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your wellness routine needs friends
- ashyaligned
- Jun 8
- 3 min read
There's a generation of us
who got really, really good at being alone.
We mastered the morning routine, the supplement stack, the 9 p.m. bedtime. We learned to protect our energy, cancel plans without guilt, and build lives that felt intentional and quietly controlled. And a lot of that is genuinely good. I'm not here to argue with a well-crafted evening ritual or a Saturday with nowhere to be.
But I've been thinking about something. All that optimization….. who is it actually for?
Because at some point, the solitude stops being restorative and starts being a wall. And your wellness routine, as beautiful and hard-won as it is, was never meant to replace the people.
A few years ago, I went to a coffee and cold plunge event by myself. Totally my kind of thing, and I bought the ticket with the intention of going alone.... And yet I sat in the parking lot for a full hour debating whether to go in. I almost left.
What got me through the door was something I'd heard on a podcast recently: the best way to meet people is to stand in line. It sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but I held onto it. I went in, got in line for coffee, and without luck in the coffee line, meandered my way to the cold plunge. and that's where I met someone I immediately clicked with. She invited me to a breath work class she was hosting the next day. At that breath work class, I met my now-dear friend and business partner.
ALL OF THAT
The business, the friendship, the retreats we'd eventually build together, came from putting myself in places that aligned with my wellness routine.
.
We recently hosted our first retreat in Mallorca with a group of 14 women.
The second I stepped onto the property, my cortisol lowered immediately, I felt what the space was designed for.
But obviously, I was nervous the whole time. Doing something new has a way of humbling you. But what grounded me was knowing that every woman there had shown up because wellness mattered to her. That shared language, even unspoken, made it easy to belong.
We do conversation cards at dinner on our retreats.
Not as an icebreaker gimmick, but because we've learned that the right question, in the right room, at the right table, can do something that months of solo journaling cannot. Women arrived at those tables for different reasons.
Some to heal something specific, some just to rest, some simply to have a good time. All of it was welcome.
That's the point!
What I keep coming back to:
most of us developed our wellness routines because something was hard. Something physical, emotional, or quietly breaking us sent us looking for tools. And those tools work. The rituals, the practices, the intentional mornings, they work.
But some healing doesn't happen in solitude. Some of it only becomes possible when you're witnessed by someone else who has been through it too. We do all this inner work to show up better in the world, and then we have to actually go out into the world. We have to stand in line. Have the courage to put ourselves out there. And show up for others, just like we show up for ourselves.
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