The next retreat
Ikigai Goddess Retreat
Okinawa, Japan · 12 to 19 July 2027 · for eight women only
The first six places 3,333 €
✦ Okinawa, Japan · 12 to 19 July 2027 ✦
Ikigai Goddess Retreat
Find your reason for being, and let abundance, health and joy follow.
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Ikigai is the Japanese idea of what makes life worth living: the reason to get up in the morning. On this retreat we approach it through four questions: what you love, what you are good at, what you want to give the world, and how it can also support you financially. Okinawa is the island through which ikigai became known to the whole world. People there live longer than almost anywhere else, and for centuries the spiritual leaders of these islands were women.
We spend a week where that tradition is still alive. You sit in the sacred places of the Ryukyu priestesses, meditate by turquoise water, eat the food that keeps this island young, and I take you into the deepest work I do, until what you came here to do is no longer a question.
The final ceremony is held under the full moon. You fly home the next morning, still carrying it.
The group is international. I guide in English and Finnish, and the meditations are guided in your own language.
What you take home
Clarity about your purpose. The specific thing, put into words, not a warm feeling that fades on the flight home.
The block that has sat between you and your calling, released. I have done this work for over 20 years, and it is exactly why people come.
Abundance flowing through your purpose rather than beside it, so that money stops being something you handle separately from meaning.
A body that has rested, swum, eaten beautifully and slept in the warmth for a whole week.
Seven other women who know exactly what you are building, and who still know it long after you are home.
✦ Is this you? ✦
This retreat is for you if…
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✦…you know the old way of living is no longer enough, but the next stage does not have a name yet.
✦…you have something to give, build or earn a living from that does not yet fit into your current life.
✦…you do not need more information, but a space where you can hear your own answer.
✦…you want your work, your money and your calling to start moving in the same direction.
✦…you long to be surrounded by women who understand what you are building.
This is not
✦ How we work ✦
Over 20 years of deep inner work
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I have taken groups to sacred places since 2006, from Egypt to Hawaii and Korea. In Okinawa, more than 20 years of my work with meditation, angel work and my Angel Light Hypnosis™ method come together.
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Meditation and ceremonies
In sacred places, on the beach and under the full moon.
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Angel Light Hypnosis™ deep work
We meet what has been keeping you in place.
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Ikigai work
Four questions whose answers you take home into your everyday life.
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Wonderful, wonderful Anu, trustworthy and warm, a big heart. A very rich and varied programme, lots of experiences, big emotions. And in just the right balance, lazy lounging and time of your own.
Tiina Pitkänen
Retreat on Kauai
Why Okinawa
There are many beautiful islands. This one has something more.
If you love Japan and its beautiful culture, Okinawa has something very special for you. Instead of the bustle and busy rhythm of Tokyo and Osaka, time moves differently here. Okinawans talk about their own time, uchinā time, and say nankuru naisa, everything will work out. Here you can breathe, slow down and feel the island's peace in your own body.
The turquoise sea looks almost unreal, but it is completely real. White sand beaches, banyan trees whose roots hang down like curtains, and water that is among the clearest in the world. In July the air is warm and the sea is warm enough to stay in for hours.
Nobody comes here by accident. It is a long journey, and that is exactly why people come when they truly want something to change.
But beauty is not the reason I chose this island.
The island where people live longer than almost anywhere
Okinawa is one of the world's Blue Zones, one of the few places where people live exceptionally long and stay healthy to the end. There are many reasons: food, movement, community and way of life.
For me, two matter most. The first is moai, a lifelong circle in which a few women commit to walking beside each other for life. The second is ikigai, the reason to get up in the morning.
Of all these things, ikigai is the one I can put into your hands. I have taught it for over twenty years. We do not look for your purpose as a beautiful thought that fades on the flight home, but so precisely that you know what you will do with it on Monday morning at home.
You get the circle this week among eight women, and you learn how to build one in your own everyday life. We taste the food together, in the village of Ogimi and at lunch every day. I do not give you a diet or rules. You get to taste what these women really eat, and draw your own conclusions.
What you take home is not a souvenir. It is the reason your next years look different.
✦ Sefa-utaki ✦
Four hundred years when women held the kingdom together
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The Ryukyu Kingdom had kings, but the kingdom was not held together by the king's power. His sister did that.
On these islands it was believed that a woman has the greater spiritual power, and that a man without his sister's protection is vulnerable. That is why the kingdom's most important spiritual leaders were women. The high priestess was the king's sister or daughter, and her task was to protect the king and the whole kingdom with her spiritual power. Under her were three high priestesses, each responsible for a third of the kingdom's sacred places, and under them the priestesses, who were in every village.
In the year 1500, the high priestess told her brother that a military expedition would succeed only if he took the priestess of Kume Island with him. The king did. The expedition succeeded.
A new high priestess was ordained at Sefa-utaki, the same place where we stand on Wednesday. White sand was carried from Kudaka Island, the island the goddess Amamikyu created first, and spread on the ground of the sacred site. Offerings were made at six shrines, and after midnight the high priestess was raised to the rank of a goddess.
This system lived for almost four hundred years, until Japan annexed the kingdom in 1879.
The women of these islands also live longer than almost anyone else in the world. I believe it is no coincidence: purpose, connection and remembering the foremothers have been in women's hands here for centuries.
We do not go to look at it behind glass. We go to stand in it and hold our own ceremony. It is not history that is over, but a reminder of what a woman has been here, and what she still is.
Your week in Okinawa
One thing a day. Never two. This island is meant to be felt, not completed.
What the price includes
You buy a week with me. Flights and accommodation stay in your own hands.
Included in the price
Every teaching, meditation and ceremony with me throughout the week.
Lunch together every day, in Okinawan places I have chosen myself.
The opening dinner and two more shared dinners.
A full day boat trip to the Kerama Islands.
The Sefa-utaki day and the Ogimi day, and our shared transport on the island.
The seawater pools on the last day.
A gift from Okinawa to take home.
What you arrange yourself
Your flights to Okinawa.
Your accommodation. I recommend a few places I have chosen at different price levels and negotiate the best group rate I can, but you book your room yourself.
Breakfasts and the evenings we do not eat together.
Travel insurance that covers cancellation.
Practical information
Everything you need to know before you say yes.
Getting to Okinawa
There are no direct flights from Europe or North America. You fly to Naha via Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul or Taipei. Right after you book, I send you my recommended routes and schedules, so that we arrive on the island at about the same time.
Passport and visa
Citizens of many countries, including the EU, the UK, the US, Canada and Australia, do not need a visa for a stay in Japan of under 90 days. Your passport must be valid for the whole trip. Check the current rules for your own nationality closer to the trip.
Weather and what to pack
In July Okinawa is around 31 degrees and the sea is warm. Light clothes, a swimsuit, a swim cap for the seawater pools, sunscreen, comfortable walking shoes and one warmer layer for the evenings.
Where you stay
You book your own room. I recommend a few places at different price levels, close to each other and to where we gather, and negotiate the best group rate I can. If you would like to share a room, tell me, and I will help you and another woman who wishes the same to find each other. Shared, a room costs about half.
Getting around the island
On programme days we travel together and transport is included. In your free time the island is yours, and I tell you where it is worth going. Okinawa is a safe and easy place to get around on your own too.
Good to know
I sell the retreat programme, not a travel package. You book your flights and your room yourself and travel on your own behalf for those. I ask everyone to have travel insurance that covers cancellation and illness.
Frequently asked questions
What language is the retreat in?
Do I need to be able to swim or snorkel?
How fit do I need to be?
Can I come alone if I do not know anyone?
What if there is a typhoon?
Can special diets be taken into account?
What if I have never been on a retreat?
Can I pay in instalments?
Reserve your place
Eight women. That is the whole retreat.
Eight is not a marketing number. It is the most this retreat can hold while I still see every one of you, while we move easily around the island, and while the week stays personal from the first circle to the last ceremony.
The first six women
3,333 €
After the first six places, 3,777 €. The price only goes up, never down.
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Instalments: 777 € deposit now, 1,278 € on 1 December 2026 and 1,278 € on 1 June 2027. You can also pay the full amount at once.
After the first six places, 3,777 €: 777 € deposit, 1,500 € on 1 December 2026 and 1,500 € on 1 June 2027.
Booking is open until all eight places are taken, at the latest 1 June 2027.
The deposit is not refundable, because it holds one of the eight places and pays for what has to be booked in advance. If you cannot come, you may pass your place to another woman. If I have to cancel the retreat, every payment you have made is returned to you in full. Take travel insurance that covers cancellation due to illness.
July is part of Okinawa's typhoon season. Safety always comes first: if the weather changes our plans, we arrange a replacement programme whenever possible, and we do not refund the share of an individual trip.
How to book your place
1
You pay the deposit
777 €, and one of the eight places is in your name.
2
I write to you
Personally, and you receive the accommodation options, flight recommendations and all the practical instructions.
3
You book flights and a room
At your own pace and on your own budget, with my guidance. You also take out travel insurance.
4
You pay the rest and we go
The second instalment on 1 December 2026, the final one on 1 June 2027. Then we wait for July together.
Ask me anything before you decide. I answer myself, and I do not let anyone else answer for me.
The retreats where it all began
Retreats with Anu Grace
Sacred places. Real awakenings. Small groups.
For over 20 years I have taken people to the places on this earth where the veil is thin. Not to sightsee. To remember who they are.
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Something happens when you meditate where the land itself is holy, when you are far from your everyday life and surrounded by people who are on the same path. Blocks that have held for years dissolve in an afternoon. Gifts you did not know you had wake up. People arrive as one person and go home as another, and their lives rearrange around who they have become.
It started with Egypt. This is the story of the retreats since.
✦ Egypt ✦
Egypt, where it began
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My very first retreat was Egypt, and I did not choose it. Isis came to me in a meditation and asked me to take people to Egypt. I had never led a retreat. I had no idea how. But when a goddess asks, you say yes. So we went.
We walked into the Great Pyramid and sat inside it, where the energy is unlike anywhere else on earth. We stood before the Sphinx. We travelled temple by temple up the Nile all the way to Aswan, and in the Temple of Luxor we found something hidden: a white light of ascension, and we sat in it and meditated until the whole group was lit from the inside.
And then we sailed the Nile, and the journey became something none of us had planned. As the river carried us between the temples, I gave every single person a private past life regression on board. And Atlantis kept showing up, not in everyone's session but in the places themselves. A hand on an ancient stone and suddenly it felt Atlantean. A doorway, a column, and there it was again. What we had booked as a trip to ancient Egypt turned into an ascension journey, and several people in that group had the most powerful awakening of their lives on that water.
Egypt does not ask gently. It opens you, and you leave knowing who you have been.
✦ Kauai · Big Island ✦
Hawaii
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Filmed on my Big Island retreat, with my sons in the water too. Wild dolphin swims are no longer permitted in Hawaii, so this is a memory now, and every retreat finds its own magic.
Hawaii is where I kept returning for more than a decade, most often to Kauai and also to the Big Island. I lived on Kauai for years, and I know its beaches, its forests and its energy the way you know an old friend. On Kauai, every retreat day started the same way: outside, feet in the sand, meditating as the sun came up over the Pacific. We hiked the sacred forests of the Nāpali coast, walked in nature, danced hula and sat in circle at sunset.
The Big Island was the island of ocean and fire. We swam with wild dolphins, back when it was still allowed, and I have never seen a group change so fast as in those hours in the water. We went out on ocean trips, snorkelled, and went to see the volcano, the home of the goddess Pele.
Hawaii teaches through the body: the water, the mountains and the mana of the island do half the work before I have said a word.
✦ From the Kauai retreats ✦
Hear it from the people who were there
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Hawaii retreat, 2014. The interviews are in Finnish, turn on YouTube's auto-translated captions to follow along.
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To Anu the mermaid. Thank you for a wonderful, unforgettable journey in the energies of light. Kauai truly is paradise on earth. If only everyone could come here and see the purity of nature, the peace, the clarity of the ocean with its foaming waves.
For me, returning to Lemuria was the most important thing, unbelievable. And at the same time so natural, because I believe I made a promise to come here.
Thank you. Thanks to you, Anu, it was a wonderful week in sparkling energies. A truly knowledgeable, well-prepared journey. Wonderful memories remain.
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Anneli Takahashi
Retreat on Kauai
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Dear, dear Kauai. Words cannot describe the energy of Kauai, everyone has to experience it for themselves. An amazingly wonderful island. My heart open and my mood at its highest. Mother Kauai takes loving, tender care of her children.
When I come to Kauai I become a completely different person, I start to live here, I feel I am a woman, a beloved goddess.
Wonderful, wonderful Anu, trustworthy and warm, a big heart. A very rich and varied programme, lots of experiences, big emotions. And in just the right balance, lazy lounging and time of your own.
✦ ◆ ✦
Tiina Pitkänen
Retreat on Kauai
✦ South Korea ✦
Korea
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Korea is silence, mountains and temples.
We meditated in Buddhist temples where monks have prayed for centuries, ate temple food prepared as a practice in itself, and let the stillness of the mountains do what stillness does. For many in the group it was their first real experience of a culture where the sacred is simply part of daily life, and it changed how they carried themselves when they came home. I have dreamt of returning with a group ever since.
Making lanterns in the temple
What a retreat with me is like
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Small groups, always. Days built around meditation, angel work and my Angel Light Hypnosis™ method, in places chosen because the energy there is real. Time in nature every day. Food that nourishes. Space to rest, to cry, to laugh, to be seen.
And the transformations are real: people have come home from these retreats and manifested the love, the money, the homes and the callings they had been waiting years for.
✦ A little warning ✦
You might come home a little lighter
On the Big Island, one of the women took a photo of me in the middle of a class. When she looked at it, part of me was simply gone. You can see everything that was behind me, right through where I was standing.
It was an old camera, and I will let you decide what happened. But consider yourself warned: these retreats are potent. You may come home lighter than you left. Possibly a little see-through.
✦ Okinawa, Japan · 12 to 19 July 2027 ✦
Join me on the Ikigai Goddess Retreat
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Questions before you book?
Leave your name and email, and I will write to you personally and answer your questions. When you are ready, you reserve your place with the deposit.
I answer you personally.
