The journey started, as they often do, with Hayley Foster being sick and no one being able to tell her why.
Her stomach had been a problem since she was seventeen. A decade ago, newly married, Foster was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. She traces it back to a vegan stretch when she replaced every gram of dairy with soy, soy milk and soy protein and soy everything, not knowing that soy, for her, was pure inflammation. "I gave myself Crohn's," she says. And then, with the certainty of someone who ran the experiment on her own body, "so I knew I could ungive it to myself."
A complete diet audit. She pulled dairy, gluten, and soy, went deep on the testing, rebuilding her plate from the foundation up. "You can't supplement your way out of a bad diet," she says.
Three years ago Foster and her husband did a dry January that simply never ended, and she describes the alcohol leaving her life mostly as a fog lifting. Around the same time she started hormone replacement therapy, preemptively, after falling down a research hole about softening the years of menopause before they arrived. She got in early, she notes, before the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal ran their reappraisals of the old hormone studies.
You might be tempted to file her under a familiar kind of red-light-and-cold-plunge wellness and move on. That would be a mistake. What Foster actually believes is more careful than caricature. When you consider her personal health history you might assume she’s got a chip on her shoulder when it comes to Western medicine. Does she think it failed her? Her answer may surprise you.
"My daughter wouldn't be here if it weren't for modern medicine," she says. "I sit on both sides of that fence."
Unhackable Heartache
About two years ago, her daughter went through a serious health crisis. Foster keeps the details private; what matters to the story is what it did to her. For the first time in fifteen years, the nervous system she had spent so long learning to regulate simply unspooled. She was meditating in the backyard every morning, doing all the things she knew how to do, and none of it was touching the heart of it. For months after she couldn’t talk about it without crying.
Her husband suggested a retreat. They had been invited to one in Mexico by a couple of guys they'd met at a conference, a conference they had only attended in the first place to find doctors who could help them understand their daughter's recovery. Foster hesitated. She was, she jokes, going to be the oldest one there. They went anyway.
Five days, no shoes. Face full of sunlight at dawn, grounding, meditating, sound bathing, and fires at night. On the third night, after a breath work session, she told the story of her daughter out loud, and for the first time in ten months the words came without the tears. The medical event and the emotion had finally come unstitched from each other. "I was like, holy," she says, and stops, because there is not really a word for it.
There wasn't one in the moment, anyway. The word came later, and when it came it did not arrive like a revelation. It arrived like something remembered. She had spent twenty years writing “I want more calm” in journal after journal, as if calm were a place she might finally reach if she kept moving fast enough toward it. What she understood now was that she'd had the grammar wrong the entire time.
Calm isn't something you find, she says. Calm is something you create.
One day can change your life
She came home and started building, first tiny retreats in her own backyard, then Mexico, then Costa Rica twice this year, and now IMMERSIV, a single day on Long Island that gathers dozens of like-minded brands into one experience you move through rather than sit and observe. No speakers, no expo hall, no lanyards.
Attendees walk from zone to zone and try a little of everything: the recovery tools, the body composition scan, the breath work, the barefoot mechanics class, the beverage station with its adaptogens and alcohol-free tonics. The cell service where they hold it is famously terrible, which she considers a feature, not a bug.
The intention and intensity she brings to her retreats is real. Foster spent the morning of our conversation on the phone trying to source drinking water in glass bottles because she refuses to put a single plastic bottle in an attendee's hand. The food is organic where she can get it, made to order, no seed oils, and she will lose money on the margins before she compromises any of it. "That would be the antithesis of everything I've ever been," she says.
Racing before the Gun
Foster got her first job at ten delivering newspapers before she was legally allowed to work. Her brother had a route and there was no way she was not about to let him have something she didn't. "I came out of the womb an entrepreneur," she says, and she is not exaggerating for effect. It is simply the fact of her.
Foster climbed the corporate ladder in advertising and hated the outline of it: first one in, last one out, and none of it showing up on her paycheck. At thirty she left and built her own promotional marketing company, with a second office in China, importing private label goods by the container load for Big Retail.
She grew that business for twelve years, and in those twelve years she was single, then married, then a mother of two, then divorced, then grieving her parents. Everything that can happen to a person happened while the company kept needing her. It didn’t take long for Foster to realize that the global enterprise she founded no longer filled her cup. It had been fun to build and then it had stopped being fun to run, and she was a single mother who wanted to be home more than the business would allow.
Foster severed the partnership and started again, this time as a consultant helping other women start and grow their own companies. For about ten years she coached, and then, the way she does everything, she followed her own need into a niche: health and wellness. The people building gyms and functional medicine practices and better ways to feel good. "Those were my jam," she says. She was on her own health journey by then, and she wanted to be around people running toward the same thing.
Slack Tide
Everything Hayley Foster has built, she built herself. The companies, the consultancy, the health turn, IMMERSIV, all of it first person singular, no assist required. Which was, for most of her life, precisely the problem. Her husband, Brian, runs the event with her now, but the thing he actually changed had nothing to do with the work
What he changed was the permission to occasionally set something down. He was a Navy SEAL when she met him at a bar, though she didn't know it; she was fresh off a Tough Mudder, and his opening line was that she had great veins. As far as pickup lines go, a bit unconventional admittedly.
Brian kept showing up after that, a fixed steadiness while she was still moving at a steady clip. He was the first person, she says, who made her feel safe enough to stop proving things for a minute. They quit drinking together. They read the same books and debate them. They have dragged their teenager into their book club and listen to podcasts as a family. The point is not romance, exactly. The point is that the load is easier to carry when shared.
Gratitude. That’s the advice she shares as the easiest way to start changing your life. Let gratitude be the first and last thought of every day and reframe your world with words. Daughterly duties aren’t “I have to take my mother to her doctor” but rather “I get to.” Same errand, entirely different life. "It changes the whole reality of it," she says. The burden and the blessing were always the same set of facts. You choose which one you're standing in.
Foster has a line she comes back to, and it lands nowhere near the water. “Take off your shoes,” she says. “Put your bare feet on the grass and feel the actual ground under you. Be where your feet are.”
Hayley Foster hosts IMMERSIV retreats in Long Island, Upstate New York, and Costa Rica. Consider it an invitation to come and take off your shoes off. Find more info here.