Healing and Portraits: A Retreat Photographer's Reflection in Canyon, Texas

I don't take nearly enough time for myself. I think if you're a new mom, an expecting mom, or just a mom in general, you understand exactly what I mean. Somewhere between everyone else's needs, our own tend to get pushed to the back burner. I try, at minimum, to do something for myself once a quarter. Sometimes it's getting my hair done. Sometimes it's going to the gym on the regular, showing up for myself in that small consistent way. And once a year, if I'm lucky, it's a retreat.

So when Mandy asked me to come photograph her retreat again, it was an easy yes. This wasn't Mandy's first retreat, she's held several before this one, but it was the first one near Palo Duro Canyon that I had the honor of photographing. I remembered feeling a little reserved the first time I worked with her, unsure of what to expect. This time was different. I told myself I would go all in, even if it felt a little scary to do so.

These healing retreats are held in Canyon, Texas, closing with a ceremony out in Palo Duro Canyon. I want to pause here and say, gently, that I am not an expert in healing work or intuition. I'm on my own spiritual journey, one where I've had to make peace with not knowing. I'm also someone who leans toward science, toward seeing to believe. None of that felt especially important that weekend, though, because at the end of the day, I don't need to be an expert in any of this. I just needed to bring my camera and be present.

When I arrived, I was welcomed with a spread of fruit and snacks, a warm house, and a room full of women meeting each other for the first time. We didn't do formal introductions. We just settled in and moved straight into our first ceremony.

I want to be clear here, because I know this can be misunderstood: none of this was dark or ominous. What I felt was peace. Calm. A kind of stillness I don't often let myself have.

The first ceremony was a guided meditation, one centered on ancestral healing. Afterward, Mandy asked what we had seen or felt. I'm usually the person who stays quiet in a group like this, but I had told myself to take the experience seriously, so I spoke up. I described mountains. A mother clinging to her daughter. A name that kept surfacing, and the mountains somehow forming the shape of a letter.

I didn't understand it yet. But it turned out I wasn't the only one feeling something unexplainable that day. Another woman later shared that on her drive in, she'd felt an unusual heaviness, a darkness she wasn't used to carrying. And somehow, without either of us realizing it in the moment, what she was feeling and what I was feeling were connected. By the end of the meditation circle, we pieced it together. The letter. The mountains. The feeling of not wanting to be somewhere. It turned out we were speaking the same language without knowing it.

That's the thing about this kind of experience. You can hear about it, but you really do have to be there to feel it for yourself.

Outside of the ceremonies, our downtime was refreshingly normal. We talked about our drives in, where everyone was from, easy conversation between deeper moments.

Then came the ceremony that caught me completely off guard: womb healing. As someone who lives with PCOS, I remember thinking, quietly, that my womb could use some healing too. As we meditated with sound playing in the background, I made myself a small promise. If my cycle started, I would take it as a sign that the healing was real. We finished the meditation, took a group photo, and almost immediately after, my body answered. It had been 87 days since my last cycle. My body had finally felt safe enough, relaxed enough, to release.

There's more I could share: moments of sound healing, rose water, a hair braiding session that had me in tears, but some of it is meant to be experienced rather than explained. What I can tell you is that every woman there was gifted her own portrait session as part of the retreat, some of them experiencing a professional photo shoot for the very first time. I watched women who walked in unsure of themselves start to soften in front of my lens, laughing, crying, letting their guard down in a way I don't think they expected to. My role wasn't to make them beautiful. They already were. My role was to hold space long enough for them to see it too, and to hand them something they could hold onto long after the weekend ended.

The closing ceremony, held out in Palo Duro Canyon itself, was nothing short of magical. Something about standing in a canyon that has existed for thousands of years, surrounded by women who had just spent a weekend being vulnerable and open with each other, made the whole experience feel bigger than any one of us.

You can find more information about Mandy and her services here.

If this stirred something in you, a longing to slow down, to feel connected, to be witnessed exactly as you are, I'd encourage you to look into Mandy's next retreat. And if you're local to Amarillo or the Texas Panhandle and want a portrait session that helps you feel that same sense of confidence in front of the camera, I'd love to be the one behind it.