The wellness industry owes you an apology

You track your sleep. You take your magnesium. You time your protein within 30 minutes of your workout because you read something about it once and now you can't unread it. You are optimizing, constantly, and by every measurable standard you're doing great.

So why doesn't it feel like you're well enough?

Here's what I think happened. Wellness started as a correction. A good one, honestly. A pushback against a culture that ran people into the ground and called it ambition. Slow down. Rest. Take care of yourself. That part was right. Then it overcorrected.

Then capitalism figured out how to capitalize on it.

Suddenly rest had a product. Recovery had a protocol. Joy had a supplement stack. The thing that was supposed to free you became another list of things to optimize, and if you weren't doing all of them, there was a $47 powder that could help.

The wellness industry doesn't actually profit from you feeling well. It profits from you feeling almost well, almost enough, almost there. The shame isn't a side effect. It's the business model.

And then your company got the memo.

Chair yoga at noon. A meditation app on your work phone. Mental health days, sandwiched between two of the most demanding weeks of the quarter. It's well-intentioned, I think. But the effect is its own kind of cruel. The demands of your job didn't go anywhere. The inbox is still full. The calendar didn't clear itself. So when the chair yoga doesn't fix the stress, you don't think: this was an inadequate solution to a structural problem. You think: something is wrong with me. I can't even do the easy thing right.

That's not a you problem. The tool was just never built for the job.

I started Dame Lodge because I wanted the opposite of all of it.

Not a retreat where someone guides you through your inner child. Not a wellness weekend with cold plunges and a no-phone policy and a worksheet about your nervous system. I didn't want more rigidity dressed up as freedom.

I wanted what my nephew gets every day at preschool. Mud. Glitter paint. A costume dance party for no reason. The complete, blissful absence of self-improvement as a goal.

I wanted to be unoptimized for 48 hours.

Dame Lodge is a women's community built around weekends like that. Mountain cabin, shared meals, good drinks, real connection. There's structure to the weekend, it's just not yours to manage. Chef is handled. Activities are handled. You just show up. The women who come are already high-functioning. They don't need another thing to do right. They need permission to do nothing particularly well for a weekend.

Something happens when you give yourself that. You stop performing. Your shoulders drop. You laugh louder than you have in months at something completely stupid. You drive home with the windows down.

You come back better, not because you worked on yourself, but because you stopped for a minute.

If that sounds like what you need: beta weekend is May 15 in Silverthorne, and the waitlist is open. We also do Denver pop-ups if you want a taste closer to home.