What Women Are Actually Getting Out of Those Menopause Retreats

The biggest takeaway often goes beyond simply alleviating symptoms.

January 23, 2026

illustration of massage table in a field of flowers

Bobbing in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of a resort in Todos Santos, Mexico, a circle of women marvel at the colorful fish. Between whooshing waves, they chat about a wellspring of deeply personal topics, like challenges with intimacy or the parts of themselves they fear or have pushed down in service of others, their faces warm with kindness. You’d be forgiven for mistaking them as longtime friends. But they’re actually near-strangers, women who’d met a couple days prior on a menopause retreat called Emergence hosted by intimacy coach and somatic therapist Zoë Kors.

Among them was Aran Klingensmith, 52, who tells SELF she felt more at peace in that moment than she could remember feeling in her adult life. She’d spent the previous decade navigating the turbulence of perimenopause, or the lead-up to menopause marked by declining estrogen. Anxiety, insomnia, and weight gain struck seemingly out of nowhere, but her doctors downplayed her concerns, leaving her isolated, even questioning her sanity.

As her symptoms eased, Klingensmith felt detached from her sense of self, of purpose. “I found myself at a crossroads,” she says. Her life had been focused outward, on building a career and raising her sons. But menopause was changing who she was on the inside. Digging for info on navigating this transition eventually led her to the retreat, which posed an opportunity to recover from the wrath and perhaps even rediscover her identity as a newly minted woman in midlife.

Like the boom of menopause-centric products, menopause retreats support a demo that is not only on the rise (more than a billion women will be menopausal globally by 2030) but historically ignored. “There’s been a long-standing stigma around menopause and aging, which leaves many people feeling underserved at this stage of life,” Melissa Biggs Bradley, founder of Indagare, a luxury trip planning and travel media company, tells SELF. It was the impetus behind the brand’s first Wise Women’s Health Retreat, at Canyon Ranch Lenox, in 2023, which was so well-received, it held another in the fall of 2025, at Palazzo Fiuggi, in Italy, and a third is in the works.

Travel is an apt medium for menopause support, as women 50-plus are the industry’s fastest-growing demo in the US and Canada, a majority of them solo travelers. Many have spent decades raising a family and rising through the ranks, and finally have the time and money to invest in themselves, Doni Belau, founder and CEO of Girls’ Guide to the World, tells SELF.

There’s no one way to do that, and the menopause retreat isn’t one thing either. Some happen at luxe resorts, involve lab tests and emerging wellness tech, or tap an array of practitioners; others are low-fi, embracing ancient remedies amid the backdrop of nature. Read on to get a glimpse inside the menopause retreat, and learn why the takeaway is often less tangible—and more profound—than the sum of its parts.

Menopause retreats take a holistic approach, addressing a range of symptoms and needs.

Many feature offerings you might find at a wellness retreat—like yoga, movement, meditation, time outdoors, and sunlight—all of which can be restorative when you’re going through the gauntlet of perimenopause, Sameena Rahman, MD, a Chicago-based ob-gyn and menopause specialist, tells SELF. For Isabel van Zuilen, 50, it was the idea of a relaxing escape amid redwood forests that initially inspired her to attend “Hot, Not Bothered,” a menopause retreat in Scotts Valley, California, hosted by functional medicine practitioners.

Menopause retreats at properties with spas take that tension-melting vibe a step further. For instance, you can slip into herbal steam caverns and thermal plunge pools while on Kamalaya Koh Samui’s Radiant Bliss retreat in Thailand; or a Finnish sauna, marine vaporium, and Turkish bath during Palasiet Thalasso’s Vital Menopause program in Spain.

These experiences are often paired with treatments and activities geared toward relief from specific symptoms. There are Kegel exercise classes for pelvic floor support at The Retreat Costa Rica’s The Big M program; somatic dance workshops for anxiety at Kors’s Emergence retreat in Mexico; and acupuncture and herbal remedies to help temper hormone swings at the Hormonal Rebalance retreat at Ananda in the Himalayas. And then there’s all the emerging tech, like a device that shrouds your body in inflammation-reducing red light at Carillon’s Miami Wellness Resort’s Inner Glow retreat, and a zero-gravity recliner at Canyon Ranch Lenox that can rescue you from menopausal rage at its M/Power retreat.

Plenty of these retreats also have an eye toward offering info and tools you can apply at home too, with expert-led programming. (It’s worth checking to ensure that the leaders have legit, relevant training.) At “Hot, Not Bothered,” for instance, van Zuilen gained a new understanding of how metabolism changes postmenopause, and how dietary tweaks may ease bloating and “meno belly.” Workshops at Miraval Arizona offer advice on busting menopause-induced insomnia and making sense of nebulous symptoms like brain fog.

At Menopausitive Workshop’s Light Me Up! retreat in Sonoma, helpful takeaways is the central focus—it launched last March with programming from experts like a women’s strength training specialist, culinary nutritionist, and pelvic floor physical therapist, and this year’s iteration will add mental health and intimacy support. “I’m hoping the women [who attended] are doing box breathing to music in their car because I taught them how, or making the carrot-miso dip from our nutritionist,” Nikki Pearl, MA, cofounder of Menopausitive Workshop and yoga instructor, tells SELF. “I’m hoping little things stick with [participants] and make them feel like they’re taking care of themselves.”

Learnings can also be personalized at retreats offering one-on-one medical consultations, sometimes including diagnostic tests. For example, programs at Combe Grove, in the United Kingdom, and various Six Senses locations involve blood tests to take a look at hormones and metabolic factors, and a continuous glucose monitor you wear for the length of your stay; Carillon’s retreat taps both lab work and sleep-tracking via a Bryte Balance smart bed, as well as a functional assessment with a personal trainer. And at Canyon Ranch’s M/Power, you get a DEXA scan (to check bone density) and a body composition workup to inform guidance from a menopause-certified physician.

“Depending on where a woman is in her menopause journey, that chat can range from, ‘What stress relief can we do? How can we help you focus a bit better? Are there dietary changes or fitness recommendations that we can make?’ all the way through to, ‘Let’s talk about a plan for menopause hormone therapy,’” Jennifer Wagner, MD, chief health and performance officer at Canyon Ranch, tells SELF.

This kind of focused intel on menopause, whether served up in a group or individual setting, can be especially valuable to the women, like Klingensmith, whose symptoms get brushed off by their doctors. Too many ob-gyns still lack the education necessary to connect the dots. And confusion around hormone therapy has only widened the care gap, keeping plenty of women from a treatment that can alleviate common symptoms, Somi Javaid, MD, a Cincinnati-based ob-gyn and founder of women’s health care platform HerMD, tells SELF.

Even doctors who are well-versed in menopause often just don’t have time to address the spectrum of symptoms and solutions. “I would love to talk to you about nutrition and femtech and pelvic floor physical therapy and mental health and hormones and nonhormone therapy, but that’s not going to be covered in one visit,” says Dr. Javaid, who spoke on sexual health in midlife at a menopause retreat at Canyon Ranch Tucson in 2023. These immersive programs can supply the lifestyle guidance often missing from a doctor’s appointment, while arming you with info to access better health care too.

Beyond supporting women through this phase, menopause retreats help them rethink it—and reclaim their power.

As much as the menopause retreat offers tips and tools for navigating this stage, it doesn’t reduce it to a set of symptoms to be solved. It reframes menopause as a life stage worth embracing, one that can be not just pleasant but full of potential.

Part of that comes simply with dedicating a weekend or longer, often in a serene natural setting or resort, to the topic of menopause and how you’re faring. That alone can be transformative for women like Klingensmith, who rarely find even an hour for self-care. “To not be responsible for anything else—work emails, mom needs—was an extraordinary gift,” Klingensmith says. It gave her the space to see herself anew, “not as a caregiver, not in my profession, but just as a person who, in her own right, has worth.”

Talks and workshops at menopause retreats often further this positive narrative. At Emergence, Klingensmith joined circle chats led by Kors, centered around disconnecting from limiting self-beliefs and carving out a fresh path forward. A similar theme ties together the speaker series at Act 2, a menopause retreat at Alisal Ranch, in California, that Lisa Algert, 55, has attended twice in recent years. Hearing a range of midlife women—journalists, doctors, stylists, entrepreneurs—share their stories of growth, loss, pivots, and more, helped put her own experience into perspective. “The vibe was less about self-optimization and the 10 things, including tongue scraping and dry brushing and breathwork, we need to do before 8 a.m.,” she says. “It was like, ‘Hey, you’ve got lived-in wisdom, and you’re great as you are.’”

The setting of a menopause retreat also invites dialogue about a topic that has for so long been taboo, something you might not even be comfortable surfacing with a partner or friend. Being “among women who don’t know your backstory, but who recognize your experience” can make it easier to speak freely, Algert says. “When you share something vulnerable in a breakout session, or over coffee, or even late-night in the hot tub, you don’t get gossip or interpretation. You get recognition, nods, ‘Me too.’”

It’s the kind of validation Klingensmith felt that day floating in the waves. Having the opportunity to reconnect with her sense of self and story, and find common threads with others, instilled new strength and confidence. And that’s no small feat, given menopause has long been pinned as a fizzling-out, a time when women lose value. “We’re no longer young and sexy according to society’s terms, so we get written off as irrelevant,” Klingensmith says. “And yet, the consensus for a lot of us [on the retreat] was that we feel more powerful and more capable of being in tune with ourselves than ever before.”