Shawnie Bailey and Aunnie Williamson had been friends for thirty years when they went into business together, Bailey as travel concierge and Williamson as event concierge. The venture was new when Aunnie’s mother died. Shawnie’s died a few months after that.
They stopped. Not for a weekend, and not with a plan for coming back.
“A lot of the time so much is put onto women, and we often neglect ourselves and our pain,” Bailey says. “We have to stop doing that. Stop, and reset, and rewire our thinking.”
That sentence is now the name of a retreat. The Reset, Rewire Retreat runs from the 15th to the 23rd of September in Ubud, Bali, out of a private villa. It is eleven days away, and it exists because two grieving women went looking for something like it and found nothing.
The credentials behind the calm
You can start a wellness retreat with a booking link and a mood board. Running one so that a group of women arrive somewhere unfamiliar and nothing goes wrong takes a different set of skills, and the difference shows up in who is running it.
Bailey has spent 27 years as founder and chief executive of Bailey Care Homes, Inc., a Los Angeles company that builds care homes for people with developmental disabilities. She holds a master’s in counseling psychology from Argosy University and graduated from Grambling State. She sits on the board of the Inner City Law Center. She has travelled to more than 30 countries, and her travel company, Pic ‘N Pak Tours and Travel, has been arranging other people’s trips for years.
Williamson has spent more than 25 years running Social Butterfly Event Planning Service. She is the one who decides where the candles go, and if you have ever sat through a retreat where the airport transfer never arrived, you know why that job matters.
So: one woman with nearly three decades of responsibility for other people’s wellbeing, and one who has spent as long making sure nothing goes wrong in a room.
“From Oprah’s Ultimate Viewers Trip in Australia to the Best Friends Cruise at Half Moon Cay, we’ve lived the journeys we now curate,” their site says. Bailey was among the viewers Winfrey flew to Australia in 2010, and sailed on the 2019 Girls’ Getaway with Winfrey and Gayle King aboard.
Why they want you to bring the friend
Most retreats sell solitude. Go alone, go quiet, come back fixed.
Bailey and Williamson start somewhere else. Thirty years of one friendship taught them that the woman reading this has one too, and that the friendship is carrying more weight than either woman in it will admit. The friend who checks in during your worst month has usually not had a holiday either.
Their invitation goes to both of you, and it comes with a second idea attached: stop treating rest as the thing you get to once everyone else is handled.
“We want to let women know that they have permission to take a break,” Bailey says.
What the week involves
The September retreat runs out of a private villa in the Ubud jungle, with Balinese cultural excursions, sound healing and morning mindfulness sessions. It costs $2,600 a person, and every booking comes with its own room.
Between retreats the pair run smaller gatherings, including a women’s sleepover they call Meditation & MooMoos, and the long-table dinners and sister circles that gave the business its shape before it had a name.
Bailey does not call any of it treatment. Given her training, she is careful about the word. What she and Williamson sell is a week where nobody needs anything from you, put together by two people who know how badly a week like that can be organised.
They built the retreat they each needed when their mothers died. Now they are selling seats at it, which tells you what they think that year should have looked like.
The doors close on 15 September. That is the awkward part of a business built on rest: the week that would do you the most good is the one you are most likely to talk yourself out of, and by the time the argument is settled the flight has gone. Anyone still weighing it up has about a week to stop weighing it up.
Details and booking are at instagram.com/shawnieaunniepresents.
Shawnie & Aunnie Presents… is a Los Angeles luxury travel and event house founded by Shawnie Bailey and Aunnie Williamson, a division of Pic ‘N Pak Tours and Travel. It curates wellness retreats, private celebrations and concierge travel. The Reset, Rewire Retreat runs 15–23 September in Ubud, Bali.
