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Wellness Retreats for Women
Nature Retreat for Women in the NSW Southern Highlands
When Your Nervous System Needs Aren’t Met By Talk Therapy
If you’re a high-functioning woman who’s tried traditional counselling or psychology – but you still feel the tension holding in your body.
Or if you’re exhausted from being “on” all the time, managing everyone else’s needs while your own nervous system stays locked in survival mode – it may be time for a different path.
At Highlands Centre for Healing, we offer nature-based wellness retreats specifically designed for women who know something needs to shift, but talking about it hasn’t been enough.
Our approach combines somatic energy healing, equine therapy, and the medicine of a 106-acre sanctuary in the Southern Highlands—because healing happens in the body, in relationships, and in nature.
Our wellness retreats for women serve as a reminder of the simple joys in life, the strength of connections, and the healing power of nature.
Nature-immersed experiences
What Makes These Women’s Healing Retreats Different
This isn’t traditional therapy. And it’s not your typical wellness retreat.
While other healing modalities focus on understanding your story or processing through conversation, we work with what your nervous system already knows—the somatic intelligence stored in your body that talk therapy doesn’t always reach.
Our trauma-informed approach honors that you’re not broken, nothing needs fixing, and your system’s responses have been profoundly intelligent adaptations to what you’ve survived.
What we offer is a return to coherence. A recalibration that happens when your nervous system finally feels safe enough to let go.
The Integration Of Three Complementary Modalities
THIS ISN’T TRADITIONAL EQUINE THERAPY – AND IT’S NOT JUST ENERGY WORK
IT’S A WAY OF WORKING THAT BRINGS TOGETHER THREE POWERFUL APPROACHES
Somatic Energy Healing
Body-led work that bypasses the mind’s defenses and speaks directly to your nervous system. Through somatic energy healing, we track the subtle shifts in breath, tension patterns, and the way your body holds what hasn’t been metabolized. This isn’t about reliving trauma—it’s about allowing your system to complete responses that got frozen in time.
Ground-Based Equine Therapy
Our herd of free-roaming horses become your co-facilitators in a way that feels nothing like traditional equine-assisted psychotherapy. Through equine therapy, these sentient beings mirror your internal state with profound accuracy—no judgment, no agenda, just pure presence. They respond to the subtle energetic shifts in your thoughts, emotions, and nervous system activation in real time, offering immediate biofeedback that helps you recognize patterns and reclaim agency.
Reiki and Energy Medicine
For women seeking deeper energetic restoration, our Reiki with the Herd sessions offer a 90-minute immersion where horses act as co-channels for healing. This modality works with the subtle energy systems that influence physical and emotional wellbeing, facilitating balance and integration on levels that conventional approaches often miss.
When the Body Holds What Words Can’t
Many people arrive here after trying to talk things through – and still feeling something unresolved beneath the surface.
Not because they didn’t try hard enough, but because what’s held in the body and nervous system wasn’t being met.
Who These Retreats Serve
Our wellness retreats for women attract those who are ready to do something radically different.
You might be a healthcare professional, therapist, or carer who’s so busy holding space for others that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to be held yourself.
Perhaps you’re navigating burnout, chronic stress, or the aftermath of experiences that left imprints on your nervous system—complex trauma, grief, major life transitions, or the accumulated weight of years spent in hypervigilance.
You don’t need a diagnosis. You don’t need to prove you’re “struggling enough” to deserve this.
You simply need to feel ready.
Our guests are typically women aged 35-60 who’ve tried traditional therapy and found it helpful for insight—but incomplete for embodiment. They’re often from Sydney, Canberra, the Illawarra, and across NSW, though we welcome women from anywhere who feel called to this work.
The Southern Highlands Sanctuary Experience
Location isn’t incidental to healing—it’s foundational.
Humans evolved in relationship with nature. Our nervous systems are designed to regulate in the presence of earth, trees, open skies, and other sentient beings. When you arrive at our 106-acre property in Moss Vale, you step into an environment where your system can finally exhale.
The Southern Highlands offers something rare: genuine quietude. No traffic noise. No urban urgency. Just birdsong, the soft footfall of horses, and the kind of spaciousness that allows what’s been compressed to finally unfold.
This is where the nervous system begins to remember it can be safe. Where the polyvagal response shifts from sympathetic activation (fight/flight) or dorsal shutdown (freeze) into ventral vagal connection—the state where healing, bonding, and integration become possible.
Retreat Formats: Designed By You
We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all healing. Your retreat can be:
- Individual Day Retreats – Intensive 1:1 sessions for women who want focused, personalized work without overnight accommodation.
- Multi-Night Stays – Immersive 2-5 night experiences in our on-site accommodations, allowing deeper integration. Wake to horses grazing outside your window. Spend evenings in reflection. Let the land hold you between sessions.
- Women’s Circle Retreats – Intimate small-group experiences (4-12 women) that weave somatic practices, equine encounters, energy healing, and the power of witnessing and being witnessed by other women on similar journeys.
Each retreat is trauma-informed, nervous system-focused, and adapted to what wants to emerge. Some women come for stress relief and nervous system regulation. Others come for profound transformation work around patterns that no longer serve them – people-pleasing, emotional shutdown, boundary struggles, or the aftermath of difficult experiences.
What Happens During a Retreat
There’s no rigid agenda. No forced participation. No performative “healing.”
Sessions are client-led and body-paced, which means we follow what your nervous system shows us rather than imposing a predetermined process. You might spend time in somatic energy healing sessions where subtle touch, breathwork, and embodiment practices help release what’s been held. You’ll likely work with the horses—sometimes simply standing in presence with them, other times engaging in intuitive movement or relational exercises that reveal patterns you weren’t consciously aware of.
If you choose Reiki with the Herd, you’ll experience a uniquely potent form of energy medicine where the horses’ own electromagnetic fields may amplify and support the body’s natural healing processes.
Throughout, you’re surrounded by 106 acres of bushland, and open pasture—nature continuing to support your system, whether you’re consciously aware of it or not
What Women Have Shared After Their Retreat
“As a registered counsellor and trauma-informed somatic practitioner, who’s walked my own healing path, I integrate all of this. The body doesn’t need to understand the science to respond. It just needs to feel safe enough to let go. I can’t wait to welcome you”
Soo
The Science Behind The Approach
While our work is heart-led and intuitive, it’s also grounded in evidence-based trauma therapy principles:
- Embodied Processing – this approach recognises that trauma isn’t about the event itself, but about the incomplete responses stored in the nervous system. When we work somatically, we help your body complete what it couldn’t at the time.
- Polyvagal Theory – Dr. Stephen Porges’ research on the vagus nerve explains why safety cues from the environment, from horses, and from an attuned facilitator can shift your nervous system out of survival states and into connection and healing.
- Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy Research – Studies show that equine interactions lower cortisol, increase oxytocin, and provide unique opportunities for nervous system co-regulation that human-to-human therapy alone cannot replicate.
- Energy Medicine and Emerging Biofield Science Research – Emerging research in bioelectromagnetics demonstrates that subtle energy interventions can influence physiological processes, pain perception, and emotional regulation.
PRACTICAL DETAILS:
- Location: Highlands Centre For Healing, Moss Vale, NSW Southern Highlands (approximately 90 minutes from Sydney, 60 minutes from Canberra)
- Accommodation: Two on-site accommodations available for multi-night stays, or commute daily for retreat sessions
- What to bring: An open mind and heart, comfortable clothing suited to variable weather, enclosed footwear for time with the horses
- Who Facilitates: Soo Woods – Registered Counsellor, Somatic Practitioner, Energy Healer, and someone who understands from lived experience what it means to rebuild from the bottom up
- Other Facilitators: We engage local facilitators for other modalities such as breathwork, yoga, EFT Tapping, sound healing + more
- Booking: Retreats are individually designed. Connect with us to discuss what you’re seeking and we’ll create a retreat structure that serves your nervous system and your goals.
- Additional notes: No prior experience with horses is required. All sessions are ground-based, ie there is no riding. Many women arrive feeling uunsure or even nervous around them – and quickly discover a sense of calm and connection
This Is Your Invitation
You don’t need to keep pushing through.
You don’t need to have it all figured out before you arrive.
If you’re curious about what might shift for you when you step away from the noise, when you allow horses and nature to witness you without judgment, when you finally give your nervous system the conditions it needs to recalibrate—we’re here.
This work isn’t about fixing what’s broken. It’s about remembering what’s always been whole.
Ready to take the next step? Reach out to discuss creating a wellness retreat designed specifically for you.