Marisol Lema

Mya grew up running around barefoot in Quebec’s countryside. Daughter of a chef and a school teacher, she spent her first years of life immersed in nature, surrounded by 40 acres of fields with an apple orchard, a recreational vegetable garden, a chicken coop, and a couple of ponds.

She was obsessed with playing ice hockey but she was the only girl on the team, since back then it wasn’t common for girls to play that sport. As time passed by, she felt pretty isolated and eventually, she quit. She started dreaming about moving out, wondering what else was out there. She was dreaming about connections.

“My life has been very serendipitous”, she says before explaining that the fall after she quit her beloved sport, a friend of her family traveled to “the big city”, Montreal, for a funeral and randomly learned that some schools in the United States were looking for female hockey players. That event changed everything.

Mya and her father went on a little tour in a friend’s beat-up car to check out four of these luxury high schools. That year she had won a science fair contest with a project about how to properly treat waste in her town, and she used her $200 of winnings to apply to each school. She got into all of the schools, and one of them gave her a full scholarship. Mya was moving out of the countryside.

Suddenly, she found herself in an elite high school in Connecticut where she could play the sport she loved. “There was a lot of learning that had to happen, a lot of culture shock, and a lot of challenges, but at the same time a lot of doors, a lot of opportunities”, she remembers.

That path took her to Cornell University, where she studied nutrition and, of course, she kept playing ice hockey, which she describes as “a beautiful weaving together of people in really fast motion to move as one body, you can’t overthink moves, have to be present in your own body and trust your teammates to dance the spontaneous dance with you”.

From those days, she looks back at a particular feeling that she describes as “pure love”: “I could look at my teammates and feel so deeply connected. That was the best gift that sports gave me”.

When college was over, Mya moved to Montreal for her master's degree. There, she fell in love with her roommate, who ended up being her husband and father of her two kids (remember she warned us about her serendipitous life?). She developed her 10 year career in nutrition coaching young athletes and then… the pandemic happened.

“I started rethinking everything as everyone did. Is this really what I want? I knew for a while that nutrition was something I was really good at but my heart was pulling me somewhere else. I started dreaming about the retreat business”, she recalls.

Mya founded Ralia Retreats, which she describes as a “magical business”. Through these retreats, she invites people to connect with local communities and integrate a “bigger movement of consciousness”.

“I work with guests who want to impact the world and understand the value of impact. They experience another level in their life through deep connection, through travel, through luxury”.

Mya talks about “big impact” when she thinks about the visits that retreat guests do, for example, to the Chorotega pottery makers in Costa Rica, where they eat lunch with a local pottery master and get to shop their beautiful designs. They are shown the direct impact of their retreat on preserving an indigenous legacy.

“But there’s also the ripple effect of a retreat when the guest returns to where they are from and that impact continues. It’s like bringing a spotlight on how impactful you truly are by just doing amazing things and enjoying life. I am obsessed with showing people that life can be really fun and impactful, and that all lives truly matter”, Mya says.

“Every day I see people looking for that deeper connection in their lives because they are not creating space to even know what they want. They are lacking consciousness and awareness of their desires. So they call it vacation. ‘We need to go on vacation because I need this way of being to stop, I need this to pause, I need just to breathe’. And yes you do, but what happens when you take that breath? What can you see? If your eyes are closed, and you are disconnected, you will see nothing”.

That is, according to Mya, the difference between a vacation and a retreat, where you travel with consciousness and intentionality, where you feel like “life can happen” and keep that expanded feeling even back home.

Mya uses the word “musing” a lot and that is what she does: she constantly muses on ideas that she brews in her mind on subjects that go from ways of making travel more sustainable, to how to empower women in business and real estate.

When asked about what little countryside Mya would think of this woman that she has become, she gets a “warm and fuzzy feeling in her chest” and replies: “I always talk to her because she would be so happy, that little girl needed a hug and to know that this would happen. She would be very excited”.