Welcome to Your Third Act.
It’s Time to Live Fully.
There is a story our culture tells about midlife and menopause. It is a story of endings, diminishing possibilities, and gradual decline. We see this season differently. If you are reading these words, perhaps you do too. Perhaps the restlessness you feel, the questions that refuse to disappear, or the growing awareness that the life you built no longer reflects who you are have arrived for a reason. They may be inviting you to turn inward with courage and curiosity. They may be asking you to explore what you have spent years protecting, avoiding, or setting aside so that you can enter the next chapter of your life with greater freedom, authenticity, and purpose.
Third Act Awakening is a year-long initiatory journey for women who are ready to embrace midlife as a season of profound transformation. Through embodied practice, contemplative inquiry, creative exploration, and supportive community, this program invites you to step into the third act of your life fully awake, deeply rooted in your own wisdom, and ready to live with clarity, vitality, and wholehearted presence.
What Is The Third Act Awakening?
Third Act Awakening is an immersive, year-long journey for a small cohort of twelve to twenty women who are ready to engage the profound transitions of midlife with courage, curiosity, and wholehearted commitment. We intentionally keep the group small because lasting transformation grows in authentic relationship. Within a trusted community, women witness one another, encourage one another, and discover that they do not have to navigate this season of life alone.
The year is anchored by three immersive retreats at Triveni Ashram Sanctuary in the breathtaking high desert of northern Arizona. Between retreats, monthly online gatherings provide opportunities to integrate insights, deepen relationships, and continue the work together. These ongoing meetings ensure that transformation extends beyond the retreat experience and becomes woven into the fabric of everyday life.
Throughout the year, we draw from a rich integration of embodied and contemplative practices, including yoga, Integrative Breathwork and journey work, somatic awareness, Inner Parts Work, expressive arts, contemplative practice, and skilled group facilitation. Rather than presenting these as separate techniques, we weave them together into a coherent path of self-discovery and transformation.
Together, these practices invite you to honor your past with compassion, meet your present with honesty, and step into your future with greater freedom, wisdom, and authenticity. Supported by experienced guides and a community of remarkable women, you will cultivate the clarity, resilience, and embodied presence to enter the third act of your life fully awake and deeply aligned with who you are becoming.
The Arc: Past, Present, Future
Third Act Awakening moves through time itself — as a metaphor, and as the actual architecture of the year. You cannot meet the present cleanly while the past is still running the show underneath it. And you cannot meet the future honestly from inside a present you haven't actually faced. So we go in order. Each retreat has its own relationship to time, and each builds the ground the next one stands on.
Retreat One: The Past- July 8-11, 2027
We begin by turning toward the past. This retreat invites us to acknowledge what has shaped us through the years: what we have lost, left behind, forgotten, surrendered, or never had the opportunity to choose. Midlife often reveals the quiet accumulation of grief that accompanies a life fully lived. Many of these experiences have never received the attention, compassion, or ceremony they deserve. Together, we create space to honor them with honesty and care.
Through a guided grief process and an Integrative Breathwork journey, we move beyond the narratives we have constructed about our lives and into the wisdom held within the body. As long-held patterns begin to soften, memories, emotions, and insights naturally emerge. We meet them with curiosity, compassion, and respect, allowing them to become part of an ongoing process of healing and integration. Healing begins when we tell the truth about our lives. As we acknowledge our past with openness and compassion, we reclaim the energy that has remained bound to unfinished grief and unresolved experience. Every meaningful crossing begins by recognizing where we have been.
Retreat Two: The Present October 7-10, 2027
Here we stop looking backward. We stop reaching ahead. Instead, we ask a single, courageous question: What is actually here?
This retreat invites us to meet the present moment with openness and honesty. Together, we explore our relationships, our work, our bodies, our choices, and the stories that have shaped our lives. As we deepen our awareness, we begin to recognize the deeper truths that have quietly existed beneath those stories all along. Clear seeing opens the door to greater compassion for ourselves and for others.
The present is where discernment grows. As we develop the capacity to see ourselves with honesty and clarity, we discover that each moment offers an opportunity to choose with greater freedom, wisdom, and intention. We gradually loosen the influence of old patterns and begin responding to life from a place of deeper awareness.
Retreat Three: The Future- January 20-23, 2028
The final retreat marks the crossing. After honoring the past and meeting the present with honesty, we turn toward the future with clarity, courage, and wholehearted intention.
This retreat invites you to step fully into the life that is calling you. As unfinished grief settles into wisdom and old stories loosen their grip, new possibilities emerge. You begin to recognize the quiet authority, deep vitality, and inner freedom that arise when your life reflects your deepest values rather than familiar patterns.
This is the retreat of integration and emergence. Throughout the year, you have gathered insight, cultivated resilience, and strengthened your capacity for honest self-reflection. Now those discoveries become embodied through the choices you make each day. You learn to choose with clarity, integrity, and the courage to live in alignment with your deepest truth.
Monthly Gatherings Online- Dates TBD
Transformation unfolds through the ordinary moments of daily life. It grows through the conversations we have, the choices we make, the patterns we recognize, and the ways we learn to meet ourselves with increasing honesty, compassion, and courage.
Between retreats, our cohort gathers each month on Zoom to continue the journey together. These gatherings weave together reflective dialogue, contemplative practice, experiential learning, and meaningful conversation, creating a steady rhythm of connection, accountability, and integration throughout the year. Each session deepens the work of the previous retreat while preparing us for the next. Together, we explore the questions, insights, and challenges that naturally emerge as we begin to embody what we are discovering. Gradually, the wisdom gained during retreat becomes part of everyday life, shaping our relationships, our work, our creativity, our spirituality, and the choices we make each day.
The monthly gatherings also deepen the bonds of community. As each woman shares her unfolding journey, the collective wisdom of the group offers perspective, encouragement, and compassionate witness. We discover that transformation moves in rhythms and seasons, and that shared experience gives us the strength to keep going. Throughout the year, we walk beside you with care, encouragement, and skilled guidance. We cultivate a supportive container where insight becomes practice, practice becomes embodiment, and lasting transformation can take root.
The Modalities
Transformation rarely happens through a single practice. It unfolds through many doorways—body and mind, movement and stillness, creativity and community, insight and experience. Third Act Awakening weaves together a rich tapestry of complementary modalities, each offering a unique pathway into deeper awareness, healing, and wholehearted living.Guided by Christina Sell and Devi Cavitt Razo, these practices form an integrated approach that honors the complexity of being human while supporting meaningful and lasting transformation.
Breathwork & Journey Work
Breath is one of the most direct pathways beyond the stories we tell ourselves and into the wisdom the body has been carrying all along. Each retreat includes a facilitated breathwork and journey experience designed to move beneath conscious thought, creating space for emotional release, deep insight, and profound integration. Rather than talking about our lives, we encounter them directly through the intelligence of the body and imagination.
Inner Parts Work & Somatic Facilitation
Drawing from Internal Family Systems, somatic psychology, and embodied awareness practices, we explore the rich inner landscape that shapes our lives. Together we meet the protective patterns, adaptive strategies, and forgotten aspects of ourselves with curiosity and compassion. Gentle yet courageous, this work invites greater wholeness by restoring access to the wise, grounded Self that exists beneath our conditioned responses.
Yoga & Embodied Practice
In Christina's teaching, yoga is far more than physical exercise. It is a contemplative discipline and a lifelong practice of self-study that uses movement, breath, and focused awareness to cultivate clarity, resilience, and presence. Accessible to practitioners of all experience levels, these practices help participants reconnect with their bodies as places of wisdom, vitality, and belonging. Yoga classes are optional.
Contemplative Practice
Silence, stillness and contemplation allows us the practice presence. Throughout the year, meditation, reflective inquiry, and contemplative practices create opportunities to slow down, listen deeply, and cultivate the capacity to remain present with life as it is. In a culture that rewards constant activity, learning to inhabit stillness becomes a profound act of restoration.
Expressive Arts & Creative Process
Creativity is for everyone. Creativity is a fundamental expression of the human spirit. Through writing, visual art, movement, guided imagery, and other creative practices, we invite what words alone cannot always express. These experiences awaken imagination, deepen self-understanding, and often reconnect women with creative energies that have been waiting patiently to be reclaimed.
Deep Group Facilitation & Community
The community itself is one of the program's most powerful modalities. Transformation happens within us and between us. Being deeply seen, heard, and witnessed by other women walking a similar path creates possibilities that individual work alone cannot provide. With decades of combined experience facilitating transformative groups, Devi and Christina cultivate a container that is both compassionate and challenging—a community where vulnerability becomes strength, wisdom is shared generously, and each woman's journey enriches the whole.
The Rhythm of the Retreat
Each day of Third Act Awakening follows a thoughtful rhythm that balances movement and stillness, learning and reflection, solitude and community. Every part of the schedule supports deep inner work while leaving room to breathe, rest, and integrate.
The day begins with an optional morning yoga practice led by Christina. These classes welcome participants of every experience level and awaken the body, deepen the breath, and cultivate presence. Many women find that beginning the day with mindful movement creates a steady foundation for everything that follows. We encourage participation while honoring each woman's unique needs, energy, and inner rhythm.
After breakfast, we gather for the morning's primary learning session. Together we engage in teaching, dialogue, experiential exercises, reflective writing, and guided inquiry that weave together psychological insight, spiritual reflection, and embodied practice. Each session encourages participants to think deeply, feel fully, and translate new understanding into lived experience.
Following a shared vegetarian lunch, the afternoon opens into a spacious period for rest, walking the grounds, journaling, or simply enjoying the quiet beauty of the sanctuary. Midlife often invites us to rediscover the wisdom of restoration, and this unhurried time allows the day's insights to settle naturally.
Later in the afternoon, we gather again for creative exploration and integrative psycho-educational work. Through expressive arts, writing, movement, visualization, small group dialogue, and whole group facilitation, participants deepen self understanding while witnessing and supporting one another's journeys. These sessions nurture imagination, insight, and authentic connection, allowing personal discoveries to expand through the wisdom of the community.
Integrative Breathwork
One full day of each retreat is dedicated to Integrative Breathwork and Journey Work, an immersive experiential practice that invites participants into a direct encounter with the deeper dimensions of the psyche.
Through the natural intelligence of the breath, body, imagination, and unconscious mind, participants enter a carefully supported process of exploration and discovery. Within a safe and skillfully facilitated environment, each woman has the opportunity to encounter unresolved emotions, unconscious patterns, personal symbolism, forgotten strengths, and emerging possibilities. The experience unfolds in deeply personal ways, often opening new pathways for healing, insight, and transformation.
Every breathwork journey follows its own unique course. The process responds to what is most alive and ready to emerge in each participant. Following the experience, we guide participants through thoughtful integration practices that include creative expression, reflective writing, contemplative dialogue, and facilitated reflection. These practices help weave new insights into daily life with greater clarity and intention.
Who This Is For
Third Act Awakening is for women standing at the threshold of a new season of life.
You may be navigating perimenopause or menopause. You may be experiencing a significant transition in your relationships, career, health, family, or sense of purpose. Or perhaps nothing dramatic has happened at all—only the quiet but unmistakable feeling that you are being invited to become more fully yourself than your current life allows.
You might recognize yourself here if you are:
Feeling that something is ready to change, even if you can't yet name it.
Standing in the midst of a transition and searching for a more authentic way forward.
Carrying losses, disappointments, or grief that have never been fully acknowledged.
Beginning to recognize lifelong patterns and feeling ready to meet them with honesty and compassion.
Longing for meaningful connection with women who are asking the same courageous questions.
Sensing a renewed creative impulse, spiritual hunger, or desire for a life that feels more deeply aligned.
Someone who spends much of your life caring for others—a teacher, healer, leader, parent, caregiver, or professional—and who is ready to offer your own inner life the same attention and devotion you so freely give everyone else.
Ready to discover what this season of your life is truly asking of you.
You do not need a yoga practice. You do not need to identify with any particular spiritual tradition. You do not need to be in menopause or have your life figured out.You need only be willing to pause, to listen deeply, and to engage your own inner life with curiosity, courage, and honesty.
If you are ready to commit to a year of wholehearted exploration—in the company of other remarkable women, supported by experienced guides, and held within a compassionate community—we would be honored to walk this path with you.
Retreat Location
All three Third Act Awakening retreats will take place at Triveni Ashram Sanctuary, a peaceful retreat center nestled in the high desert of northern Arizona. Surrounded by expansive skies, ancient juniper trees, rugged wilderness, and abundant wildlife, the sanctuary offers a quiet, spacious environment that naturally supports contemplation, renewal, and deep inner work.
Although located in Arizona, the sanctuary's higher elevation creates a climate that is considerably cooler and more temperate than the desert heat of Phoenix. Expect crisp mornings, comfortable daytime temperatures, breathtaking sunsets, and the extraordinary beauty of the high desert landscape.
For many years, Triveni Ashram has welcomed individuals seeking spiritual renewal and personal transformation. Its peaceful atmosphere, thoughtfully designed gathering spaces, and unhurried pace provide an ideal setting for reflection, community, and meaningful retreat. Participants also enjoy delicious, nourishing vegetarian meals prepared fresh on site throughout each retreat.
The most convenient airport is Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (PHX), located approximately two to three hours from the retreat center by car. Many participants choose to rent a vehicle, while others arrange shared transportation with fellow attendees.
Detailed travel information, lodging options, recommended arrival and departure times, and other retreat logistics will be provided after registration, making it easy to plan your journey with confidence. We will also help facilitate ride-sharing among participants whenever possible to make travel more convenient and enjoyable.
Accommodations & Meals
One of the gifts of retreat life is its simplicity. At Triveni Ashram Sanctuary, you'll be invited to step away from the pace of everyday life and settle into a rhythm of practice, reflection, nourishing meals, and meaningful connection. Accommodations are intentionally comfortable, welcoming, and uncomplicated, supporting the contemplative spirit of the retreat rather than distracting from it. The retreat center offers a variety of lodging options, including a limited number of private single rooms, shared double rooms, and several charming glamping accommodations for those who enjoy being even closer to nature. Throughout each retreat, participants enjoy delicious, thoughtfully prepared vegetarian meals served on site. Sharing meals together is an important part of the retreat experience, creating opportunities for conversation, rest, and community between sessions.
Tuition for Third Act Awakening includes lodging and all meals during each of the three retreats. As we get closer to each retreat, participants will receive detailed information about accommodations, arrival and departure times, packing recommendations, travel logistics, and the room selection process so that everyone can prepare with ease and confidence.
Our intention is for every aspect of your stay—from your room to your meals—to support a sense of ease, presence, and belonging, allowing you to focus fully on the transformative work of the year.
About Devi
Devi Cavitt Razo is a leader in human and organizational transformation — and a prolific creator of the programs, tools, and frameworks that make transformation possible at every scale.
Over three decades, she has developed an integrated body of work that spans the personal, the relational, and the systemic. Grounded in spiritual practice and deeply versed in group facilitation, somatic process, inner parts work, family constellations, expressive arts, psychedelic guidance and integration, and contemplative practice, her presence is joyful, deep, and unflinching.
She spent seventeen years as a senior facilitator, lead trainer, and director of training at the Hoffman Process, and has since worked extensively with individuals, organizations, and communities in transition. Devi holds degrees in psychology and organizational development, is an ICF-certified PCC coach, and is the co-creator of Essentials of Self and founder of the Aurum Leadership Institute.
LEARN MORE ABOUT DEVI
About Christina
Christina has dedicated her life to her own healing journey and to learning, practicing, and teaching principles of personal growth, self-inquiry, and conscious living. Prior to her three-decades long immersion in yoga asana, meditation, and teacher development, she worked as a counselor in addictions centers, emotional growth boarding schools and offered Integrative Breathwork trainings and personal growth seminars. Christina has an undergraduate degree in Counseling and Master’s Degree in Integrative Education. She is a certified Anusara yoga teacher and designated Teacher Trainer. She was certified in Integrative Breathwork through Eupsychia in 1995 and is currently apprenticing with her mentor with James Frazier in Neo-Shamanic Breathwork with a focus on shamanism and Jungian studies. She has authored three books on yoga and body image and several professional articles about the yogic journey.
