About Purring Oaks
Purring Oaks is a 60-acre forest sanctuary tucked in the woods of Southwest Michigan. It’s more than a retreat center—it’s a slow, living ecosystem where healing doesn’t have to look like productivity, and creativity doesn’t have to perform.
Founded by Lilla, a writer and healing arts practitioner living with chronic illness, Purring Oaks is rooted in somatic intelligence, seasonal rhythms, and the belief that land can be a co-teacher. This is a space for those who’ve felt rushed, overlooked, or burnt out by the speed of modern life. Here, softness isn’t weakness—it’s strategy.
Residencies at Purring Oaks invite artists, healers, writers, and seekers to live, learn, and co-create with the land. Whether you're cultivating a creative project, tending your inner ecosystem, or simply longing to feel like yourself again, Purring Oaks welcomes you with open arms and quiet trees.
Offerings include:
🪷 Artist Residencies (Spring through Fall)
🧘♀️ Healing Sessions through the Maneki Method & Emotional Body Mapping
🥋 Honeyflow BJJ for sensitive or adaptive bodies
🫱🏽🫲🏼 Small Event Rentals for workshops, nature gatherings, and seasonal circles
🌾 Land-based projects co-created with residents and community members
At its heart, Purring Oaks is a place to return—to your body, your breath, your creative pulse, and the Earth.
About the Founder…
Meet Lilla — writer, artist, and founder of Purring Oaks.
Born in Chicago to two academics, Lilla grew up steeped in language, curiosity, and a love of learning. She earned her MFA in New York, developing an arts practice rooted in observation, intimacy, and reclamation. Her creative life expanded into ritual arts, acro, and burlesque performance, but chronic illness soon changed her pace. Living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, she became an unwilling expert in what it means to navigate the world in a sensitive, adaptive body.
What began as survival evolved into intentional healing. Through daily practice, somatic study, and embodied ritual, Lilla developed her own healing modalities: Honeyflow BJJ, a gentle martial arts approach for bodies like hers, and the Maneki Method, a personalized body-mind system for clarity, purpose, and integration.
In time, the city could no longer contain her rhythms. She followed a quiet pull to land—and in 2023, she said yes to stewarding 60 acres of Michigan forest. Purring Oaks was born.
Lilla’s life now orbits around the land, her cats, and her morning rituals: pilates, tea, card pulling, a slice of her homemade seed bread, and time with what’s hard to face—be it the news, her own thoughts, or the next phase of growth. Her days are shaped by seasonality: gardening, clearing paths, creating residency spaces, and welcoming others into the slowness.
She is not here to fix anyone. She is here to hold space—for softness, for truth, for creativity, and for return.
Contact us
Interested in working together? Fill out some info and we will be in touch shortly. We can’t wait to hear from you!