Some people hear “week-long meditation retreat in Mexico” and say, Oh, how relaxing.

Truth: it isn’t.

The days are long. Twelve to fifteen hours. Roughly 35 hours in meditation. The rest in teaching, integration, silence, tears, laughter, breath.

It is not a vacation.

It is devotion.

This was my third retreat with Joe Dispenza. On the way there, a new friend said, “You must know what’s coming by now.”

I smiled and told her it feels like reading The Alchemist. The book hasn’t changed, but you have. And so, it reveals something new each time. Each retreat carries its own theme, its own layer of becoming.

What I didn’t know, what none of us knew, was that this retreat’s theme would be called Alchemica.

The Alchemist.

Of course.

The synchronicities began immediately… and they didn’t stop all week and are still continuing. The kind that make you pause. The kind that make you smile, your heart explode with joy. The kind that remind you you’re being guided.

And the word I drew that first day?

Abundance.

Not the loud kind.
Not the striving kind.

The quiet, holy kind.
The kind that comes when you remember who you are.

There was so much peace, the kind that settles into your bones. Insights that felt like gentle whispers from the Divine… and others that cracked something open inside me. I was invited, lovingly but unmistakably, to see myself more clearly. My patterns. My defenses. My tenderness.

And to see others in my life through compassion rather than protection.

It felt sacred.

It also felt confronting.

Because real alchemy is not aesthetic. It is not passive. It is fire. It is surrender. It is staying when your nervous system wants to run. It is softening when your ego wants to defend.

It is choosing to unbecome… so you can become.

There were moments that felt magical; time bending, heart opening, tears falling without story. And there was effort. So much effort. Presence. Breath. Returning again and again when my mind wandered. Choosing love and acceptance, over habit.

Each time I go, I meet another layer of myself.

Each time I come home, I am more myself.

That is the miracle.

That is the abundance.

And I am deeply grateful for the courage to keep stepping into the unknown, into the fire, trusting that what emerges will always be more true than what I left behind.

-Elizabeth