Healthy Living: First “Living in Womb Wellness Retreat” This Weekend

It’s a one of a kind event that is being hosted in Belize this weekend. It’s combining food and diet and yoga into a weekend of wellness geared specifically to women. It’s called the Living in Womb Wellness Retreat and in tonight’s Healthy Living we find out more about it.

Marleni Cuellar reporting

It’s marketed as a four-day retreat to be hosted in a luxury hotel in Cayo. It promises to be a weekend of healing and rejuvenation. But the Living in Womb Wellness Retreat is a first of its kind event being hosted in Belize. As the name suggests it is about connecting with a woman’s center: her womb through yoga, meditation, and healthy eating.

India Camiel

Chef India Camiel, Owner/Organizer, Back2Live

“Everything that we create comes from the womb. Even if we are putting our makeup in the morning, we need to bring that energy from the womb up into what we want to present to the world. If we are painting, if we are having children, if we are shopping, if we are cooking…all of that creative energy comes from the womb. So for women, the womb is life.”

Chef India is a well know detox specialist and raw vegan chef in Belize. India feels that women in Belize can greatly benefit from focusing on womb wellness.

Chef India Camiel

“A lot of Belizean women suffer from fibroids and cists and different womb ailments and we speak of it from a medical standpoint, but rarely in Belize we talk about rejuvenating and healing that sacred thing from an energetic perspective with yoga, with medication and with the right consumption. International people can be exposed to Belize and the wellness that exists in Belize and the beauty as well as the rejuvenation. And that local Belizean women can also come and learn something from international teachers that they may not have known before.”

The weekend includes an intensive twenty-hour of learning to prepare raw and vegan food with Chef India and yoga sessions with visiting yoga instructors. Angelica Tonatzin from Los Angeles and Ona Hawk from Atlanta are two visiting instructors who are excited to be participating in the event and to share their knowledge and experience with the participants.

Angelica Tonatzin

Angelica Tonatzin, Women’s Wellness Educator in LA

“For me, the womb wellness aspect is such an important part of healing, personally and collectively with a group of women. So it’s been a journey for me in becoming aware of how to heal my wound from a holistic level and so being able to share with women any self-care tips that I know as well as hosting space through movement, yoga, breath or meditation and intention. But really inspiring because I know how empowering it is to have these tools that we can then take home. So I was really inspired to share this in a larger way.”

Ona Hawk

Ona Hawk, Holistic Health Educator, Firehawk Yoga

“Self care and self empowerment go hand in hand and we are able to share that information whether we become teachers or not. I think certainly as women, we certainly educate many more than we intend to or realize. Yoga is often portrayed as big fancy poses and contorting the body into all these shapes and twists. Where it really starts with as she mentions the breath. And just in learning how to breathe correctly, you would be astonished in what changes happen in people’s lives. And so she is now able to better educate her children on self care and she’s had experiences in losing weight and all coming as quite a surprise to her and not to me.”

Angelica Tonatzin

“I’ve had some women who come and want to get pregnant and end up getting pregnant simply because there was so much intention and attention that I would guide the women to bringing their awareness to their womb. So having breaths towards the room, certain moments that help bring circulation to the womb. And that was unintentional. I was creating spaces just for women to gather and to share a human space and some of them were getting pregnant; some of them were getting relieved of their menstrual cramps. And so that’s when I began to understand the power of yoga and bringing the intention to the room as well as when you are in a collective space for healing with women.”

Organizer of the event, Camiel, says that while it’s called womb wellness. Men are welcomed as well.

Chef India Camiel
“While we are focusing on the womb, it is also in a larger context of understanding that the womb wellness is really the conjunction of masculine and feminine essence in harmony. We know that as women, if we are sick, it affects out mate and then it affects out families and then it affects our communities and it also affects our environment. So yes, the womb is the catalyst, but it does include that masculine essence as well.”

The retreat starts on Friday and there are are several options to participate- from the full retreat or registering for a few of the sessions. You can find more information at www.back2livebz.com