Sofia Health
Mary Meduna-Gross, Ph.D.
MoreYou Creativity Retreat: Am I forcing or flowing?
Retreats will resume in 2027
Can you let the experience of creating move through you — or do you feel compelled to control it?
The question is not really about art. It is about how you meet anything undefined or unfinished. Most of us reach for control the moment an outcome stops being guaranteed, and we do it so fast we never catch ourselves doing it. Put yourself in a room with materials and no instructions and the reach becomes visible.
That is the whole design. Other people and unfamiliar materials create contrast, and contrast is what makes an unconscious assumption finally audible.
Not a class. Nothing is taught, nothing is critiqued, and no one is going to look at what you made. Some people make something. Some people talk. Some people sit quietly the whole time. All of that is the retreat working as intended.
What you might notice:
The urge to know what you are supposed to be doing
Deciding you are bad at this within the first ten minutes
Watching what other people are doing and adjusting
Needing the thing to turn out well
Going quiet, or filling the silence
Wanting to finish rather than continue
How quickly you can explain why you are not really a creative person
None of these are problems to fix. They are the patterns you carry everywhere else, showing up somewhere low-stakes enough to see clearly.
Who this is not for
Anyone not willing to entertain the possibility that things could go differently. This asks for openness, not agreement. If you already know how it goes, the room has nothing to offer you.
Practical details
Held on the 3rd Sunday of the month 11AM-1PM central time
@ SolFlo in Wicker Park, Chicago
Come as you are. Nothing to prepare. Materials provided. Talk or silence, both welcome. If you want something to focus on, I will have prompts available — not exercises, just questions worth noticing your reaction to.
We close the last half hour together, putting the room back.
Limited to twelve people.
Mary Meduna-Gross, Ph.D. is the founder of PlenaVita Shift and a NeurOptimal® trainer in Wicker Park.
Less Struggle. More You.
Leadership Presence Coach
Founder/CEO PlenaVita Shift
Most of the people I see are not in crisis. They are functioning. Meeting deadlines, taking care of other people, making decisions all day. If you asked, they'd tell you they're handling it. And underneath that, they're running on reserve in a way they have mostly stopped noticing.
What I work with is presence under pressure: the capacity to stay clear, steady, and fully yourself when the stakes are high. Most of us lose it without realizing. We brace against our experience instead of being in it, and the bracing becomes so familiar that it stops looking like a pattern and starts looking like personality. Effort became the way you do things. Then it became who you are.
Presence gets built in three places.
In the body first, because it's hard to see yourself clearly while you're braced. NeuroStability Training uses NeurOptimal® neurofeedback, which gives your brain information about its own activity while you sit back and listen. There is nothing to concentrate on and nothing to do correctly, which is exactly the difficulty for people who are used to being good at things.
Then within yourself, in how you meet your own reactions. The MoreYou Mini-Retreat is a monthly evening to practice noticing what's happening in you without running from it or gripping it. MoreYou.app carries that practice into the day, a few minutes at a time.
And then in the middle of life, with other people. The pattern is easier to keep when everyone around you shares it. The MoreYou Creativity Retreat puts people in a room together, with an unfamiliar art medium and no expectations, to notice what they do when things don't go their way.
I came to this through my own life. Twenty years in education, where I watched capable people burn out doing work they cared about. A decade in school leadership, where I made decisions under pressure and learned what it costs to stay composed while doing it. A master's in mental health counseling, which gave me the language for what I was watching but not the tool for it. The Gulf War came before all of it and taught me the same lesson earlier: a person can perform well for a very long time while quietly running out of room.
Handling it and being present are not the same. Noticing the difference is usually the beginning of something.
If you're not sure where to start, book a 15-minute conversation, or take the Presence Profile in MoreYou.app first. The app is free during beta, and my writing is at Surprisingly Content on Substack.
Less Struggle. More You.
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