Week 2: Tend to Your Body

From Bloom to Basecamp

A 4-Week Spring Preparation Series

The soil doesn’t apologize for winter.

It just receives the season it’s in, and when spring comes, it softens. It opens. It gets ready to grow again.

Our bodies are the same.

This week we turn toward the body — not with a training plan designed to break us down and rebuild us, not with a harsh inventory of everything we can’t do yet. We turn toward it the way a gardener tends to soil. With curiosity. With care. With a willingness to start exactly where we are.

Spring is the tending. Summer is the bloom. Fall is the grounding. Winter is the rest.

We are right on time.

First: ask the inner critic to step aside.

Before we take any honest look at our bodies, we need to create a little space. That voice that knows every limitation, every skipped workout, every way we’ve fallen short — we’re going to ask it to go do something else for a while.

It doesn’t have to leave forever. Just for now.

What we’re doing this week requires kindness. A soft eye. The same gentleness we’d offer a friend who was just finding her way back to movement after a hard season.

The trail meets us where we are.

One of the most beautiful things about the backcountry is that it doesn’t ask us to be anything other than present. The mountain doesn’t grade us. The trail doesn’t compare us to who walked it before.

What it does ask is that we show up prepared enough to be safe, comfortable, and able to receive what’s there.

That preparation begins not with intensity, but with consistency. Baby steps, taken with intention, build real capability. And capability builds the thing we’re really after — confidence.

Our Week 2 Tasks

1. Take an honest, kind inventory

Sit with these questions and write or reflect freely:

Where am I already using my body? What feels strong and alive in me physically? What has been asking for more attention?

2. Name your strengths first

Before we look at what needs tending, we look at what is already there. We walk? We garden? We chase kids or carry groceries or stand on our feet all day? All of it counts. All of it is a foundation.

3. Add one easeful, playful movement this week

Choose whatever feels like a gentle yes:

A 20-minute walk outside, just to feel your legs moving on uneven ground

A slow hike at a local park or trail, no destination in mind

A walk with a light daypack on — even just around the neighborhood — to get used to carrying weight

Ten minutes of stretching or gentle yoga focused on hips, calves, and feet

There is no wrong answer.

The only goal this week is to begin.

If the body is ready and the call is there — the 2026 Gentle & Soulful Women’s Backpacking Retreats are open. These retreats are designed for exactly where we are right now. Not for the athlete. For the woman who is ready to walk herself back to something.