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.
