About Purring Oaks
Purring Oaks is a 60-acre forest sanctuary tucked in the woods of Southwest Michigan. 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, an artist and healing arts practitioner living with invisible 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 a rhythm to live by.
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 and Work-Trade Residencies (Spring through Fall)
🧘♀️ Reading Sessions - Tarot, Birthday Magic and more!
🥋 Honeyflow Pilates for sensitive and 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 ground and return to your body, your breath, your creative pulse, and the Earth.
Purring Oaks moves forwards slowly and with purpose. We are not trying to grow fast! We are trying to grow well. This is a minimal waste, conscious permaculture led space. The land is not a backdrop. It is a relationship. Everyone who gathers here is asked to honor it — to use marked areas, care for plants, and leave things as they found them. We share this space with cats, trees, stink bugs, and each other.
About the Founder…
Meet Lilla (she/her) — artist, reader, Pilates instructor, 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.
In time, she felt the city’s hectic energy increasingly wearing on her, and she followed a quiet pull to the land of Southwest Michigan. In 2023, she said YES to stewarding 60 acres of Benton Harbor’s woodlands and wetlands. Purring Oaks was born!!!
Over the years, what began simply as survival tactics evolved into an understanding of intentional and sustainable living. Through daily practice, somatic study, and embodied ritual, Lilla developed her own healing modalities: Honeyflow Pilates, a gentle and comprehensive training method for all kinds of bodies, and her famous Birthday Witch Readings, which allow her clients to deep dive into the beautiful mysteries of their birth charts and archetypal energy blueprints to maximize their joy, empowerment, and purpose in this lifetime.
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. Her days are shaped by the rhythms and needs of the seasons: gardening and harvesting, creating residency spaces, and welcoming others into the slowness and intentionality.
Lilla is not here to fix anyone. She is just here with a bottomless pot of tea for visitors to hold space, for softness, for truth, and for play.
Contact us
RSVP-ing for an event? Interested in working together? Or just want to say hi? Fill out some info and the Purring Team will be in touch shortly. We can’t wait to hear from MEW! 🐱
