our needs, hold our rage, hold our grief. And to hold space for everyone else.
And we do all the time and we are so damn good at it.
We hold it together when everything is falling apart.
We hold our bodies to impossible standards.
We hold our dreams quietly so we don’t seem too ambitious.
We hold our pain privately so we don’t burden anyone.
And we do all of this while our bodies are changing, our hormones are shifting, our roles are evolving, and the world keeps expecting us to simply carry on without missing a beat.
There is no woman out there who isn’t defined by the word resilience.
It truly is in our DNA, written into us through generations of women who had to be strong, had to keep going, had to make it work.
Resilience is our inheritance, our superpower, our survival mechanism.
But resilience shouldn’t mean suffering in silence.
Strength shouldn’t mean never resting.
Being a woman shouldn’t mean constantly proving we’re enough.
A Space to Finally Let Go
What I’ve learned through my own messy, beautiful journey is that when women gather in honesty – when we stop performing and start being – something ancient and powerful awakens.
This is why I created A Pause in the Season, a six-day restorative retreat for women navigating seasons of change.
For women who’ve been holding it together while everything shifts.
For women who are tired of proving they’re enough.
Dhara and I have designed this from our own lived experience, from knowing what it feels like to be the girl who didn’t quite fit, the woman who questioned the script, the human who needed space to finally let go.
Six days of restorative yoga, breathwork, sound healing, cacao ceremony, and the quiet power of being held by other women who understand because they’re living it too.
This is not about fixing anyone.
It’s about creating space where rage, grief, confusion, desire, and exhaustion can finally be spoken without judgment.
Where rest is medicine.
Where you can trust your body again.
If this resonates I’d love to welcome you.
Let’s come home to ourselves together!
A Pause in the Season