It was the middle of COVID, and I had no idea what I was doing with my life.
That’s the honest beginning. Not a vision board. Not a business plan. Just me, in Santa Teresa, with the world on pause and the floor of my old life completely gone beneath my feet.
But to understand how I ended up there, you have to go back much further. To a little island in the Philippines. To a girl who had nothing but the ocean and a dream too big for her circumstances.
I grew up surfing. Where I’m from, the sea isn’t a luxury it’s just there, the way the sky is there. We didn’t have much. My beginnings were humble in the truest sense of the word the kind of humble that teaches you early that the world doesn’t owe you anything, but also that you don’t need very much to be alive. I had the waves. I had my people. I had a dream.
And the dream was simple, even if it felt impossible: I want to see the world.
I had no money. No connections. No map. Just this stubborn, salty knowing that my life was meant to be bigger than the island that raised me. I didn’t know how it would happen. I just knew it would.
The universe provided. It always does, when you’re really listening.
Fifteen years ago, I left home. Singapore was the first country I ever set foot in outside the Philippines, and I still remember the way the lights looked from the plane the way my whole chest felt like it was about to burst open. I’m doing it. I’m actually doing it.
That one trip turned into fifteen years of being a world traveler. Living out of a suitcase. No plan, no return ticket, no idea what was next. Just trust, and curiosity, and the constant pull of the next horizon.
Somewhere in those years, I found Bali. And Bali found me right back.
I fell in love the way you fall in love with a person completely, irrationally, and forever. Bali became my home, the place my heart kept returning to no matter where else in the world I wandered. It’s where I really came into my surfing. Where I deepened as a yoga teacher. Where I learned what it meant to live slowly, sacredly, in tune with the land.
I’m so excited to go back one day soon. Bali is woven into me.
But my path wasn’t just about chasing waves and beautiful places. Somewhere along the way, traveling became a calling, not just an adventure. I spent years doing humanitarian work volunteering with street children across Southeast Asia, then later in Latin America. Sitting with kids whose stories would break you open if you let them. Learning that service is its own kind of prayer.
One day, I’ll do that work in Africa. That’s a dream I’m still carrying.
And then, in the middle of all that movement and meaning, the world stopped. COVID happened. And I got stuck in Costa Rica.
Not stuck in a bad way, exactly. Stuck in the way the universe sometimes does to us closing every door so the one you didn’t see opens. Borders shut. Flights vanished. Bali, my home, was suddenly a world away. And I found myself in Santa Teresa with no return ticket and no idea who I was supposed to be on this side of the planet.
I’d been teaching yoga for years by then sixteen, actually. I knew how to hold space for other women’s unraveling. What I didn’t know was what to do when it was my turn to come undone. The studios were closed. The plans were gone. The version of me who had been moving constantly for fifteen years she just wasn’t there anymore. And in her place was this quiet, unbearable question: what now?
So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I went to the ocean.
Santa Teresa in those months felt like the edge of the world. Empty roads. Empty beaches. The kind of silence that makes you finally hear yourself. I paddled out, and even though I’d been surfing my whole life, this water felt different. The Pacific on this coast has its own personality bigger, wilder, less forgiving than the waves I’d grown up on. It humbled me all over again. It tumbled me. It held me when I didn’t know I needed holding.
I sat out there one morning between sets, salt water dripping off my hair, and something in my chest just… cracked. Not broke. Cracked open. The way a seed does before it becomes something else.
I didn’t have language for it then. I just knew I was crying and laughing at the same time, and that for the first time in months, I felt alive.
It would take me years to understand what was actually happening that day.
In yogic and astrological traditions, life moves in seven-year cycles. Every seven years, something dies in us so something truer can be born. We don’t always get to choose when these cycles arrive. Sometimes they come dressed as a global pandemic. Sometimes as a relationship ending. Sometimes as being stranded in a country you didn’t plan to live in, in a jungle that’s slowly eating your electronics.
That morning in Santa Teresa was the beginning of mine. My first real spiritual awakening. The end of one woman and the slow, salty becoming of another.
Surfer Goddess was born in that crack.
And I want to tell you how it actually started because the truth is so much less glamorous than people imagine.
I built the very first Surfer Goddess website on my iPhone 8.
Not by choice. My MacBook Pro had been eaten alive by mold anyone who’s lived in the Costa Rican jungle knows what I mean. The humidity here is relentless. It creeps into your shoes, your books, your laptop. Mine was completely gone. So there I was, this woman with a vision the size of the ocean, hunched over a tiny cracked phone screen, building the first version of Surfer Goddess one shaky thumb-tap at a time.
It was so imperfect. I had no idea what I was doing. I’d never built a website. I didn’t have a logo, a brand, a strategy. I just had a story and a small phone and the stubborn knowing that this had to exist.
It reminded me of being that little girl in the Philippines, dreaming of a world she had no map for. I didn’t have the right tools then either. I just had the dream. And somehow, again, that was enough.
I started to see it so clearly: women everywhere were going through their own quiet earthquakes. The pandemic had ripped the masks off so many of us. Marriages were ending. Careers were dissolving. Versions of ourselves we’d been performing for years were finally falling away. And most of us had nowhere to go with all of it.
I knew what had saved me. The ocean every ocean I’d ever swum in, from the Philippines to Bali to this wild Costa Rican coast. A board. Other women. Yoga that wasn’t about achieving a pose but about coming home to a body. Long, unhurried dinners where no one was trying to impress anyone. Sisterhood that didn’t ask you to perform.
I wanted to build that. Not a retreat. A threshold. A place women could come to in the middle of their own becoming.
That’s what Surfer Goddess is. It started in Santa Teresa, in the wreckage of a world none of us saw coming, in the beginning of a seven-year cycle I didn’t know I was in, on the cracked screen of an iPhone 8 in a jungle that was slowly eating my electronics built by a girl from a small island who once dreamed of seeing the world and somehow, impossibly, did.
It lives in Nosara now. It’s reaching toward Morocco. Toward Bali back to the waves that shaped me. Toward every coastline where a woman is quietly asking what now?
And if that’s you if you’re in your own crack-open moment, your own seven-year threshold, your own I have no idea what I’m doing with my life I want you to know this
You don’t need to come from money. You don’t need the right laptop. You don’t need the perfect plan. You don’t even need to know how to surf.
You just have to listen to the dream that won’t leave you alone.
And then you have to paddle out.
The ocean has been waiting for you.

With love
Maries