For women, gathering with friends is essential to managing stress. Corrales Grief Spa, at The Oasis in New Mexico, offers personalized wellness retreats designed to help friends reconnect.
In 2000, psychologist Shelley E. Taylor and her team at UCLA published a landmark paper in Psychological Review that fundamentally challenged fifty years of stress research. Her work proposed that the dominant model of stress response—fight-or-flight—described male behavior under stress far more accurately than female behavior. Women, they found, responded to stress through a distinctly different pattern: tend-and-befriend.
Taylor’s team described two interlocking responses. The first involves protective, nurturing behavior directed toward the self and others when facing a threat. The second involves actively seeking out and strengthening social bonds—the drive to gather and be near others. The research found that oxytocin mediates both responses.
The result is a stress response that, in women, is biologically oriented toward connection. When stress rises, the female body defaults to the urge to reach toward other women.
Taylor’s 2006 follow-up paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science elaborated on the mechanism: positive connection under stress causes oxytocin to attenuate the body’s stress responses, dampening sympathetic nervous system activation and calming the HPA axis, the same system implicated in chronic stress and its downstream effects on the immune system, digestion, and sleep. In plain terms: being with women you trust, particularly when you are under stress, physically calms the body at a biological level.
The Longevity Research
The research on female friendship and health outcomes doesn’t stop at stress regulation. It extends to some of the most significant health outcomes researchers study.
A meta-analysis published in PLOS Medicine by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues at Brigham Young University found that individuals with adequate social relationships had a 50% greater likelihood of survival compared to those with poor or insufficient social relationships. The researchers noted that this effect was comparable in magnitude to well-established mortality risk factors, including smoking.
A separate longitudinal study examining social integration and longevity in women found that the depth and breadth of meaningful social connection was associated with significantly better long-term health outcomes.
This is not about having a lot of acquaintances, but about the particular, irreplaceable quality of being genuinely known by other women.
Why Life Pulls Women Apart
If the research is this clear, and the need is this biological, why do so many women find themselves, at a certain point in life, isolated from the friendships that once felt central to who they were?
The answer is not a mystery—careers accelerate, children arrive, and relationships shift. Grief takes up residence. Women who reach their forties, fifties, and sixties often describe a particular kind of grief around friendship—not the loss of a specific person, but the gradual erosion of the closeness they once had with women who still exist in the world, who still matter, but who have drifted to the edge of a life too full to hold them close.
This too is a form of loss worth naming, tending, and, when possible, reversing.
Group Retreats at Corrales Grief Spa
A group retreat at The Oasis is built around the same understanding that shapes everything Kristy does: that healing happens in relationships, that the nervous system softens in the presence of safe others, and that some things simply cannot be done alone.
Retreats can be tailored for small groups, offered as day retreats, overnight experiences, or multi-day stays. They are appropriate for friend groups seeking to reconnect, for groups of women navigating a shared loss or transition, or for women who simply know they need each other and are ready to make space for that.
What the group brings and what they need shape each retreat. Kristy offers her presence, her thirty years of experience, and access to the full range of healing modalities at The Oasis, including Reiki, sound healing, guided visual imagery, expressive art, the Reflections Room, breathwork, yoga nidra, and the Bosque itself. There will be food, thoughtfully prepared, and space for silence and space for laughter.
The Friends Who Need Each Other
If you are reading this and feeling the pull of the woman you once talked to every week, the friend you keep meaning to call, or the group that hasn’t gathered in longer than any of you care to admit, that pull is worth following.
The research is clear. The body knows it. The only question is whether you’ll make room.
Reach out to Kristy to begin a conversation about what a group retreat at The Oasis might look like for you and the women who matter.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a group retreat at Corrales Grief Spa?
A group retreat is a tailored healing experience for small groups of women, held at The Oasis at Corrales Grief Spa in Corrales, New Mexico. Retreats are available as half-day, full-day, overnight, or multi-day experiences, and are shaped around what the group needs. They can be focused on reconnection, shared grief or loss, life transition, or simply the restoration of friendships that deserve more time and space.
Do we need to be grieving to attend a group retreat?
No. Group retreats are for any gathering of women who want to come together with intention—whether that’s to reconnect, mark a life transition together, support a member of the group through a loss, or simply rest and restore in each other’s company. Kristy will work with your group to design an experience that fits where you are.
What modalities are available during a group retreat?
Kristy offers access to the full range of healing offerings at The Oasis, including Shamanic Angelic Reiki, guided visual imagery, expressive art, sound healing, breathwork, yoga nidra, the Reflections Room, and the MARI Card Test.
Can our group stay overnight at The Oasis?
Yes. The Oasis offers two beautifully appointed private suites—the O’Waken Oasis (1,350 square feet) and the Bosque Oasis (600 square feet, with direct Rio Grande Bosque views)—both available for extended stays. For groups who want an immersive multi-day experience, overnight accommodation is available.
How do we begin planning a group retreat?
Reach out to Kristy directly to start the conversation. She will talk through your group’s situation, size, and needs, and work with you to design an experience that feels right.
