520. The Powerful Ways This Retreat Helps You Find Clarity

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Lesley Logan shares her favorite parts of the Cambodia retreat and why she believes every woman should experience traveling abroad with a supportive community. Discover how this immersive week of movement, mindset, and connection can spark lasting breakthroughs in your Pilates practice and personal life. Plus, hear how retreat experiences can fast-track your growth and create friendships that truly last.

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In this episode you will learn about:

  • Why Siem Reap became the soul spot for this transformative retreat.
  • How five Pilates sessions shift your body and mindset in just one week.
  • What the workshops reveal about vision-setting and practical daily change.
  • How the retreat breaks barriers and sparks deep friendships in minutes.
  • Why new environments inspire clarity, confidence, and bold life shifts.


Episode References/Links:

  • Cambodia Pilates Retreat - https://crowsnestretreats.com

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Episode Transcript:

Lesley Logan 0:00  

That, to me, that community, that family that we build, we build it in a class. We build it like that. It is the thing you can't put a price on, to be completely honest. Because, in life as adults, I think it can be really difficult to make friendships like there's so much going on. For example, I meant to text a girlfriend two weeks ago. She travels a lot. I travel a lot. Something happened in my life and Brad's like, I think you should text her and I was like, yeah, I should text her and I just didn't do it. And then I was taking my yoga class, oh my God, I need to text and see how she is. Now that I'm in town, I can't wait to see her. and after yoga class, she'd already text me. So I just fucking love that. But that friendship, while amazing and wonderful, and for sure, I can go a month without texting her, and we're still the deepest and wonderful of friends, on this retreat there is not a month to make a friendship. You make it in a minute. 


Lesley Logan 0:44  

Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guest will bring bold, executable, intrinsic and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and Be It Till You See It. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started.


Lesley Logan 1:27  

Hello, Be It babe. How are you? I'm your guest today. No, it's me, and I'm really excited to chat with you. I realized you hear about us talking about Cambodia a lot, like, in my clips of like, come with us, come do Pilates, come do this, and you probably take a week off of your life to get on a plane, and for most people, at least 17 hours of travel, but probably more like 21, to do all that, you probably want to know a little bit about what is it like, right? And so I thought I'd just have you like a lowdown of my three favorite parts. And on Thursday, Brad is going to tell you about his favorite parts about the retreat. And I hope that this really makes you realize, oh, I'm coming in October. This is going to be something I do. And if you're someone who wants to host your own retreat, you can actually use our system and our team helps that make it easier for you. Obviously, you'd replace Pilates with whatever it is you do. But at any rate, let me tell you a little bit, so first of all, why do we go to Cambodia? Why do we go to Siem Reap? Well, if you're at all like me, you're probably like, hmm, can I go to an island? Can I lay on a beach? And I definitely understand a vacation of that sort. But this is not that. And you come to this for a different reason. So first of all, when Brad and I got married, which would be 10 years ago this October, Brad and I got married he wanted to go to Siem Reap for our honeymoon. And I was like, wow, that is not what I thought honeymoon would be. I thought a honeymoon would be like an island in Thailand on a boat. But really, I was like, okay, well, if we do Siem Reap, can we go to Thailand, and we also went to Japan. It was really, really fun. And the most hilarious thing is like, what we resist is there to assist, because we landed in Siem Reap and I was, my soul is home. It was dark, you guys. It was so dark. We went straight to bed. But like, I just was so excited to be there. I love the smell of it. I love the energy. It was just so different. And I think, you guys, we have an episode that came out with Monique Rhodes about getting out into cultures that are different than ours, and getting a little uncomfortable. And I just realized there was like a sense of joy around me and energy inside me that was like this is amazing. I got up and we watched the sun rise over Angkor, and then we went to like, seven temples in one day, maybe nine, and I just knew I'd come back. And so a year later, we had two retreats that year. We took people, Pilates clients, there, and we just had so much fun. We did it again and again and again. Now we've been, I don't know, 10 or 12 retreats. At any rate, what happens when you come on a retreat with us, and the reason I think you will love this so much is I really believe that women should travel abroad. I think it's really important for women to see different ways the world works, see how different cultures support the people around them and community around them. I just thought it was just like the coolest thing. And so at any rate, I also know that traveling alone is not actually everyone's cup of tea, and also it might not feel very accessible or very safe. And so when we created this retreat, I wanted you to become to my home, because that's gonna make you feel more comfortable, right? And also we wanted to make it super easy, so that you don't even have to worry about, how do you get from the airport to where we are. It's a different country. t's a different language. Whenever I land in different country, I'm always like, okay, I know once I get to my hotel, I'm gonna be okay, but from the hotel to the airport, how does this work? Do I need a credit card? Do we have to have cash? Do you have to exchange already? What's the cultural system? How far is the airport? Sometimes they're so far away. So you don't have to worry about that, because we actually pick you up. We have one of our most amazing drivers, trusted drivers, who comes and picks you up. You come to our house and we do five Pilates classes over the six days. So we actually do a class when you arrive, just to stretch out from the plane, and I find out like, what your movement goals are that week and what exercises you want to move through. And each class helps each person build up to the practice and things that they want. And we had so many people, like this last retreat, we have people who never did Pilates before, to clients of ours who've been part of OPC for a really long time, to teachers who've been teaching for a really long time, and each person got to work on an exercise that they really struggled with and get some breakthroughs. It was really a lot of fun. And so we do one afternoon class, and then four mornings we do a class. We don't do a class on the sunrise day. I promise you, we get enough steps in. We do. We get enough steps in. And so it's just really quite fun to see also how your Pilates practice can change only in a week, but from day to day depending on what we did the day before, which is just fabulous. It's like creating the Pilates movement habit that you really want. We do it together on this retreat. 


Lesley Logan 5:39  

So Brad will talk more about all the temples and the food and all the other stuff, but I wanted to tell you about the workshops. So I used to do Pilates mat workshops. And the truth is, is that it's hot. It's hot there. And two and a half hours working on our mats, on these exercises. While super fun and interesting, it's also just a lot. It's a lot on the body. It's a lot on the mind. And I don't think it makes your mat practice more consistent when you get home. The mat classes themselves do that. So I pulled together some my favorite things that are like podcast type, my business coaching type, my breath work stuff, all that stuff, I pulled it together, and I put this unique two day workshop together where we do breath work to visualize what we want. Who do we want to be? What is this Be It Till We See It, right? What is that? And then we journal, and you can share what you want. Obviously, don't have to. And then we go through all the different things that you should get clear on. So it's like everything, every Be It podcast has taught us roughly on manifestation and visualization into a workshop, and we end with breath work, and it's just so beautiful to solidify it. 


Lesley Logan 6:53  

Then the next thing, we come back, I take that woo-woo, and I bring in stuff that makes it a one woo, which is, how do we actually get the thing we visualize to become reality? How do we do that? And I can tell you right now, because we've done this so many times, and we've had people do it twice, that we have a woman, her wins will be shared on a future FYF, that in less than six months of the retreat, and what she visualized, she's already doing the things that she put together, already, right, already done. So because we actually talk about, okay, so you're really busy. You've known you want this life for a really long time, but you don't know how to do it. We actually go through a series of exercises to make that a reality. Buy back your time. Make it easier for you to have the habits you want. Make a morning routine that you like to have. Make an ideal schedule that has you and your priorities in it. All the things that you hear me talk about in, like, short, quick sentences, we take hours to, like, really dive in and depending on who you are and where you're at in your life, one of the practices we do might be the exact thing you need, where the other one might be for someone else. It's just really fun, because by the end of the second workshop day, you have homework that you can take back on literally, what your first next step is to make this vision become a reality, to make this vision something you can be till you see. It's just really, really cool, and it's something that I promise you, like doing breath work outside and hearing birds chirping and sometimes a frog ribbiting to the side, and then the traffic's going by, like it's just really cool, like you're not so removed from life that you're woo, I'm off in Wonderland. And then you visualize something that's not even what you want, but it just sounds so spiritually amazing. No, you visualize what you want. 


Lesley Logan 8:35  

And the thing that this retreat always attracts is the almost epic people, and they change you because they validate you. They see you. They high five you. We had a beautiful soul who was like, I don't want to feel like this. I don't feel like this emotion. I'm going to keep that between the retreaters and the women there didn't even know her, and they're like, no, no one would ever judge you for that. You don't need to feel like that. And validated her in a way they don't know her, you know. And so that to me, that community, that family, that we build, we build it in a class, we build it like that. It is the thing you can't put a price on, to be completely honest. Because in life, as adults, I think it can be really difficult to make friendships like there's so much going on. For example, I meant to text a girlfriend two weeks ago. She travels a lot. I travel a lot. Something happened in my life, and Brad's like, I think you should text her. And I was like, yeah, I should text her. And I just didn't do it. And then I was taking my yoga class. Oh my God, I need to text her and see how she is. Now that I'm in town, I can't wait to see her. And after yoga class, she'd already text me, so I just fucking love that. But that friendship, while amazing and wonderful, and for sure, I can go a month without texting her, and we're still the deepest and wonderful of friends, on this retreat, there is not a month to make a friendship. You make it in a minute, and it's really quite cool, because these people have no idea who, what your life is back at home, and so you can kind of explore the things that you desire, the things you want, the things that you're worried about, in a way that is in a different vacuum, half a day away from everything else. 


Lesley Logan 10:08  

You can notice what you miss, what you don't miss. You can notice what you don't actually worry about, and what you are and it really helps you have some perspective. But most importantly, you get these deep friendships that just this shared experience, that even a year, five years from now, you'll think back to this trip and that person, that conversation, and how integral it was into you becoming more of the person you want to be. I think it's really hard to dream up what your future should be in the current chaos of your life. I think it's just really hard. Because even if you are able to, like, close your eyes and tune out all the noise, the moment you're done with the meditation, there's a knock on the door, an extra bill came that you weren't expecting, or someone texts you out of the blue and needs something. And so it can be really hard to, like, stay in that juiciness, right, to stay in that space, to really pull it together, to pull the whole dream together, pull a vision together, to, like, really explore what you don't want without any outside influence. And so yes, we're there and we're outside, and there's gonna be influence, but that influence is going to be, oh my God, over a thousand years ago, a bunch of people built these temples without machines, right? They did a bamboo and elephants, and someone put this from idea into reality, and there was a whole world here thriving away from the ocean a thousands years ago, because they were able to figure out how to get the water to run the wrong direction so that they could live. Talk about moving actual mountains to create a society that thrives and survives. 


Lesley Logan 11:48  

And so to me, what is so cool about prioritizing your Pilates practice, or even starting a Pilates practice and being around other people and having the most incredible experience, an exposure to something so different. In Cambodia, they have a very savory breakfast, okay, and it's very filling, because a lot of them work outside, and most of us probably barely sit down and enjoy our breakfast. But there, we like sit down, enjoy it. We get to explore it. We have it outside. There's all these different things we do, and having that such a different cultural experience keeps you from doubting or putting up obstacles to making your dreams a reality, which is why so many of our retreaters have come back again and have made changes within a week, 30 days, six months of their life, and are having their dream become a reality, and more importantly, they're in community, because it's, like I was saying, was so hard to build friendships. You build them in seconds because you all are there because you wanted a week away. So you have that thing common. You're all there because you're like, I wanted to see this. I wanted to go on this experience. And so it really brings barriers down and allows you to have really deep, wonderful aha conversations, and yeah, you'll go shopping or go for a walk with someone you literally met yesterday. And it's just, it's just magical. So I'm really obsessed with this retreat. I really love exposing people to a culture that's so different than theirs. I really love people seeing how uncomfortable they can be. Not that the retreat is uncomfortable at all, but meaning like, yes, you can do that long flight. Yes, you can get to a foreign country on your own. Yes, you can be among strangers and make friends. Yes, you can do Pilates five times in one week. Yes, you can visualize what you want. Yes, you can try a food that you've never heard of and like it. Yes, you can, right? And what that brings in your confidence that you take home with you. Most people get home and they're like, take me back. How do I go back to where that was? Because there's just something so present in your body when you're there. That's how I can describe it. You just get so present, get out of all the chaos, and you get to just be yourself among some really cool people. 


Lesley Logan 14:04  

So I want you to come. I want you to come this year. I want you to come with us. I want you to stay at my house. Want you to move with me. I want to hear what you dream of, and I want to celebrate that, and I want to help you find the first next step for that. And I want to build a community with you that puts in, build in cheerleaders and accountability buddies to remind you, oh my God, remember this? I want to give you memories that last a lifetime. 


Lesley Logan 14:28  

So go to crowsnestretreats.com so that you can be it till you see it on this and I think the Be It Action, I would just be like, what if you could do this trip? What if you could go on a trip? What if you were someone who could go on this trip? What would that look like? Who would you have to be? What help do you need? Just, do you need a travel agent to help you book the flight? Okay, let's do that. Don't let that technology stop you. Don't let the crazy trip stop you. Do you need someone to watch your dog? I bet you there's someone who can just watch your house and your dog for you. There are, literally, those websites for that. What if you could make this trip happen instead of going, oh, next time, oh, I'm too busy this year. What about next time? What if you could make it happen? I think that's my Be It Action Item. 


Lesley Logan 15:08  

And I will say, I pulled this for Brad, but I think it's really cool for this podcast, it says my creativity exists outside the paradigms I'm told to squeeze myself into. My creativity exists outside the paradigms I'm told to squeeze myself into. You are told all the time, busy, busy, busy. People are busy. Get stuff done. And you're also told a ton of stuff about why you can't take a week off for yourself. You must be on a trip you do with others. You can go on this alone. We've got others for you. Yes, you can. You can. And the way the retreat is set up, if you fly on a Friday night, depending on where you live, you will be there on Sunday morning at the latest, maybe Sunday afternoon. The retreat starts in the early evening, and we end on a Friday morning, so that you can fly out on a Friday and be home probably on a Friday. Solike a week, a week of work. Come on, what are you waiting for? 


Lesley Logan 15:57  

All right, loves. I hope that it was fun to go on a little adventure with me, letting me share why do this retreat? Why I want you on it? What you're going to do with me on it. Thursday, Brad is going to talk about all the other goodness, his favorite parts, and I think it's really fun to hear why he loves it so much. And then you get to experience both of us on a retreat together. And the joy and the adventure is just, well, it's a good kind of contagion. All right loves, until next time, Be It Till You See It. 


Lesley Logan 16:24  

That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod.


Brad Crowell 17:06  

It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell.


Lesley Logan 17:11  

It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co.


Brad Crowell 17:16  

Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi.


Lesley Logan 17:23  

Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals.


Brad Crowell 17:26  

Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time.



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