We recently connected with Aimee Hansen and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Aimee thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

Sometimes, a riptide runs through your life, just when you need to be nudged away from the familiar shore. It pulls you into the liminal waters of uncertainty. Resistance will not help. The only choice is to surrender. And when you return to shore, it will not be to the same one you once departed. In the fall of 2011, the riptide that brought me from the familiar to the unknown came through three sequential events.

the known plan dissolves

In 2011, during our second longterm backpacking trip together to escape the corporate world of London, my six year relationship fell apart. On day seven of a trek in the Huaraz mountains of Peru, my girlfriend and I called it quits in a tent. Early in our trip, we had been aggressively mugged (I was punched) while jet lagged and walking down the wrong street in Rio de Janeiro. The experience had put our entire adventure into question for her and had begun to shake the existing fractures in our relationship. We’d saved up and planned to travel for two years, but only made it seven months before the break up. We spent three more months traveling before letting go of each other, as neither of us knew what was next.

the “safety raft” appears

With my trip prematurely dissolved, I decided to recollect myself at my parent’s house in Illinois. I had been living abroad in London, England for nearly 10 years, save the travel. Before the trip, I’d given up everything, including the six figure job, and kept only two suitcases full of stuff. I had no home.

This is when the invitation to trade in uncertainty arrived. The advertising agency I’d left had heard about my adventure ending. They wrote to me to offer me a global position (my previous boss’s job) and to live anywhere in the world I chose. For context, I’d only stayed in advertising after the first two years out of college because it had let me achieve my dream of moving to London – at 24 years old. I’d since left it three times after obtaining a visa and British citizenship – once to work for an NGO and twice (after brief stints to save up) to go traveling.

I’d already escaped the golden handcuffs, but I was still depending on the golden ticket for traveling. The question was always there – what am I going to do when the money runs out? Still, the offer made my stomach churn. I was viscerally aware something bigger was at stake. Even in baseball, it’s three strikes, and you’re out. This was a crossroads of the soul. I told the agency to not even tell me how much money was on offer. I didn’t care – it was a no. The cost of going backwards to work which had emptied my spirit was now far too great.

the ground of reality shifts

During the same stay at my parent’s home, I was in Chicago on a girl’s weekend with my mom. I had set an intention to share deeper talks on our trip, but what unfolded was beyond anything I could imagine. On precisely 11/11/11, over martinis, I stumbled upon a new family truth, different to the one I’d lived for the first 34 years of my life. The family secret was that my dad who had raised me, just like my younger sisters, was not my biological father. My biological father lived one hour away.

I believe things happen when they should. I could not begin to do justice to the layers of this story or the real beauty that unfolded as everyone navigated this. But I can say this. You can’t give the past its truth, no matter how you try. Often, so much comes down to love or fear or some confusion between them. The keeping of a secret becomes a bigger thing to reveal than the secret itself, and it’s hardest for those who carry the weight and pain of bearing it.

The gift of that moment? When the ground of your life shifts from underneath you, it’s a whopper permission slip to take a big pause. To unearth all the questions. To actually ask yourself what you want with your life. With my reality disrupted, life honestly felt more up for grabs. Without that moment, I may have never had the push, or the courage, to go in an entirely different direction with my life.

the leap into the unknown

Having put a hello letter in the mail to this newly discovered human, I packed up the backpack and headed off to Central America with the rest of my trip savings, alone. To start, I signed up for a yoga teacher training on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. I was determined that travel would not just be travel this time. I wanted to put my foot on a new path. I’d never heard of the lake. I knew nobody. But I had to make one step in a direction that wasn’t backwards and unsafe to my soul.

The risk I took was braving a journey into releasing all the shores. And in doing so, I took a big and spacious pause and let the world as I knew it dissolve. Thirteen years later, I can say I didn’t set out for backpacking that time around. It was a different journey entirely that rooted me on the lake until I found a different way of being in the world that includes offering my gifts in ways I never could have foreseen. I never taught a yoga class, either. But I have never stepped into another office, and I’ve never regretted the no.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am the creator of Storyteller Within and lead facilitator of the Journey Into Sacred Expression Women’s Retreat based on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. Ten years ago, the first women’s retreat launched on March 8th, 2015, serendipitously – though not by intention – on International Women’s Day. So we are approaching the ten year anniversary!

Across the last decade, I’ve held this intimate event 25 times and with hundreds of women under the watch of volcanoes. I have a summer retreat approaching on July 26 – Aug 4, 2025 at the gorgeous Villa Sumaya. I also offer online community and journeys for women focused on intuition and living from the heart, as well as one-on-one guided sessions. In August of this year, in collaboration with my co-author, USA Today bestselling children’s author Marianne Richmond, we are releasing a guided writing journal entitled “This Book Is A Retreat: 101 Soul Nourishing Questions to Reconnect with Yourself” which is published by Sourcebooks. (I also have a children’s book about feelings and a novel about an inner world adventure to publish soon!)

Each Journey Into Sacred Expression women’s retreat involves a profound self-exploratory writing journey, movement, yoga, as well as integrative ceremonies such as sound, Chichimeca sauna, and Mayan fire with several guest guides. Through the style of journaling I lead and immersive facilitation, I invite women back to their center and to their voice, where they encounter their own truthfulness and power. I help them to reclaim what they may not even realize they have lost or given away. It’s so important to me that women feel liberated to be whoever they are and say anything in these spaces.

In my offerings, I invite you into the spacious heart, to connect with your center, to get more honest than you’ve ever been with yourself, and to hear and heed your own intuition and guidance. Together, we loosen the stories you tell against allowing your self and your expression, in all the ways you tell them. And we call forth the stories that conspire with who you are and what energies you are here to bring forth. You are reminded that you are the only storyteller of your life, and this power is more important than any narrative you could ever tell.

Women at a crossroads in their lives are often drawn to my spaces. Perhaps they are in a liminal space due to a change of circumstances or they feel on the verge of something they cannot yet name. Women come to get away from the noise and reconnect with their core, to remember who they are, and to liberate themselves more into living her. In the sharing, there is an unspoken magic that impacts everyone. I hold a very grounded space, where women unfurl and relax into themselves. It’s an immersion into self trust and embracing yourself in your wholeness. The deep work can feel so lightening when we do it together.

After the retreat, women have left jobs or relationships that no longer work for them. They’ve taken the big leaps they ached to take that changed how they live or show up for their dreams. They’ve opened up to relationships or embracing the desires they were afraid to admit they even had. I feel every woman who attends the retreat is already on a trajectory of change, whether visible or occurring within, and she seeks or finds this experience to support her on the path.

With the risk I took so many years ago now, I embarked on a journey towards myself. At the time, I even felt I was searching for someone to help me crack open my piñata, so I could feel the self that was buried under the masks and layers, and live her. I wanted to feel truly inside of my life, not a life prescribed by my fears or culture. I walk in that life now, but even more so I found a way to bring my experience to guiding others. Even several years later, women repeatedly tell me they have not found another circle like this one. For me, it’s been a calling and a sacred responsibility.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

When I first decided I was going to begin this retreat offering, I moved fast. I now know I’m a sacral authority, so when I have the clear signal, I move. Freedom is a place beyond choice where I simply feel compelled towards something. That is how I felt when the idea for this retreat came through on day four of a fundraising fast that I had conceived of for a local organization. I’d been writing book drafts on similar themes, and having reached a frustration point with each approach, I realized in a lightbulb moment I could instead create a live experience! The idea was going to happen, and I just needed to work out the how – how to create it, organize it, and market it. It was a steep learning curve.

But what happened was that I planned and canceled five retreats before the first one finally landed. I didn’t yet have women signing up for the offering, one or two. I was also stepping up into a new level of myself, and perhaps I was like the chef who is secretly hoping that nobody shows up to the new restaurant because its scary when you first put yourself out there. I had to internally be ready to brave the leap. Within me, I had to catch up with my inspiration. I took up freelance writing in the gap and have used that to support me, too.

Ultimately, after several retreat cancellations, I had a talk with the divine. I said “I need to let you know that if the next retreat doesn’t happen, I am going to take it as a signal that I am supposed to do something else.” Seven women appeared to make the next planned date happen. Then I received one mention in one article about writing retreats in 2016, and after that, I was planning extra retreat dates for the amount of women wanting to attend. As time has passed, the years have brought both ebb and flow, and riding with this is another aspect of resilience.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Early in my entrepreneurial journey, I had to release and rewire the internalized paradigm of self-dominance. When you’ve studied and worked in patriarchal and corporate environments, you absorb the belief that stress and pressure are the agency through which things happen. You learn the masculine principle of creation which focuses on achieving the desired outcome by the deadline at all costs. Quickly, taking care of yourself and moving in rhythms becomes irrelevant.

Even so, when I worked in offices in my 20s and early 30’s, I watched some people compartmentalize and clock out at five. I wasn’t like that, and it’s part of why being in that environment did not work for me. I gave too much of my life-force to things I cared little about. At the time, I was operating under the belief the worst thing that could happen was I disappointed someone, and my standards for the work and “not disappointing” were high.

When I began developing my own thing, I noticed that the old paradigm of pushing and pressuring was seeping into how I was treating myself. At one point, before a single retreat happened, I went NO. No. And I created a boundary with myself. I thought to myself, if I am going to pour this kind of energy into this endeavor, I may as well throw it all out and go back to the office. This was not the energy I wished to hold for myself and not the energy I wished for my offering to carry. It would serve neither me nor the women to bring that paradigm into this work.

So whenever I noticed the old paradigm creeping in, I paused and breathed through it. The feminine principle of creation is about the journey of creating itself – how we experience and who we become through it, and enjoying the process. Taking care of yourself as a creative being is more important than any one outcome. I relaxed deeper into intuition, trust, and rhythm, so that I carried the work I was doing with the spirit I wished to gift myself and the women who came to my retreat experiences. It has been work done as devotion. Over time, I’ve come to focus far more on the value of my presence than my productivity – and it makes all the difference.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thestorytellerwithin.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/storytellerwithin/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/storytellerwithin

Image Credits

Elfa Mystica Photography – Iulia Lumina Devi (photos 1-6)

Ourtravitude – Kendall Förster (photo 7)

Personal Photo – Gabriela Cordón