A guest post by Isabella Ferrari, known as Penny the Witch, who brings The Sacred Witch retreat to Lunita from January 17 to 21, 2027. Her work lives at pennythewitch.com.
About Me
My name is Isabella Ferrari (Penny, my witch name), and my work is rooted in the meeting point between ancient spiritual practices, embodied healing, and the realities of modern life.
A big part of my path began when I spent almost three years living and studying in a Buddhist monastery environment. During that time, I immersed myself in Buddhist philosophy, meditation, contemplative practice, and different approaches to healing and understanding the mind. That experience shaped the foundation of the way I work today and taught me to see healing as something that is not only mental or spiritual, but deeply embodied.
Over time, my path expanded. I deepened my connection with herbalism, traditional witchcraft, ritual, folk practices, and the relationship between people, nature, symbolism, and the unseen.
For the last ten years, I have dedicated my life to studying and exploring different healing modalities, including somatic work, meditation, emotional release, energy practices, ritual, and spiritual mentorship. More recently, I have also begun incorporating the Emotion Code into my work, a method focused on identifying and releasing what the system describes as trapped emotional energy.
What I love most is bringing different traditions together in a way that feels grounded and accessible. I am not interested in making spirituality feel distant, complicated, or reserved for a small group of people. I want ancient practices to feel digestible, practical, and genuinely transformational for the modern world.
That is also the heart of the retreats I create.
I love blending meditation, somatic healing, ritual, witchcraft, emotional work, nature connection, and intuitive practices into experiences that allow people to reconnect with themselves in a deeper way.
For me, healing is not about becoming a completely different person. It is about remembering who you are underneath the layers, the protection, the conditioning, and everything you have had to carry.
My work is ultimately about creating spaces where ancient wisdom can meet modern life, and where people can experience these practices not only as ideas, but as something they can actually feel, embody, and take home with them.
Isabella Ferrari, Penny the Witch
pennythewitch.com
The Sacred Witch takes place at Lunita Jungle Retreat Center, in the jungle outside Puerto Morelos, forty minutes from Cancun airport, from January 17 to 21, 2027; the program and reservations are on the retreat page. If ritual and embodied work in nature are what draw you, our guides to sacred ceremonies in Mexico and to women's ancestral healing retreats describe the ground her week stands on.