2027 retreat
Origin
Five days on a mile of private beach on the Pacific coast of Mexico. Four days of hands-on, hands-in care.
January 23–28, 2027
Playa Viva, Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo, Mexico
"Women's CARE is meant to be in the hands of women."
Ma School was founded on that sentence. Four years in, we know what happens when women gather to receive this work. Your body lets go of what it has held for years. Something in you comes home.
Origin Retreat is the final retreat of the Womb Continuum Practitioner training, the week our graduating practitioners bring everything they have studied into their hands. You are invited to be the woman on the table. Five days, four three-hour bodywork sessions and a circle of women trained to hold it.
Every woman begins in the pelvis. Every body begins in the earth. Origin is five days of coming home to both.
Twelve hours of HANDS ON care In four days.
Three hours on the table, on each of the four days, with two practitioners who are yours for the week. Twelve hours of hands-on, hands-in pelvic care in total.
This is care most women never receive in a lifetime. Here you are given days with the same hands, with nothing else asked of you. Each morning your body is r
ready to go a little deeper.
Who This is for
Who This is for
You had a baby a year ago, five years ago, twenty years ago, and nobody ever closed you.
You had surgery. You lost a pregnancy. You have been holding something in your pelvis for so long you stopped noticing it was there.
You are nearing your last blood, and no one has prepared you for it.
You give this work to other women, and you have never received it in this way.
You do not need to know Ma School. You do need a history with your own body: bodywork you have received, a practice you return to, a relationship with the body you live in. This week is for women already on the path, and it takes them deeper.
You had surgery. You lost a pregnancy. You have been holding something in your pelvis for so long you stopped noticing it was there.
You are nearing your last blood, and no one has prepared you for it.
You do not need to know Ma School. You do need to know your own body. You have been listening to it for a while now. Origin is where you go deeper.
You give this work to other women, and you have never received it in this way.
the week
Every morning opens with movement, to arrive in the body before anyone's hands are on it.
Mornings and afternoons hold the sessions. On four of the five days, you receive three hours of bodywork from your two practitioners, with faculty in the room. Between sessions there are workshops and the land itself — the beach, the estuary, the farm.
Every evening closes in circle. Time to integrate, and time to speak.
7:30
Movement on the deck
8:30 Breakfast
10:00 - 13:00
Session or a workshop
13:00
Lunch. Rest. The beach.
15:00 - 18:00
Workshop and/or integration
18:00
Dinner
19:30
Circle
A day at Origin
the work
The sessions are Womb Continuum Medicine in practice: hands-on, hands-in pelvic care, worked layer by layer. Fascia. Muscle. Organ. Blood. Lymph. Bone. Four days of sessions give the time to move slowly through every one of them, and to restore flow, alignment and space where the body has held for years.
Every session is given by Intelligent Hands, hands that have spent 18 months learning to read the body's language. They know what they are touching, and why.
the women
Two practitioners work with you across the week, each at the end of 18 months of study. Two practitioners means two pairs of hands and two ways of listening, and your body is met by both. You receive everything they have learned. They receive the experience of holding a woman, fully, across a whole week.
Nothing happens without your yes. Boundaries are set before the first session and can change at any moment. The work moves from the outside in. Internal work is offered on the last two days, never assumed, and your practitioners follow your body day by day.
the workshops
Between sessions, the practitioners lead. Each one brings something she has learned and loves, and teaches it to the circle. It might be a way of touching your own belly or breasts or a practice for the breath. What opened on the table in the morning has space to integrate in the afternoon.
The Place
The land holds you too: a mile of wild coast, an turtle sanctuary, a farm, and the wild pacific ocean. Nestled between the sparkling waters of the Pacific Ocean and the majestic Sierra Madre Mountains, Playa Viva sits on a mile of pristine private beach surrounded by lush green palms. You'll fall asleep to the lullaby of the Pacific and wake to the warm breeze on your skin.
Combining simple elegance with natural beauty and a commitment to improving the environment and the local community, Playa Viva is a sustainable boutique hotel on the western coast of Mexico, 45 minutes south of Zihuatanejo/Ixtapa International Airport (ZIH).
The property's nearly 200 acres include an estuary, an Aztec archaeological site, a turtle sanctuary, and a coastal forest and mangrove ecosystem that supports an array of stunning wildlife.
Playa Viva's commitment is to deliver a farm-to-table dining experience: fresh, healthy food from their own permaculture farm and other local farmers. They take health seriously, and that mindset starts with the health of the earth and continues through every living system that supports food production — the land, the producer, and every guest.
- Blaney, Origin 2025
I had a very traumatic experience in 2020 that took me to the darkest corners of myself, and the path of healing from it led me to Origin. I was nervous. I didn’t know what womb continuum care was, I’d never received bodywork like it, and I’d never left my kids for that long. But I had a deep inner knowing that my body needed to receive this work and my spirit needed to be in a group of like-minded women.
Receiving in a group setting is so profound. I honestly think it was the first time I knew I wasn’t alone in trying to heal what had happened to me. It was also the first time I’d received touch where nobody wanted anything from me. Understanding that my body is for me was one of the most profound realizations of my life.
The whole thing was life-changing.
your guides
Andrea Terrones
Andrea is the founder and lead teacher of Ma School and of Ma, her women's health and bodywork practice based in Valle de Bravo, Mexico, and working with women worldwide. Her work rests on one conviction: the female body is wise. Nothing it does is a mistake — it adapts, it remembers, and it reorganizes when it is met with the right kind of attention. She left medical school to find a medicine that could hold the whole body. This work began in her own, with a cycle that went silent for nearly two years after a decade on birth control, a body gone numb, and a search that no textbook could answer. What followed was more than a decade of apprenticeship with traditional midwives, sobadoras, and curanderas across Mexico, a path that led her back to the matriarchal lineage of Juchitán, Oaxaca, that she comes from through her grandmothers. She paired it with formal training in pelvic bodywork and functional medicine.
She works with the body as one system, bringing together hands-on work in the pelvis, womb, and abdomen, functional nutrition and lab work, somatic practice and ceremony. Becoming a mother of two was the initiation underneath every other training she has received.
She has spent twenty-five years studying the body, and ten years teaching and leading retreats. Ma School is what she built from all of it. She teaches the way she was taught, hand to hand, and she holds her students to the standard her own teachers held her to. Now in its fourth year, the school exists to train the practitioners who carry this work forward, so that women’s care returns to women’s hands.
Mandy Verghese
Mandy is a mother, bodyworker, herbalist and professionally trained midwife. She has spent the last 16 years attending hundreds upon hundreds of births across the full midwifery care continuum, from remote homebirths to busy international hospitals in urban settings.
Her career has been shaped by a continued pursuit of what best supports innate female physiology, a thread that has led her into advanced training in prenatal and breech-specific abdominal bodywork, craniosacral therapy, Womb Continuum Care, scar remediation, and herbalism for women's health. She has also studied female movement biomechanics and strength training and their influence on posture, pelvic health, and fetal positioning.
As a teacher, Mandy has a gift for translating complex physiological concepts into language that's precise and immediately usable, for practitioners and the women they serve. She has a unique ability to marry science, biological reality, culture, intuition, and felt sense in her role as a health educator and guide. Her life’s work led her to develop Wombspace training for prenatal bodywork, co-create Born Through Movement, and join Ma School as a co-teacher.
Mandy's calling is to grow the skills of birth attendants and bodyworkers, and to carry the wisdom of physiological womanhood forward for the next generation.
She currently lives on the west coast of Canada.
Details
Dates
Arrive Saturday, January 23, 2027. Depart Thursday, January 28, 2027.
Travel
Fly into Zihuatanejo/Ixtapa International Airport (ZIH). Playa Viva is 45 minutes south. Their team meets you at the airport and drives you to the retreat; transfers in both directions are included in your retreat fee. Aim to land by 1 pm on the 23rd; departures on the 28th after breakfast.
You will stay in one of Playa Viva's treehouses: open bamboo structures with two double bedrooms and one shared bathroom. You share your room with one other woman and your bathroom with three. Every bed has a mosquito net. Bring a light layer for the evenings and nothing you would mind getting sand on.
ACCOMMODATIONS
Apply at the link below. Once your application is in, we will send you a link to schedule a conversation with Andrea. If accepted, a non-refundable deposit of $1,500 USD holds your place. The balance is due before the retreat.
APPLICATION
Your retreat fee includes airport transfers, lodging, all meals, every session and teaching, activities on the land, taxes and gratuities. Flights are not included.
This is an intimate circle Only 8 places. One for each practitioner.
$1,500 deposit due upon acceptance + balance of $3,500 due by December 15.
pay-in-full
$5,000
+ $1,500 deposit, due upon acceptance. 3 additional monthly payments are due November 15, December 15 and January 15.
