By Michelle Thielen

The week I turned fifty, I flew to the edge of the Sea of Cortez and let someone else carry my bags.

That sounds like a small thing, but it wasn’t.

I arrived at Secrets Puerto Los Cabos Golf & Spa Resort with the dust of the road still behind me, and before I could find my own footing, someone pressed something cold into my hand, said my name as though they had been waiting all day for me to walk through the door, and told me there was nothing left for me to do.

The resort runs on what they call Unlimited-Luxury, no wristbands, nothing to sign, nothing to track. When you roll out the red carpet for customers your entire  career, it’s significant when others do this for you. Secrets Cabo red carpet meant limitless access to eight restaurants with not one reservation required, so a craving for fresh Pacific seafood at Oceana could turn into handmade pasta at Portofino to celebrate my half century of God keeping me alive.

It meant a suite that opened straight onto the Sea of Cortez, a beautiful, private check in lobby – ideal for this introvert, and an infinity pool where I could be handed an ice cream drink without ever lifting myself out of the water. What it meant to me was quieter than any of that. It meant that for nine whole days, I was not in charge of a single thing, there was no planning or permissions needed. The only intention I set was to get deep rest and to be fully present.

Held

I did not plan a meal, carry a schedule, return an email, or carry the constant hum of who needs what from me next. The people who run that place have built their whole craft around one promise, that you will be cared for so completely you forget you were ever the one doing the caring. I have been blessed to have stayed in beautiful hotels all over the world. This was my first time at this resort, along with my closest friends and family. It was the first time in a long time that I set down the weight I did not know I was still carrying.

One afternoon I found my way to the Secrets Spa with two of my girlfriends, twenty-one treatment rooms tucked into their own quiet wing, surrounded by stone, flowers and the sound of water, I dreamt with my eyes wide open. We moved through the hydrotherapy circuit the way you move through a room you have needed your whole life without knowing its name. We were escorted to a beautiful steam room, a gentle lay of our head back so that our guide could place cucumbers on our eyes. Then to the sauna, a hide away shower, the bubbling pool, with oxygen beds and forceful streams to massage the neck. We had good laughs there and never wanted to leave. Then the cold  plunge. After my ankles were numb I quickly turned around and chose the beautiful hot tub instead. We relaxed there until we were called for our treatments. Now it was time for our massages. Even though it’s often challenging to find a therapist who can perform a true deep tissue massage, I had met my match that day for 90 blissful minutes. 

I have spent years teaching other people how to release what their bodies are holding. That afternoon, with the help of two incredible women that took an airplane to celebrate me, each of us let someone else help us each to release and let go, and we didn’t apologize one iota for needing it.

It’s an honor to have spent my life holding space for other people. For more than three decades I have been the one in the front of the room, the choreographer, the presenter, the teacher, the minister, the steady voice when someone else’s world was coming apart. I built a school and a body of work around helping people find their breath again, and I would not trade a day of it. But this time, on the edge of the water, with seven of the people I love, the space was held for me.

The Last Call

My phone rang one morning while I stood in the middle of our guest room, the curtains lifting and falling in the ocean breeze the way they do in a room built to let the outside in. It was my dad. I put him on speaker so my husband could talk to him too, and for a few minutes the three of us were just there together, talking about how on earth his little girl is 50, how beautiful it is to be basking in the sun in December. His voice filled the room as Derek and I smiled and laughed at his dad jokes. I did not know it yet, but that was the last phone conversation I would ever have with my dad. 

Five Days

Shortly after arriving home, a call from my step mother led us to visit my father in St. Anthony’s Hospital in Lakewood, Colorado. My dad had many hospital visits, surgeries and procedures throughout many years, apparently this one felt different as we received the invitation and immediately purchased airfare. I wasn’t sure if I was more nervous at what I was about to witness in my dad’s ICU or the outcome of seeing my estranged brother of 14 years. Immediately upon arrival my brother hugged both of us and then I walked to my dad’s bedside. It was heartbreaking to see all of the wires and tubes in him. We were there six days in which I had five of those days of communication, laughs and taking care of him. When we left, he was sleeping and that would be the last time I would ever see him.

He died on January 31, 2026. I don’t count the first day, the one lost to airports and cars getting to him, because five is the number of grace, and I have come to believe God does not run out of it even when the clock is running out on us. Five days I got to sit with my father while he was still alive and still alert, still himself and still asking for “coffee and a smoke”. Five days I was not guaranteed and did not waste, not one hour of them. A word kept bubbling up each day as I washed his hair, face, and scratched his itches – a new word for my dad that I’d never connected before – precious. In these last days with him, he was child-like and incredibly precious. These last days I’ve realized were some of the most precious moments of my life.

The Water I Avoided

I have not been able to write about any of it since. Some griefs do not organize themselves into paragraphs. They just sit in you, heavy and wordless, and the ocean, which had felt like rest, started to feel like something I could not go near. So I did not. For months I stayed away from the water despite many invitations to our happy place near home. I avoided it not on purpose exactly. I just always had a reason.

Then recently, I went back.

Wave by Wave

I stood at the edge of a much colder Pacific Ocean than Cabo. Our ‘happy place’ at the Washington coastline wasn’t a place I could go since so much had happened, and I wasn’t ready this time, but I wasn’t sure how much longer I could avoid the water – it seemed to be beckoning me. You see, I had lost my beloved 14 year old black lab Molly right before my dad’s passing. I hadn’t been to our happy place without her for as long as I could remember. I was her person. She was my little girl. We rescued each other 14 years prior in a parking lot in Federal Way, Washington. We only left each other’s side when I had to get on an airplane.

I took the journey toward the water’s edge, down the long path of stairs, across the wide sand, without my husband and without my Molly…and there I stood. It is the way you stand at the edge of something you have been avoiding, half braced, half hoping. Though I was heartbroken and heavy-laden, the strangest thing happened. Wave after wave came in, and something in me came undone with each one, gently, the way a knot finally gives when you stop pulling at it. The way a sheet falls downward in the air and gently rests on the bed. My body exhaled.

Deep calls to deep in the roar of Your waterfalls; all Your waves and breakers have swept over me (Psalm 42:7, NKJV). 

I have read that verse for years and never once understood it in my body until that afternoon. The same body of water that once carried my father’s voice to me across the miles has now carried the grief out of me, wave by wave.

I did not have a name for it yet. I only knew that being held by moving water did something my mind alone could never manage. It reached the grief underneath the grief, the part of me that had been holding on so tightly I had forgotten how to let go on dry land. I have spent years telling others that the body can pray in ways words cannot. My toes floating there, I finally felt it for myself, except this time the water was doing the praying, wave after wave, crashing over me, the sun dazzling on the water’s surface appeared to be a million ballerinas dancing with grace. Each ripple was grace. Grace washed over me.

Though this pathway is still unfolding, God created a beautiful healing journey through water. He gave me ideas that seemed to flow freely into a beautiful way to help others heal. Whether it is depression, a disease or ailment, God created water to heal. Water has been healing humans ever since God created the world. At the edge of the ocean is where YogaFaith’s Sea Therapy was born on a day I almost did not go. What God led me to create with water, sound and buoyancy and a body finally allowed to stop working so hard just to stay afloat, because the sea will carry you if you let it, the same way grace carries you if you allow it.

Why I Call It Beautiful

I know it is strange to call any of this beautiful. Grief does not usually get that word, and most people talk about it like a wound you simply learn to live around and nothing more. I do not believe that anymore. I think of myself standing at the edge of that water, half braced and half hoping, and I do not see a girl who was broken. I see a woman who is becoming. Recovery is possible, for all of us, not as a return to who we were but as something new grown right alongside the loss. Some of us find it at the sea. Some of us find it somewhere else entirely, in a kitchen, in a garden, in the quiet of a morning sunrise or a beautiful sunset. But it can be found, and when it is, I no longer think it is wrong to call it beautiful. I think it is the truest word for it. We cannot return to who we were before losing our loved one, but we can make our new normal beautiful.

Fifty Is Not the Top of the Hill

Our culture treats fifty like the top of a hill you have started down. I want to tell you, gently and from the far side of a hard few years, that this is a lie. I turned fifty in a place built to nurture me completely, I received a phone call I did not know to treasure yet, and I was given five days of grace at the end I will never take for granted. I have spent these long, slow, heavy months since learning that healing does not arrive on a schedule any more than grief does. Both come in waves. His mercies are new every morning (Lamentations 3:22-23), and I have started to believe the same is true of mine.

I did not go to Cabo to be impressed. I went to be still, though I did not know yet what the stillness would end up holding. I came home changed in ways I am only now finding words for, and more convinced than I have ever been that my best days are not behind me. I do not think yours are either.

So here is what I would offer you, whether or not there is a trip on your calendar. Find the place, even a small one, where someone else carries the bags for once, rolls out the red carpet just for you, where the meal, the massage and the hour by the water are not something you have to earn first. Let the doing stop. Let your breath go all the way to the bottom. And if the water, or whatever your version of the water is, is asking something of you, do not wait as long as I did to answer.

Take my arm. Let’s keep walking into it together.

Wave after wave, Michelle