Park Records file photo by Carolyn Weber
This summer the Wild Women Tribe is going wild.
The women’s adventure meditation group will host a six-day retreat with horses for shamanic meditation from Sept. 18-22, followed by a one-day workshop version of the retreat on July 20.
These are in addition to several other one-day mindfulness hikes, “wandering” workshops and longer retreats scheduled throughout the summer and later this year. For example, a six-week trail hiking series will be held every Wednesday starting this week through Aug. 14.
Workshops and retreats combine meditation with movement and creative activities to create a social space for women in nature that is centered around personal growth.
Founder Renee Huang, who launched Wild Women Tribe in 2018, said each course is designed to focus on a particular core theme, such as finding your identity, achieving balance or finding flow.
These themes are typically integrated throughout the day’s events through hiking, yoga, foundational movement or physical exercises, often set to music.
“Each workshop has a distinctly different feel,” Huang says, “but there’s a sort of template of structural uniformity that permeates each experience: mindful time outdoors.”
Forging meaningful connections with nature in creative ways is a consistent practice, such as the burning release ritual, in which participants write something on a piece of paper and burn it to release it.
Huang developed these concepts after a career in journalism and marketing.
“I was a journalist by training,” she says, “working for the Canadian national newspaper The Globe and Mail before moving to Mexico, where I spent nearly a decade developing marketing and public relations services for the luxury hospitality and tourism industries.”
In 2018, Huang faced personal challenges that led her to seek deeper connections with other women.
“I really felt a strong desire to connect with women in the outdoors,” Huang said, “but I just couldn’t find any groups around me.”
She partnered with coaches, facilitators, therapists and yoga instructors to create a day-long event, and Wild Women Tribe was born.
“I think we’re conditioned by society to look to external validation to validate our worth,” Huang says, “so as we go through life we tend to create a checklist of things that signify achievement or success or validate our worth. And I think it’s really important for women to go back to themselves as a measure of their own worth and experience, and to be in tune with their inner self in order to feel inner peace and harmony with themselves.”
The practices that take place in the workshops and walks are not unusual, Huang said: They involve familiar concepts like self-care and looking after yourself before others.
“But sometimes it really does create a sense of community and camaraderie to be with other women who are going through the same thing and feel like, ‘I’m not the only one looking to find my way back,'” she said.
The one-day equine meditation workshop, taking place on July 20 from 9am to 3pm, will allow participants to “immerse themselves in the feeling of being with a herd of horses” with the help of equine therapist facilitator Alejandra Lara, Huang said.
Lara is a Park City-based trauma-informed therapist who works with horses and humans, and Huang said she has experience working with women’s groups and veterans with PTSD. The day will include a hike, yoga, lunch, and time with the horses.
The idea is to feel an affinity with other living beings, which helps us to cultivate mindfulness within ourselves: recognizing the wildness we see in the horse and connecting it with our own inner experience of wildness.
“They are beautiful mirrors that reflect our emotional and vibrational reality and how we show up,” Huang said.
The September 18th retreat, “Inner Insight and Wisdom,” will bring in more time and more facilitators to further deepen the horseback riding experience and introduce various tools and practices for mindfulness for self-care and growth.
“It will include a five-day shamanic meditation course with Alejandra and her herd of horses,” Hoang says, “as well as shamanic earth medicine, tools and practices taught by Marissa (Zelenak), one of the leaders of Shamanic Twist in Camas, and art therapy sessions with Jill Johnson, a trauma-informed art therapist who used to run the town’s paint mixer.”
REINS, a nonprofit conservation ranch in Oakley, will host the course, which means the horses will have to rebuild their trust in humans and do their own mindfulness training, Huang said. A portion of Wild Woman Tribe’s proceeds will go to REINS.
Huang himself will be hosting several writing workshops as part of the retreat, teaching participants how to rewrite the old stories people tell themselves about their lives and how to examine the role of certain words and ideas in structuring our inner lives.
“Beliefs and thoughts form the backbone of reality and shape what we actually experience in the world,” she said.
Other workshops and retreats are planned for later this year, Huang said, including a “Wild Child Mom and Daughter Day” focused on creativity and flow. Daughters ages 8 to 11 can join their moms for hikes, physical activity classes, snacks and art workshops from 3 to 6 p.m.
The six-week trail hiking series begins Wednesday from 9 to 11:30 a.m. and will run for six weeks through Aug. 14. Huang will lead the women on the trail with a new fitness coach each week, including physical fitness specialist Aisha Haskell. The courses are priced on a sliding scale, with donations ranging from $40 to $55, Huang said.
After that, she’ll host a five-day yoga retreat in Hawaii in November called “Shadow and Light,” and a five-day retreat in Oaxaca, Mexico in January. These more premium retreats help participants completely escape the hustle and bustle of modern life.
“You can dive deeper into your work without the distractions of everyday life,” Huang says. “Your senses are activated and you look at things with curiosity because you’ve never been there before. Going to a destination helps you connect more deeply with your process.”
For more information about Wild Women Tribe or to sign up for workshops and retreats, visit wildwomentribe.net..
