Jumpstart Your SOULjourn!
This year our logo is reminiscent of the timeless wisdom of our grandmothers and acknowledges our ancestral homeland as the "Grandmother of Mexico". Holding an Aztec calendar based on earlier calendars (Olmec, Mayan, etc.) she reminds us of the importance of ritual, ceremony, and acknowledgment as we traverse through time and the cycles of life. Change and transformation are symbolized in the monarch butterflies which come home to Mexico in a glorious migration journey of their own.
Jumpstart Your Souljourn Retreat 2024 *SOLD OUT* Thank you
Jumpstart Your SOULjourn II Retreat 2025
Registration is open
Dates of 2025 Retreat: February 21-27, 2025
Email sunyafolayan@seesunya.online for 2025 Waiting List
Jumpstart Your Souljourn 2025
February 21-27, 2025
Chapala, Jalisco, Mx.
Do you have a desire to live with more freedom, ease, expansion and adventure? Have you an urgency to experience more? Have you considered exploring the land, culture, and language of inland Mexico, and experiencing this colorful and vibrant area for yourself, and perhaps your family? Jumpstart Your Souljourn is your opportunity to come to the lakeside villages of Chapala, Mexico and to come home to yourself. Move from wondering how to experience the components of a softer life to actualizing an expanded way of being that includes more ease, caring community, beauty, and freedom. Join us in Mexico this winter and make it happen.
Jumpstart your SOULjourn II is the soft-landing to your very SOUL. It is also your official welcome to the Lakeside area of Jalisco, Mexico, characterized by Lake Chapala, Mexico's largest lake, and the surrounding towns and smaller pueblos. This experience is designed to give hands-on information to Black women, especially those considering their future and life at retirement.
Africa is considered the "Grandmother of Mexico" due to the significant cultural and genetic legacy of African people in addition to the various other indigenous peoples of North America. African, Indigenous, and European customs have shaped Mexico's music, dance, art and cuisine. Our old and new genetic legacies have been documented and are celebrated in many places in Mexico as Afro-Mexican identity is awakened and celebrated. Just as we came centuries before and during the Transatlantic Slave Trade through Southern routes, our diasporic footprints continue to create new migratory patterns and make history today. You will tap into the wisdom of your own foremothers and embrace the wisdom and energy of the land as you journey within.
If you are ready to seize the time, expand your territory, and embody the change that's inside of you, then this retreat is for you.
About Your Facilitators
Your soft-landing retreat experience:
Enjoy Two daily meals of authentic, nutritious, and varied Mexican cuisine and other diverse flavors. Find yourself in the culinary roots of Africa in Mexican food, flavors, textures and colors. Drink Red Jamaica tea, Horchata, and Tamarindo; savor red rice and black bean dishes, and so much more as you uncover the West African foundations of so many Mexican dishes.
Hotel Memora in Chapala will be your base. You will choose to reside in a two-bedroom, two-bathroom shared bungalow, or a one bedroom one bath building in which you will reside alone. Located 10 minutes by taxi from Chapala Centro, you will find this peaceful haven along the lower side of a mountain. On your rest days, enjoy the boutiques, shops and artisan offerings, art galleries, music, and color, of Ajijic and Chapala, as the backdrop for your activities. Tap into these communities, enjoy fragrant coffee and pasteles at dusk on a sidewalk table at the town's Plaza Centro, and tap into your own magic, actualizing the dreams that have been placed inside of you.
Each participant will enjoy two spa treatments as well as a day to luxuriate in the thermal waters of San Juan Cosala-s spas..
Our excursion is to one of the area's thermal spas that bring forth varying degrees of heated volcanic healing mineral spring water. Luxuriate for hours in a pool of fragrant flowers, immerse your body in the healing smoothness of an Avena bath, and experience the decadence of the gentle exfoliation of coffee on one's skin followed by fragrant floral and herbal vapors for the face and neck and body. No rushing through this experience, you will want to linger for a while!
After your thermal waters experience, enjoy a breathtaking, mountainside dinner at sunset overlooking Lake Chapala from one of the most spectacular vistas in the area. Allow yourself to be awestruck by the beauty of the starry sky and the enchanting twinkling lights floating below on the lake as we dine by candlelight under a soaring thatched- roof palapa.
You will enjoy a closing rooftop reception at the home of the hosts, Sunya Folayan and Donna Jones in Chapala, where you will meet local residents, friends, and neighbors for a "Mirador Mingle".
Get answers to all of your questions about residency in Mexico from a local attorney we know and trust in our Informational workshop on residency. Get insider information on paths to residency in Mexico in 2025.
Experience informational presentations and bring your questions about safety, law, and daily life from local professionals who are poised to serve you in the following professional areas: real estate, medical, Spanish language proficiency, end-of-life, culinary, public safety, and law.
Wake up to Embodiology movement in the mornings. Engage your body and prepare your mind to receive all that is in store for you... and you will draw upon the grounding movement in a closing water blessing ceremony at Lake Chapala.
We will close out the experience with a water blessing ceremony at Lake Chapala incorporating some of the themes developed during the Embodiology sessions participated in during the week.
Jumpstart the sojourn to your SOUL's desires in the private bungalows on the lower campus of Hotel Memora in Chapala, Mexico. Here, on a lower hillside overlooking Lake Chapala, you will experience beautiful views of the wooded landscape and breathe in the lovely expanse of Lake Chapala.
Memora Hotel Bungalows Chapala, Jalisco, Mexico
(embed video here)
other, Gardener, Embodiology® Practitioner, Chef, Mentor, Photographer, Arts/
Health/Environmental Activist, Warrior
Following a thirty-year international career in dance performance, pedagogy,
theater/film production and arts and business management, Ms Lovell
embarked on her fourth career as a holistic bodywork practitioner starting her
next entrepreneurial venture Body & Soul Therapies in 2004.
Ms Lovell now retired, currently lives on the east coast, conducting and
attending national and international seminars and workshops, impacting her
various communities as a business-as-usual disrupter, environmental, health and
arts activist, business mentor, wellness consultant, and certified Embodiology®
Practitioner and Instructor.
Discovering, executing, and sharing how to love the creative forces that nurture
and shape every aspect of our lives
Dancer, Choreographer, Actress, Director, Producer, Film maker, Arts & Science &
Technology Researcher and Administrator, Holistic Wellness Practitioner, Globetrotter,
Mother, Gardener, Embodiology® Practitioner, Chef, Mentor, Photographer, Arts/
Health/Environmental Activist, Warrior
Following a thirty-year international career in dance performance, pedagogy,
theater/film production and arts and business management, Ms Lovell
embarked on her fourth career as a holistic bodywork practitioner starting her
next entrepreneurial venture Body & Soul Therapies in 2004.
Ms Lovell now retired, currently lives on the east coast, conducting and
attending national and international seminars and workshops, impacting her
various communities as a business-as-usual disrupter, environmental, health and
arts activist, business mentor, wellness consultant, and certified Embodiology®
Practitioner and Instructor.
Discovering, executing , and sharing how to love the creative forces that nurture
and shape every aspect of our lives
You will be assigned a coach and will receive group and individualized coaching sessions to address 5 cashflow strategies to take into middle age, and into retirement. Your retreat experience and preparation will begin in January 2025, in advance of your arrival in Mexico in January.
Space for this retreat is limited, so register early, check your passport, and pack your bags!
What's included:
Cost: $1097.00 per person for retreat in shared bungalow; 1397.00 for retreat in private bungalow. (Early bird registration lasts through January 21, 2025. Price includes lodging, 2 daily meals, workshops, financial success tools, coaching, two individual spa treatments, trip to thermal waters, Embodiology sessions; transportation and admission to thermal waters, and transportation toto and including mountaintop dinner.
(Airfare, taxi to and from hotel, individual sight-seeing/shopping trips on rest days, and alcoholic beverages are not included in price.)
Our recommended travel vendor is Mary Heredia of Viajes Chapala, our preferred travel professional for airline tickets and world travel. She is our bi-lingual Chapala based travel agent who supports our business, provides courteous service and is committed to helping our customers get the best prices.
Email: viajeschapala@hotmail.com Phone: Whatsapp +33228643335 Phone: 3766884808+52
Airport: You will fly into Guadalajara International Airport. Airport taxis are plentiful and easily accessible from the front portico of the airport near the hotel. The cost of taxi service is approximately 550 pesos (Approx. 35.00 in U.S. dollars.) Our retreat location is approximately 20 minutes from the airport.
