This Isn’t a Retreat.
It’s a REVELATION.
Five days of barefoot beauty, bold desire, and coming home to your most liberated self.
Let Venice seduce you back to your own gaze—October 2025.
This Isn’t a Retreat.
It’s a REVELATION.
Five days of barefoot beauty, bold desire, and coming home to your most liberated self. Let Venice seduce you back to your own gaze—October 2025.
You step off the vaporetto into velvet dusk, your sandals forgotten in one hand, the other trailing fingertips along stone warmed by centuries. Venice hums around you like a secret. The air is thick with sea salt, candlelight, and possibility. Gondolas drift like dark lullabies along the canal, and a violin echoes softly from a distant balcony. You feel it then—not just the beauty, but the pull. A slow, unmistakable call from the woman you were before the world asked you to be sensible.
A call to reveal your truest, most liberated self.
Welcome to REVELATION.
REVELATION is a five-day return to the woman you were before you dimmed your own light—an invitation to uncover, and at last embody, the self you might have hidden away. It is for the one who was told not to want too much, not to be too loud, not to linger in her longing. For the one who once dreamed of being a singer, an artist, a dancer—before the rules arrived with their tidy sentences and careful expectations.
This is for the woman who sometimes catches a glimpse of another living boldly—laughing too loud, taking up space, claiming joy—and feels a pang of envy followed by a quiet, aching question: Could I live like that too?
We begin on a Sunday and unfurl slowly, like silk in warm water. Each morning barefoot on terrazzo floors, we’ll dance ourselves back into our bodies—into the most honest, unguarded parts of who we are. In sacred rhythm with each other, we’ll explore the power of the feminine gaze—not the one shaped for someone else’s pleasure, but the gaze that rises from within, from the marrow, from desire herself.
We’ll study the male gaze through the silent iconography of Venetian art and architecture—and then unlearn it, piece by piece, movement by movement. We’ll enter the drawing room not to be seen, but to see. We will sit before the male nude not as muses or onlookers, but as artists and directors. We will hold the gaze, not just return it. We’ll give ourselves permission to linger, to wonder, to instruct. To ask, “May I have you stand like this?” and feel the electric thrill of being the one who sees.
Together in an old palazzo, surrounded by candlelight and echoes of ancient arches, we’ll feast under stars that have watched women forget and remember themselves again and again. We’ll let Venice seduce us—not just with her beauty, but with her insistence that beauty belongs to us too; that longing, pleasure, voice, and vision were never meant to be buried.
What will you find inside REVELATION?
You will reclaim the parts of yourself you’ve hidden away—your sensuality, your longing, your voice. You’ll experience deep embodiment and confidence, feeling at home in your skin. You’ll step into creative freedom and unapologetic self-expression. You’ll practice being seen—and being the one who sees, on your own terms. You’ll form intimate bonds with a circle of women walking the same path of return.
And, most of all, you’ll reveal your truest, most liberated self—the woman who was always waiting to be invited fully into the light.
Every woman’s transformation is different. For some, it’s a fierce new boldness. For others, a softening, a coming home, or an entirely new gaze on life itself. The only guarantee is you will not leave the same.
This is not self-improvement. This is self-return.
With the archetypes of permission as our companions, we’ll unravel the mysteries of what we have longed for. Through movement, laughter, drawing, conversation, dance, story, and ritual, we’ll gather the exiled parts of ourselves—sensual, wild, radiant—and let them back into the circle.
The transformation is not theoretical. It is physical.
It is spiritual. It is practical, joyful, embodied.
You will leave not only changed—but revealed.
Chosen by your own gaze, and finally free in your own skin.
Meet Your Guide
About Michelle Dovey
Michelle Dovey is an internationally exhibiting artist and bestselling author whose pioneering work lives at the intersection of art, embodiment, and radical liberation.
With over two decades immersed in transformational practices—including dance, shamanism, and somatic creativity—Michelle is a seasoned guide in breaking taboos, dissolving shame, and reclaiming the body as a source of power, truth, and pleasure.
She exhibited with the acclaimed Gimpel Fils gallery in London for 15 years, building a career rooted in emotional depth and intuitive process. Yet her most profound turning point came through a deeply personal, unapologetic experiment: drawing over 70 naked men in a year-long exploration of her own conditioned shame. What began as art became alchemy—a radical reclamation of the female gaze, a deep inquiry into power and permission, and a full-bodied rewiring of her relationship to desire.
This is Michelle’s first retreat as a facilitator, but she brings the depth of lived experience, the credibility of international recognition, and the soul of someone who has walked through the fire she now invites others into. Her mission is nothing less than cultural reclamation: leading a global movement that empowers women to meet their longing with curiosity, step beyond silence and shame, and inhabit their bodies as sacred instruments of joy, sovereignty, and self-expression.
Drawing naked men was Michelle’s medicine. It may not be yours. But what it revealed is universal:
"When shame begins to dissolve, what emerges is nothing short of a revelation—desire unshackled from shame becomes a compass for truth, vitality, and liberation."
This retreat is that portal. A rare and radical invitation into permission, curiosity, and shameless becoming.
The investment is £10,000
which includes five days and nights of sumptuous Venetian accommodation, all nourishing meals, private drawing studios, palatial spaces, movement sessions, materials, and the intimacy of a curated circle. This is powerful work. And only those who are truly ready will hear the call.
This isn’t for everyone. But if something stirs in you—if you feel a quickening, a yes rising quietly inside—perhaps you’re meant to cross this drawbridge. If you sense that REVELATION is calling your name, you’ll find everything you need here to begin your application.
Space is intentionally limited, so that each woman is deeply held in her becoming. Venice is waiting. We are too.
With love from the dream and the drawbridge,
Michelle
© 2025 Michelle Dovey. All Rights Reserved.