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
SELF MADE presents:
be:WILDER
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 responsible. 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 does it feel like I’m living someone else’s life? Almost like a caged animal.
The strategies that helped you build a good life aren’t necessarily the ones that will help you feel fully alive inside it. At a certain point, the habits that made you safe, stable, and successful can become a ceiling. You know how to anticipate what everyone needs, keep your emotions in check, make the responsible choice, and adapt yourself to almost any situation. But all that competence can leave surprisingly little room for spontaneity, creativity, pleasure, and the parts of you that don’t fit so neatly into the life you’ve built.
When you’re accustomed to spending so much energy managing yourself, you may not even notice what it’s costing you. You talk yourself out of the thing you want before you’ve given yourself a chance to explore it. You keep your opinions to yourself rather than risk making someone uncomfortable. You spend so much time considering the sensible next move that another year goes by without making one. 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 become.
You’ve outgrown that level of containment.
You don’t need another strategy for keeping yourself in check. 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 loosen your grip on 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 isn’t recklessness or rebellion for rebellion’s sake. And it isn’t 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 more room to be fully human.
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 lying under a tree for an afternoon without turning it into a lesson about the importance of rest.
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.
You can be spontaneous without inviting chaos. Experience pleasure without needing to escape. Be irreverent without abandoning yourself.
This is the kind of unruliness I’m interested in: not less discernment, but more of yourself participating in it. Your mind doesn’t lose its seat at the table; it loses its monopoly. Head, heart, and body get to be in conversation. Desire, intuition, imagination, sensation, and experience become sources of information alongside reason.
Personal power isn’t perfect control over yourself. It’s having more freedom in how you meet your life: to notice the programming without automatically obeying it, to listen to more of your own intelligence, and to choose your response.
It’s what I call self-authorship.
For one week, we’re going to change the conditions.
For one week, we’re going to loosen the grip of calendars, inboxes, errands, algorithms, and all the other things that usually organize your attention.
Out in the Tuscan countryside, there will be nowhere else you need to be. There will be yoga and meditation, coaching and inquiry, poetry and myth, music and ritual.
We’ll walk the hills, forage for wild plants, visit a working goat farm, linger over meals, spend time in silence, swim, nap, dance, and occasionally do absolutely nothing.
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.
What happens when your body gets a vote? When you let a poem work on you without needing to explain what it means? When you follow curiosity somewhere unexpected? When another person witnesses you without trying to fix you? When you have enough quiet to notice what you couldn’t hear over 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 without needing to make anything of it. You allow yourself to be utterly bewildered by the landscape, the poetry, the people around you…even yourself.
This isn’t a week of listening to me explain how to become a more liberated person. There will be short teachings and facilitated experiences. 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 live together at Podere La Valle, a 150-hectare estate of aromatic plant fields and forest in the Tuscan countryside. You’ll wake up somewhere beautiful with nowhere to commute to, nothing to accomplish before breakfast, and enough time to notice where your attention wants to go.
And we’ll spend a lot of that time outside: walking the hills, learning what grows wild around us, eating food connected to the land, swimming, wandering, resting, paying attention. Not because nature is going to reveal your “true self,” but because the living world asks something different of our attention.
Tuscany gives us somewhere beautiful, sensory, and very much alive to explore.
We begin at the solstice.
We’ll gather for 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 our first 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 renewal.
Ritual will be woven throughout be:WILDER—not as performance or ceremony for ceremony’s sake, but as a way of marking what matters. 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.
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.
A GLIMPSE AT OUR WEEK
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Day 1: Sunday, June 20
Florence. Arrive, settle into the hotel, and spend the afternoon however you like. Our first dinner together that evening.
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Day 2: Monday, June 21
Summer solstice. Travel into the countryside after breakfast. Welcome lunch, time to explore the estate, dinner, and our opening ceremony.
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Day 3: Tuesday, June 22
Into the landscape. A walk through the Tuscan hills, then lunch, rest, and facilitated reflection.
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Day 4: 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.
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Day 5: Thursday, June 24
Foraging. A guided foraging walk in the Chianti countryside and lunch, then back to the villa for rest and integration.
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Day 6: Friday, June 25
Podere Le Fornaci. We’ll spend the day with Valentina, [ONE LINE ON WHO SHE IS], for cheese-making, food, and conversation about a life built in close relationship with the land. A quiet evening back at the villa.
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Day 7: 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.
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Day 8: 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.
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.
$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
PRICE DOESN’T INCLUDE
Airfare
Travel insurance
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
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 that I’m a whole, complicated human being who deserves compassion, understanding, and grace.
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.
I feel so much more comfortable being myself. 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
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. I’ve always loved writing, but nothing I wrote ever felt good enough.
Through our work, Dani has helped me reconnect with my creative side. I’ve started writing again and now practice it daily. She encouraged me to explore new experiences, classes, and events, while helping me identify the different voices in my head and navigate them with me in the driver’s seat.
Even though my external circumstances haven’t drastically shifted (I still have the same job), 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
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. Always busier than I wanted to be. I desperately wanted the stillness. The slowness.
Now, I get to be slow. I operate on my own time. And all of this feels so much better than I even expected.
— ER
FAQ
How do I join?
[APPLICATION + SHORT CALL, OR DIRECT REGISTRATION]
How physically demanding is it?
[Hike length and terrain. Yoga is accessible to all levels; every practice is optional.]
Do I have to participate in everything?
[Your stance, e.g. everything is an invitation, and opting out is part of the practice.]
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 / details.]
What’s your cancellation policy?
[Policy.]
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.
be:WILDER · Reclaim Your Unruly in the Tuscan Countryside · June 20–27, 2027