get off the self-care emergency rollercoaster
join TEND
fall 2025 cohort enrolling now
Tend
A Season of Re-Orienting Your Body, Life, Relationships + Community
Around You + Your Needs
Let's start here:
you are worthy of the same exquisite care and tending you give others.
I know, I know. The fact that humans have needs and require ongoing care and love completely tracks when you think about other people. But you? Somehow you feel like the exception.
Because there's always something else to do, right? Someone else to take care of. Another achievement to reach for. One more errand to run.
It is frighteningly possible to spend an entire life waiting for it to be your turn, with your days designated by external factors. But there are no special prizes for sacrificing your life in service of everyone else. The to-do list will never actually end.
Of course, divesting from that is no small feat. (Especially for those of us socialized to be caretakers, living in the soft animals of our bodies in incredibly challenging times.)
But on the other side? Radiant aliveness. Deep resourcing. Benevolent self-responsibility. Nourishing stewardship.
Welcome to Tend
Tend is a 12-week process of reorienting your life so that YOU and only you are solidly in the center of it.
As we work through the framework for forming the self-awareness, self-regard, and self-trust required for true self-love, we’ll go spelunking into the deepest parts of yourself, experiment with new ways of relating to yourself and others, and create your own unique way of moving through the world informed by you and your needs – not who you think the world wants you to be.
We'll approach the often-nebulous world of self-care in concrete, straightforward ways that leave you with an absolutely unshakeable relationship with yourself that will see you through literally anything.
Never again will your needs, value, or relationship with yourself be up for grabs. Those core pieces of yourself will be absolutely, solidly, yours.
In Tend, we'll work on things like...
Informed self-care – you can’t actually do self-care if you don’t know yourself first. Without that baseline relationship, how do you know what to offer yourself?
Radical self-partnership, the kind that sees you truly tend to yourself even on your not-so-shiny days, without the toxic productivity or self-betterment in the name of Goodness, Perfection, or Ideal Beauty.
The actual self-responsibility —> self-care —> self-trust —> self-love pipeline. (As opposed to the performative self-care so many talk about.)
Re-centering you in your life, and practicing the skills that keep you there: recognizing wants and needs, asking for your wants and needs, and contributing in the way that only you can.
When to say yes and when to say no (and how to feel grounded and at peace with either one!)
Reclaiming ownership of your enoughness, and divesting from all the other not-selves that you've picked up throughout your life.
Sustainable productivity. It is absolutely possible to get things done without sacrificing your body or spirit. We'll also learn about cyclical living, and your energetic rhythms.
It's 12 straight weeks of learning how to take up space smack in the center of your life by tending to yourself, your relationships, your commitments, and your community … without losing even one tiny bit of yourself in the process.
The Tend Path
Everything we do in Tend is focused on giving you the knowledge, skills, and capacities required for true self-care. We’ll start by gathering data about your self and where you are now, then we’ll do some experiments based on what we learn, and then create ways to incorporate this into your life.
Here’s our weekly themes:
Week 1: Mammals have needs and so do you. Your needs are the best, most alive part of you
Week 2: Climbing back into your own skin – your needs talk to you through your body. This week, we’ll start meeting them there
Week 3: Recreating the language of needs, and your preferred strategies for getting them met
Week 4: Being seen, known, and cared for in your relationship with yourself
Week 5: Healing old stories about not being allowed to need what you need and want what you want
Week 6: Knowing when to push and when to pause
Week 7: Becoming a detective to your own experience
Week 8: Shedding what does not belong to you
Week 9: Integration and nourishment
Week 10: Speaking with intention, care, and generosity – and remaining on your own side when you want to self-abandon
Week 11: Sustainable productivity
Week 12: How to continue and deepen this practice of self-love
Bonuses!
Additionally, your Tend tuition will include a few delightful subject-specific bonuses – we’ll talk cycles and seasons, holiday boundaries, and how to ask for what you need, among other things!
Dates + Details
Tend runs twice a year, from Sep 29 - Dec 21, and Mar 23 - June 14.
12 WEEKS OF GUIDED PRACTICES
12 self-study modules of video, audio, and written content. We'll cover a broad range of topics that help you shift your mindset and build your skillset for stewardship.
LIVE CALLS + GATHERINGS
Weekly coaching + community connection calls with me. This is deep work, and I'm here to support you every step of the way.
PRIVATE PODCAST
Private podcast of Tend content + call recordings. Listen anytime you want to go deeper on a specific topic, or put Tend on in the background as you go about your day.
TEND CARE PACKAGE
Carefully curated care package delivered to your doorstep. Care packages are my love language, so you know this is going to be good!
Fall 2025 Cohort live call dates + times:
We’ll have a welcome call on Monday, September 29 at 7 pm Eastern.
Weekly Q&As will take place on Thursdays at 12 pm Eastern.
join Tend
3-month journey
12 weeks of prompts, practices + rituals to support you in honoring your needs + creating systems of sustainable productivity
Weekly 90-Min Q&A calls with Mara
On-demand support when you hit reply & dance into Mara’s inbox
Private podcast to listen to lessons + recordings on the go
Welcome care package 💌
Access to a fabulous on-demand workshop library – we’ll talk cycles and seasons, holiday boundaries, and how to ask for what you need, among other things!
Lifetime access to the course materials + future updates
*
A few notes for when you say YES:
Tend is a three-month course, not a monthly membership you can cancel at any time. When you sign up, please do so with the intention of being a participant for the duration of the program.
3% of profits from Tend will go to Summer of Sass - a vital program in my community that transforms lives by offering a much needed break to LGBTQI 18-20 year olds from oppressive areas in the US by offering them a summer in the welcoming community of Provincetown, Mass to live + work where they are celebrated.
Limited seats available. Doors close on 9/18 or when program fills.
Hey there. I’m Mara.
she/her
If you’re new to my orbit, I’m a coach, writer, podcast host, and self-proclaimed World’s Neediest Human. (A title I take seriously.)
A few years ago I quite literally wrote the book on needs -- Needy: How to Advocate for Your Needs & Reclaim Your Sovereignty.
I work with humans to live more sustainably, to tend to their needs, to honor their energy cycles and rhythms and to really deepen into their relationship with themselves so they stop abandoning themselves in order to do more, or earn their worth or their approval by some external standard.
You want to be seen, acknowledged, and appreciated. (You are not alone in this.)
You can have all of those things. In your relationship with yourself.
In fact, that’s the only reliable source of the attention you’re looking for.
I’ll be frank with you: I used to look at others who embodied their lives as a frontier for play; who didn’t define their worth by their productivity; who owned their role as their ultimate permission + acknowledgement granter, and I’d think, “Must be nice.”
Well, friend. That’s how I live now, and let me tell you: It absolutely is.
Tend is the school + community I wish I’d had when I was a burnt out oldest daughter/mental health care professional/people pleaser/anxiously attached human with a history of relegating my needs to the bottom of a very long to-do list in an attempt to prove my worth.
Tend is my answer -- as a queer, femme wife and mother of two young children, recovering control freak, and human functioning in a world rife with racism, late-stage capitalism, a pandemic, and a climate crisis -- for how to live in a way that is infinitely more delicious, satisfying, rich, intentional, and grounded.
One where you are present, regulated, and able to contribute sustainably.
I am on this journey with you. I haven’t arrived. No one does.
I hope you’ll join me.
join Tend
3-month journey
12 weeks of prompts, practices + rituals to support you in honoring your needs + creating systems of sustainable productivity
Weekly 90-Min Q&A calls with Mara
On-demand support when you hit reply & dance into Mara’s inbox
Private podcast to listen to lessons + recordings on the go
Welcome care package 💌
Access to a fabulous on-demand workshop library – we’ll talk cycles and seasons, holiday boundaries, and how to ask for what you need, among other things!
Lifetime access to the course materials + future updates
*
Frequently Asked Questions:
Your life is for living.
It's YOURS. Tend is an opportunity to practice the skills and build the capacity to hold the radiant aliveness that is your birthright, simply because you exist.