The Ceiba Protocol
By Ceiba Wellness
The Private Leadership Event for Women at the Forefront of Tech, Cybersecurity & AI
October 23-28, 2026 - Riviera Maya
Invitation-only 20 executives
Masterclasses
AI risk, cyber law, threat intelligence, and the neuroscience of high-stakes decisions. Led by practitioners. CPE-eligible.
Tabletop Simulations
Not a one-hour exercise. A breach scenario that builds across five days — with every decision carrying into the next session.
The Cohort
Twenty executives. Every profile reviewed. The conversations that don't happen at conferences.
The Program
Five Days. 20 seats. Engineered for Impact.
One invitation-only experience designed for women in technology, cybersecurity, and innovation — combining continuing professional education, physical recovery, and curated offline experiences.
Not a retreat. Not a conference. An industry event.
Movement & Recovery
Daily Pilates, yoga, and guided recovery practices – designed around the physical demands of executive technology work. Not a bonus. Part of the program.
Wellness Concierge
A dedicated concierge coordinates your recovery throughout the five days – lymphatic massage, HiFU, hydrofacials, and magnesium treatments, personalized to your pre-arrival intake.
Offline Experiences
Astronomy & celestial navigation. Thermal stress protocol. Yacht day: open water cognitive reset. Acoustic frequency therapy. Curated offline immersions personalized to the cohort, confirmed closer to the event.
Personal Protocol
You leave with something built around you – a take-home resilience protocol with recovery habits, decision-making frameworks, and tools calibrated to your baseline.
The Breach Scenario
Decision making under pressure. Practitioner-led. Closed door. CPE-eligible.
Most tabletop exercises are run from a slide deck, in a boardroom, with people who already know the script. Here, the scenario is live, the peers are real, and the debrief is led by practitioners who have managed actual breaches at the highest level. The scenario adapts in real time to the decisions the group makes. It runs across five days. The pressure compounds.
No recording. No vendors. No audience.
The difference shows up back at work – in how fast you move, how clearly you communicate under pressure, and how confidently you make the call when it matters.
Shawn Ford
Breach coach & partner, Ceiba Law
Faculty
Gabrielle Botbol
CTO, Hacker
Woman Hacker of the Year 2022. Offensive security specialist with a practitioner's understanding of how attacks actually unfold – and what executives get wrong when they do.
Elodie Meyer, LL.B.
General Counsel, Entrepreneur
Co-founder, Ceiba Law. Serial entrepreneur who built a cybersecurity firm before founding her own legal practice. Tech lawyer with firsthand operator experience.
Vanessa Henri, LL.M.
Managing Partner, Founder
Cybersecurity lawyer and entrepreneur. Top 20 Women in Cybersecurity Canada 2020. Top 3 Women in Cybersecurity Law 2024. International speaker and published author.
Myriam Côté, Eng., Ph.d.
Chief AI Officer
Engineer, researcher, and one of the architects of applied AI in Canada. Helps organizations cut through the noise and turn AI into something that actually works at scale.
Executive recovery
Your nervous system does not separate the meeting from the body that sat through it. Five days of high-intensity learning, peer pressure, and strategic thinking accumulates physically. The Ceiba Protocol is designed around that reality. Movement is not scheduled between sessions by coincidence.
Movement and recovery coach,
Althea Studio - Pilates & Wellness
Mina Grozdeva
Mina Grozdeva holds a degree in Physical Education and Sport Sciences with a specialization in health, and international certifications in Pilates Mat and Reformer, Postural Reeducation, Functional Training, and the Hypopressive Method.
At the Ceiba Protocol, she leads daily sessions calibrated to each participant's baseline. You arrive with an assessment. You leave with a protocol.
Conversation starters
The Attacker's Methodology
You have a security program. An attacker has already mapped around it. What are you not seeing?
The Counsel's Calculus
A lawyer and a CISO read the same incident differently. One of those readings protects you.
AI Helps, Until It No Longer Helps
You adopted the tools. Have you thought through what they are optimizing for, and what that costs you in two years?
Technology, Security and Sovereignty
When procurement, national security, and digital sovereignty collide, your judgment is the last line.
The Setting
The Ceiba Protocol takes place in a private setting on the Riviera Maya, selected for one reason: to remove the noise of everyday life.
Over five days, participants step away from boardrooms, airports, notifications, and endless meetings into an environment designed for thoughtful conversations, restorative movement, and uninterrupted focus.
Every space—from the meeting rooms to the outdoor gathering areas—has been chosen to support the rhythm of the experience: learn, reflect, recover, and connect.
Sara Derbel
Chief of staff
Ayate Leshaf
Chief learning officer
Darcie Rivest
Managing partner
Built from lived experience. Not a theory
Why The Ceiba Protocol
Darcie spent over a decade recruiting for technology companies, working alongside CEOs and CTOs to build their leadership teams. She watched high-performing people operate at full capacity with almost no space to think clearly.
Then she stepped offline herself – yoga teacher training in India, Divemaster certification in Greece – and came back with a different understanding of what executives actually need.
She now designs and runs the experiences she never saw offered.
The Ceiba Protocol was not born in a boardroom.
It was built by two people who have lived this world from the inside.
The curriculum was developed with a Chief Learning Officer and is grounded in established learning science: spaced retrieval, interleaved practice, and stress inoculation. The sequencing of sessions, the placement of movement between cognitive work, the escalating pressure of the tabletop scenario — none of it is incidental. Every element has a documented reason.
You leave with more than CPE hours. You leave with a decision instrument built under real pressure, a physical recovery protocol calibrated to your baseline, and a cohort of peers who went through it with you.
Who is this for?
She is a CISO, VP, CTO, GC, or founder in technology, cybersecurity, or AI. She has been to the conferences. She knows what a good room feels like — and she knows when she is not in one.
She is not looking for more content. She is looking for a room where the conversation is worth having, the peers are worth knowing, and the five days are worth the five days.
The CISO
The Lawyer
The VP
The Founder
- Access to the room, not just the content
- 20 executives. Every profile reviewed
- The peers you cannot reach on LinkedIn
- Your next board advisor is in this cohort
- Relationships built on five days, not five minutes
- The network that actually picks up the phone
The room is almost full. Request Your Invitation
Riviera Maya · October 23–28, 2026
From $2604 USD with accommodation
Or contact us at hello@ceibawellness.co
In good company
Frequently Asked Questions
Five nights accommodation, all meals, non-alcoholic beverages, and open bar throughout the program. All CPE-eligible sessions, daily movement and recovery, every curated offline experience including the yacht day, and your personal take-home protocol. Flights and ground transport to the venue are your responsibility. We are happy to help coordinate your arrival logistics.
The only thing not included are wellness credits. These are kept separate intentionally: every participant arrives with different recovery needs and priorities, and the credit system lets you choose exactly what you want, a private Pilates session, a lymphatic massage, a hydrofacial, rather than paying for a fixed treatment package that may not fit you.