Reclaim Your Unruly in the Tuscan Countryside
A week beyond self-containment to revive the parts of you that feel most powerful, creative, and alive.
A 7-day retreat in Italy · June 20–27, 2027
7 nights: 1 in Florence, 6 at a countryside villa · 12 guests · Led by Dani Cirignano, Certified Integral Coach · Alcohol-free · From $3,495
Early registration bonus: Apply and secure your spot by December 31, 2026, to receive a three, 90-minute coaching session package with Dani.
SELF MADE presents:
be:WILDER
Early registration bonus: Apply and secure your spot by December 31, 2026,
to receive a three, 90-minute coaching session package with Dani.
June 20–27, 2027
June 20–27, 2027
YOU’VE GOTTEN VERY GOOD AT MANAGING YOURSELF.
But it’s stopping you from feeling fully alive.
You know how to get things done. How to be a responsible adult. How to read a room, and adjust yourself inside it. You are skilled at staying on top of everything, and showing up for the people and creatures who depend on you.
You probably know a lot about yourself, too. You know your patterns and their origin stories. You can tell when you're activated and when your inner critic is running the show. You've read the books, done the therapy, maybe worked with a coach, healer, guide, guru.
Maybe you stopped drinking, and built the practices, routines, and communities that gave you a life you didn't need to escape from, and now you’re asking, did I come this far for life to feel sort of…meh?
Or maybe you’ve reached a decent level of comfort and success in midlife but find yourself wondering, why do I feel like a caged animal? Like I’m living someone else’s life?
Here’s how I see it:
The strategies that built you a good life aren't the ones that will make you feel ALIVE inside it.
What I see again and again in my coaching is how the habits that make us safe, stable, and successful become a ceiling.
Under that ceiling, there is little room for spontaneity, creativity, pleasure, and very little access to the parts of you that ache under the weight of domesticity.
When you're accustomed to managing yourself, you may not even notice the cost:
You talk yourself out of that art project that keeps you up at night before even giving it a chance.
You choke down your true opinions rather than risk making someone uncomfortable, resentment fermenting all sour in your gut.
Years go by putting off until tomorrow while you wait for a level of certainty that will never come.
Even your growth and self-development become another form of self-management—one more habit to maintain, trigger to avoid, pattern to interrupt, version of yourself to optimize..
You’ve outgrown that level of containment.
You don't need another strategy: you need to loosen your grip and make room for the creative, expressive, spontaneous, and gloriously unruly parts of yourself to participate in the life you've worked so hard to build.
be:WILDER is an invitation to reclaim your wildness, yes. But it's also a call for bewilderment: to let yourself be surprised, enchanted, and moved by that which the mind cannot immediately explain.
To let go of what you already know and plug into the pulse of aliveness shimmering right there beneath the surface of the everyday.
You don’t have to choose between having your shit together and being wildly alive.
Your unruly isn't the part of you that wants to burn everything down; it’s not recklessness or rebellion for rebellion's sake. Nor is it some pristine "authentic self" buried under your conditioning, waiting to be excavated.
Your unruly is the intelligence, aliveness, expression, and possibility that become available when you give yourself space to go a little…feral.
It's the desire you can hear before you put it on trial. The opinion before you soften it. The no before you calculate someone else's disappointment. The creative impulse before you decide whether you're talented enough. The sensitivity you've spent years trying to toughen up. The part of you capable of relaxing under a tree for an afternoon without that shitty little voice reminding you of your laziness.
be:WILDER isn't an invitation to tear down the life you've built.
It's an invitation to discover how much freer you can become inside it.
How to be spontaneous without inviting chaos. How to experience pleasure without self-abandonment. How to be irreverent and absurd and not apologize or shy away.
Your unruly demands a softening of control so you can experience a far fuller spectrum of your humanity. It demands disobedience to the default programming, a prioritization of gut feeling and intuition equal to cognition and logic, and developing the strength and power to have agency over how you respond to what life serves up—no matter what it serves up.
Your mind loses its monopoly. Head, heart, body, and spirit get to be in conversation. Desire, imagination, sensation, and experience become sources of information alongside reason.
It’s what I call self-authorship.
THE WEEK, THE LAND, THE SOLSTICE
For one week, we’re going to change the conditions.
Out in the Tuscan countryside, you’ll loosen the grip of calendars, inboxes, errands, algorithms, and all the other things that usually organize your attention.
There will be nowhere else you need to be.
We'll walk the hills, forage for wild plants, visit a working goat farm, linger over farm-to-table meals, spend time in silence, swim, nap, dance, and occasionally do absolutely nothing. We’ll explore our inner and outer worlds through yoga and meditation, coaching and inquiry, poetry and myth, music and ritual.
Most of us live in cultures that privilege the mind. We learn to think our way toward decisions.
The mind is extraordinary. It’s just not the only intelligence we have.
be:WILDER is about reclaiming other ways of knowing and relating.
be:WILDER is an experiment designed to show you: what happens when your body gets the first say? When you let the immediacy of a poem work on you without having to explain why? When you follow curiosity and spontaneity to somewhere unexpected? When another person witnesses you without trying to fix you? When you become still enough to bring to bear what would otherwise have remained buried under all the noise?
You get out of your head and back into your senses. You taste, touch, move, create, and connect. The land comes alive to you, and you come alive to yourself.
You remember what it feels like to inhabit your body, your desires, and the present moment. You allow yourself to be utterly bewildered by the landscape, the poetry, the people around you…even yourself.
In addition to the retreat programming, there will also be significant stretches of time when no one is telling you what to do.
The spaciousness is part of the reclamation.
Why Tuscany?
It's easier to discover what is actually yours when you step outside the environment reinforcing who you've learned to be.
For six nights, we'll stay at Podere La Valle, a 150-hectare estate of aromatic plant fields and forest in the Tuscan countryside. Much of this time will be spent outside: walking the hills, learning what grows wild around us, eating food connected to the land, swimming, wandering, resting, paying attention. The landscape itself becomes an invitation: into slowness, into rhythm with the earth and ourselves, into greater attunement to what wants to come alive in you.
We begin at Summer Solstice
We’ll spend our first night in Florence, then travel into the countryside on June 21, the summer solstice and longest day of the year. That evening, we'll open the retreat with ritual, using the turning of the season as a threshold of our own: a chance to mark what we're stepping out of, what we're making room for, and what in us might be ready for reclamation.
Ritual will be woven throughout be:WILDER.
We'll use it to cross thresholds, honor endings and beginnings, and give form to experiences that don't always belong to the thinking mind.
A GLIMPSE AT OUR WEEK
Our days will have a gentle rhythm of yoga, meditation, and facilitated exploration, with plenty of unstructured time to rest, wander, and follow your curiosity. Some mornings we'll begin with movement and meditation; other days we'll head out into the countryside. Nothing is designed to keep you busy for the sake of being busy.
Sunday, June 20 — Florence. Arrive, settle into the hotel, and spend the afternoon however you like. Our first dinner together that evening.
Monday, June 21 — Summer solstice. Travel into the countryside after breakfast. Welcome lunch, time to explore the estate, dinner, and our opening ceremony.
Tuesday, June 22 — Into the landscape. A walk through the Tuscan hills, then lunch, rest, and facilitated reflection.
Wednesday, June 23 — Villa day. Morning practice and session, lunch, and an extended stretch of silence. The afternoon is yours: pool, spa, gardens, journaling, sleeping, staring at the hills, doing nothing particularly impressive.
Thursday, June 24 — Foraging. A guided foraging walk in the Chianti countryside and lunch, then back to the villa for rest and integration.
Friday, June 25 — Podere Le Fornaci. We'll spend the day at a working goat farm, where we’ll experience cheese-making, food, and conversation about a life built in close relationship with the land. A quiet evening back at the villa.
Saturday, June 26 — Closing night. Morning practice and our final session, then an open afternoon. That evening: our closing ritual, ancient-grain pizza, music, and a very raucous dance floor.
Sunday, June 27 — Return. Optional morning practice, breakfast, and a final gathering before transport back to Florence.
This is a preview of our week, not a minute-by-minute schedule. The final itinerary, including the timing of our practices, sessions, and excursions, will be shared closer to the retreat. The balance of guided experiences and spacious, unscheduled time is intentional.
WHAT TO EXPECT + WHO IT'S FOR
Some things can only be known through experience.
There's a difference between understanding that you're allowed to take up space, express yourself, trust your desires, and follow your curiosity—and actually experiencing what it's like to do those things.
I've curated be:WILDER to close that gap. Through movement, creativity, silence, beauty, connection, and intimate relationship with the natural world, you'll have the opportunity to experience yourself with less self-consciousness and more of your wild, creative, spontaneous self available.
What emerges may surprise you. Some discoveries will be immediate; others may take time to reveal themselves. But your body will remember what it felt like to move, create, laugh, connect, and take up space; to unwind and let your self-expression unspool in the company of kindred spirits; and to be held by the land as you reclaim your own wild nature.
You already understand so much about yourself. Now come experience something that understanding alone cannot give you.
Alcohol-free, by design
You don't need to be sober or identify as being in recovery to attend. But the retreat is entirely alcohol-free.
That's intentional. We're exploring what it means to be fully present for pleasure, connection, celebration, awkwardness, beauty, boredom, and each other without needing to alter the experience. For some people, that will feel completely ordinary. For others, it may be part of the experiment.
Is be:WILDER for you?
be:WILDER is for people who are curious, self-aware, and willing to experiment. You may have done years of therapy, coaching, recovery, or spiritual practice, and find yourself less interested in understanding yourself endlessly than in experiencing what else is possible.
Perhaps you recognize yourself here:
You’ve built a successful career, relationship, or life that looks good on paper, but you’re beginning to question whether it’s still the life you want.
You’re navigating a transition—a milestone birthday, career change, divorce, empty nest, or another threshold that’s asking you to reconsider who you are and how you want to live.
You’ve changed your relationship with alcohol, built a life you’re proud of, and now you’re wondering how to reclaim the spontaneity, pleasure, and irreverence you once associated with drinking.
You miss making things, taking chances, expressing yourself freely, or following an impulse simply because it delights you.
You’re craving more time in nature, more connection to your body, and more experiences that engage your senses rather than your analytical mind.
You want to spend time with interesting, thoughtful, slightly unconventional people who are also questioning the rules they’ve inherited and experimenting with what it means to live on their own terms.
You don’t need to arrive with a problem to solve. You do need to be willing to participate, to spend real time both in community and alone, and to get curious about what happens when you don’t already know the answer.
This isn’t a sightseeing tour, an intensive therapy experience, a recovery program, or a self-optimization bootcamp. And it’s not the right week for you if going without alcohol is a dealbreaker.
Early registration bonus
Secure your spot by December 31, 2026 (application approved and deposit received), and you’ll receive three private 90-minute coaching sessions with me, a $750 value.
We’ll use them to prepare for be:WILDER, and however else serves you most: to get clear on what you’re hoping to reclaim (or unleash), to work through something you’re navigating, or simply start unspooling before we ever set foot in Tuscany.
$3,495
Double Occupancy
$600 Deposit
$3,995
Single Occupancy
$600 Deposit
PRICE INCLUDES
1 night at a hotel in Florence
Six nights at Podere La Valle
Meals
Transport between Florence and the estate
Retreat programming, yoga, meditation, and embodiment practices
Guided hike
Foraging experience and lunch
Meet Your Guides
Meet Your Guides
WHO IS DANI?
I’m a Certified Integral Coach, Holistic Recovery Guide, and writer. I work with people who’ve gotten very good at doing what’s expected of them but are ready to live as their whole, unruly selves.
My approach combines deep inquiry, embodiment, and real-life experimentation to help people move beyond self-awareness into self-authorship—building the trust and freedom to make choices that reflect who they actually are.
I’ve been alcohol-free since 2017, and my work is informed by my own experience of reinvention, recovery, and discovering that a good life can become an extraordinary one.
WHO IS CAROL?
We’ll also be joined by Carol Sicbaldi, longtime friend and Self Made collaborator. Carol is the founder of Carol’s Moveable Feasts, and she has spent nearly two decades designing and guiding immersive travel experiences throughout Italy.
Drawn to Italy by her family’s roots in Piedmont, Carol eventually made the country her home. Her deep knowledge of its landscapes, traditions, and food culture—and her longstanding relationships with local artisans, farmers, and makers—allow her to create experiences that go far beyond the usual tourist itinerary.
Carol brings her love of slow living, simple pleasures, and authentic connection to be:WILDER, introducing us to the people, places, and traditions that make Tuscany so extraordinary.
What past participants say
“I feel so much more comfortable being myself.
When I first started working with Dani, I was feeling pretty lost. I had spent so much of my life believing there were two sides of me, a good side and a bad side, and I was constantly trying to reconcile the two.
The biggest transformation has been in the way I see myself and the relationship I have with myself.
I've learned to slow down, recognize what I need, and give myself permission to prioritize things that bring me joy, even when they aren't productive or serving some bigger purpose.Instead of trying to become some completely different, better version of myself, I'm learning how to genuinely like and care for the person I already am.”
—DM
“I’ve always loved writing, but nothing I wrote ever felt good enough. I've started writing again and now practice it daily.
When I first started working with Dani, I felt stuck in many ways. I didn’t love my job, every day felt the same, and I was bored with life. Even worse, I wasn't enjoying my favorite hobbies.
Dani has helped me reconnect with my creative side. I am enjoying life so much more. I’ve made new friends, kept up a daily journaling practice, and lost my fear of showing others what I truly love. I feel empowered, open, and authentic.”
—AM
“I was always busier than I wanted to be. Now, I operate on my own time.
Before working with Dani, I was dealing with an ever-present lingering feeling of overwhelm. I felt as though I was constantly swirling through a sea of chaos without much control, but just at the whim of the waves of life that often felt like too much to handle.
Everything looks different now. Chaos is part of life. I no longer push against it. I move with it, flowing like a river. Allowing. Accepting. Just being. Less doing. I am finding excitement in the whitewater and peace in the stillness.
Throughout my drinking years, I was constantly filling my life. I desperately wanted the stillness. The slowness.
Now, I get to be slow. And all of this feels so much better than I even expected.
— ER
FAQ
How do I join?
Fill out this application. Dani will be in touch within 24 hours to discuss next steps and possibly to schedule a quick call to connect and answer your questions.
How physically demanding is it?
We’ll be hiking on even terrain for up to 5 miles. Yoga is all levels and easily modifiable for all bodies.
Do I have to participate in everything?
We ask that you come ready to take part in the full itinerary. Each session builds on the last, and the group experience is shaped by everyone being present. That said, participating fully doesn’t mean overriding yourself. You’ll always be encouraged to use your discernment: to modify, slow down, or step back from a practice when that’s what you truly need. Learning to listen to yourself is part of the experience. If you need to sit something out, just let us know in advance so we can support you.
I’m in early recovery. Is this right for me?
be:WILDER isn’t a recovery program, and it doesn’t replace the support you rely on. If you’re early in recovery, let’s talk before you apply so we can decide together whether this is the right time.
Can you accommodate dietary needs?
Yes! Just let us know in advance.
Is there an early registration bonus?
Yes! Secure your spot by December 31, 2026 (application approved and deposit received) to receive three private 90-minute coaching sessions with Dani to support your preparation and integration.
What’s your cancellation policy?
We understand that plans can change. Here’s how cancellations work:
90 or more days before the retreat: Full refund.
Fewer than 90 days before the retreat: No refund, as accommodations and arrangements are committed at that point.
All cancellations must be submitted in writing to Dani. The date we receive your email is your cancellation date.
If you can’t attend, you may transfer your spot to someone else, as long as they complete the application and are a good fit for the retreat. Please contact us before arranging a transfer.
If we need to cancel the retreat for any reason, you’ll receive a full refund of all payments made to us. We aren’t responsible for flights, travel, or other costs you arrange separately, so we strongly recommend purchasing travel insurance.
There will always be something else you could be doing.
Another deadline. Another responsibility. Another reason this isn’t the most practical time to disappear into the Tuscan countryside for a week.
There will always be more to accomplish, manage, improve, or figure out.
But what if, for one week, you let yourself be surprised by what happens when you stop trying to make something happen?
You don’t need to know what you’ll find.
You can be bewildered.