Meet The Retreat Architect
Jen Kasten Dotson
Jen is not just your retreat host. She is a bridge.
Born in Guadalajara, Mexico and now rooted near Chicago, Jen moves between worlds naturally — between cultures, languages, energy, beauty, strategy, emotion, luxury, spirituality, and transformation. For more than 17 years, she has guided people through some of the most meaningful thresholds of their lives, creating experiences in Mexico that were never just events, but portals.
What makes Jen different is that she doesn’t simply plan experiences. She reads them.
She understands energy, emotional dynamics, aesthetics, timing, nervous systems, symbolism, environment, and human connection all at once. She can hold luxury and depth in the same hand. She can orchestrate beauty while also seeing the invisible emotional undercurrents moving beneath a room, a relationship, or a transformation.
Her work has always revolved around one thing: creating spaces where people feel safe enough to become more fully themselves.
Over the years, that expression took the form of destination weddings, sacred travel, immersive environments, storytelling, emotional curation, and deeply intentional gatherings. But beneath all of it was always the same gift: holding transformation through experience.
Jen’s path has also been deeply personal.
As a mother, a spiritual seeker, a creative visionary, and a woman walking her own journey of becoming, she understands what it means to outgrow old versions of yourself. She understands visibility wounds, identity shifts, emotional rebirth, and the longing for soul-aligned community. Her spirituality is not performative. It has been shaped through lived experience, intuition, devotion, curiosity, ritual, nature, meditation, embodiment, and years of listening to the quiet inner voice asking for more alignment.
Her energy carries both fire and grounding: the warmth that makes people feel seen, and the spark that reminds them they are powerful.
Jen brings the essence of Mexico into her work not as a trend or aesthetic, but as something ancestral, embodied, and alive. The jungle, the ocean, the moon, the sensuality of beauty, the sacredness of gathering, the emotional openness of ceremony, the importance of joy, music, movement, texture, food, and human connection — these are not concepts she learned from a Pinterest board. They are part of her lived language.
She is both guide and witness. Part visionary. Part creator. Part firekeeper.
And through this journey, Jen is creating a container where people are no longer asked to shrink, hide, or perform healing — but instead are invited to safely emerge into the fullness of who they already are.
Why Ix Chel?
This journey was not originally called The Ix Chel Journey.
It began with the moon.
As I worked with lunar cycles in my own life, I experienced firsthand the power of setting intentions beneath a New Moon, taking aligned action, allowing the Full Moon to illuminate what was hidden, and using the waning moon to reflect, release, and refine.
In many ways, this retreat was born through that process.
The original vision was planted like a seed. Over the months that followed, the moon revealed what was aligned, what was not, what needed to grow, and what needed to be released. With each cycle, the retreat became clearer.
Then, during a period of energetic clearing and reflection, I began encountering the story of Ix Chel—the ancient Maya goddess of the moon, water, fertility, medicine, and transformation, revered throughout the Yucatán Peninsula.
At first, I was simply curious. But as I explored her story, one detail stopped me in my tracks.
In one telling of her journey, Ix Chel enters a period of death and renewal before being restored to life after 183 days.
One hundred and eighty-three days. Almost exactly six months, a 6 Month Lunar Cycle. The same length of time between the New Moon that begins this journey and the Full Moon Eclipse beneath which we gather in Mexico. The same length of time we spend nurturing an intention, allowing it to grow, transform, and eventually emerge into the light.
The synchronicity felt impossible to ignore.
As a Mexican woman who has spent nearly two decades living and working in the Riviera Maya, this connection carried an even deeper meaning for me. While many visitors experience this region as a beautiful destination, I have come to know it as home—a place where the land, the sea, the jungle, and the stories of those who came before us are woven into everyday life.
This retreat is, in many ways, an homage to that connection.
An homage to the land that has shaped my career, to Gaia, to my Mexican heritage, and to the roots that continue to call me home.
I understand that not everyone will feel an immediate connection to Ix Chel or to Maya cosmology. For many of my guests, especially those coming from the United States, these stories may feel unfamiliar. But for me, they are part of the cultural landscape that has surrounded me for years. They are reminders that long before resorts, airports, and modern maps, people looked to the moon, the waters, and the rhythms of nature for guidance, healing, and meaning.
What moved me was not simply the mythology itself, but the universal truth within it: that transformation happens in cycles, that growth requires surrender, and that renewal often emerges from periods of uncertainty.
In meditation and reverence, I asked Ix Chel for her blessing to share her story and to weave her wisdom into this experience. The answer I received was not one of hesitation, but of excitement.
And so this journey became more than a retreat.
It became an invitation to walk alongside the cycles of the moon, the wisdom of the land, and the timeless story of death, renewal, and rebirth that Ix Chel has carried for generations.