On paper, a Pilates instructor and a financial coach don’t have an obvious reason to share a weekend.

One of us has spent 30 years helping women move better. The other has spent 25 years helping women understand money. Most retreats pick a lane. You either go somewhere for yoga and green smoothies, or you go somewhere for a finance workshop and bad hotel coffee.

We ran the combined version once, for one group of women, to see if our hunch was right. It worked. Then it kept working. Now it’s the only way we run retreats.

The problem we kept running into separately

Kim kept meeting women in her studio who could do the Pilates, loved the Pilates, left feeling a thousand times better, then walked straight back into lives where the stress that tightened their bodies never actually went away. The movement was real, but the root cause often wasn’t physical. For a lot of women, the constant low hum of worry was financial, or about the future, or about decisions they couldn’t bring themselves to face.

Mel kept meeting women in her coaching practice who were smart, capable, and completely stuck. Women who could run a company, raise three kids, and manage other people’s money, but who would freeze when it came to their own. The information wasn’t the problem. The spreadsheets weren’t the problem. The problem was the nervous system underneath. The women would arrive to a session already activated, spend the whole hour trying to think clearly through a fog of stress, and leave with good advice their body couldn’t absorb.

We were treating two halves of the same problem from opposite ends.

What changed when we put them together

The first time we ran a combined retreat, we watched something specific happen, over and over, with different women.

Morning: Kim’s session. Slow, deliberate movement. Breath. The sound of shoulders dropping.

Mid-morning: Mel’s session. The same women, sitting down to talk about their money.

The conversations were different. Not because the content was different, but because the women were different. They were steady. They asked sharper questions. They stopped apologising for not understanding things. They made decisions in 40 minutes that had been stuck on their to-do list for three years.

It wasn’t the Pilates that fixed the money. It wasn’t the money work that fixed the body. It was the order and the combination. You need the body to soften before the thinking clears. You need the thinking to clear before the decisions land.

Why women, specifically

We both work with women. Not because we have anything against men, but because the patterns are different and they deserve their own space.

Women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s are carrying a particular load right now. They are often the ones holding a household together, supporting ageing parents, running or co-running a business, and quietly wondering if the plan they thought they were on is still the right one. They’ve usually been told their whole lives that wanting more (more rest, more money, more clarity, more time) is selfish.

Our retreats are deliberately small. We want women who can actually hear themselves think over the course of a weekend, and be heard by other women who are in a similar place. What happens in those rooms is not something we could manufacture in a bigger format.

What we bring to the weekend

Kim brings 30 years of fitness experience and 25 years of teaching Pilates. Her sessions are the quietest, most supportive movement you’ll do all year. You will leave each one feeling longer, calmer, and more yourself.

Mel brings 25 years in financial services and a no-jargon, no-judgement approach to money coaching. Her sessions are honest conversations about what you have, what you want, and what’s getting in the way. She doesn’t sell products. She doesn’t work on commission. She works for you, for the weekend.

Between us, we’ve built a format that doesn’t exist anywhere else: the body stuff and the money stuff, in the same space, with the same small group of women, across a single slow weekend.

If this sounds like what you’ve been looking for

It probably is. Most women who come to our retreats have been looking for this exact combination for years and haven’t been able to find it in one place.

Have a look at our upcoming retreats →

More in the Money & Movement series:

• Why Exercise and Money Both Feel Harder Than They Used To
• When Your Body Softens, Your Thinking Clears
• What Actually Happens at a Money and Movement Retreat

Melissa Meagher and Kim McCulloch co-host Money and Movement Retreats: small-group weekends for women in midlife navigating money, movement, and what’s next.