Cindy Hopper, MS, LPC, CRC

Psychotherapist & art of living well retreat host

I’m Cindy, a psychotherapist, writer, and longtime observer of the ways we make sense of ourselves and our lives. I’ve spent years listening to people’s stories and helping them look more closely at the experiences, relationships, beliefs, and patterns that have shaped who they are. I will be guiding our retreat program to explore the life we want to live and how we want to show up in the world.

The Art of Living Well grew in part from my work with women navigating divorce and rebuilding afterward. In those groups, I developed a guided, multisensory process that helped women look beyond their circumstances and begin exploring a bigger question: What makes life meaningful for me?

I soon realized that question belongs to all of us. We don’t need to be in crisis or facing a major transition to wonder whether the life we’re living still fits. I’ve sat with many women who felt guilty that the “good life” they worked hard to create wasn’t as satisfying as they thought it should be. Sometimes the life that looks perfectly good from the outside no longer feels quite right from within. And sometimes we’ve become so accustomed to expectations, roles, and old stories that it’s hard to tell what we chose, what still fits, and what we might be ready to leave behind.

The experience I’ll guide us through is a form of envisioning, but it’s less about manifesting a particular outcome and more about uncovering what has meaning. We’ll use more than our thinking minds to get curious about what fits and what doesn’t, what we want to keep, what we may be ready to let go of, and what our deeper longings might be telling us. Sometimes what we discover is quite different from where we started.

There is no prescribed version of a good life waiting at the end of the weekend. And there will be no fresh collection of shoulds to take home with you. You already have enough of those. No to-do list either. I promise.

My hope is that you leave knowing yourself a little better, trusting yourself a little more, and with a clearer sense of how you want to move through the world. I hope there is some lightness, too. The kind that feels a little like taking a deep breath after you didn’t realize you’d been holding one in.

I’ll guide our conversations and reflection while leaving room for the unexpected, the playful, and the things that tend to show up when we’re not trying quite so hard to make something happen. Because this is meant to be more than a lovely weekend away. It’s an invitation to return to your life differently.