Retreat : Discovering the Story
(3 days/4
nights : arr. Sun 9th Sep, dep. Thurs 13th Sep : £420 or 475)
Our stories are what give us our sense of who we are. This retreat will be about stories... the earth's stories, cultural stories, family stories, our own stories. It will be about creating and telling stories, perhaps your own story, or perhaps a story you create to say what you want to say. Creating a story can take many forms... yes, writing, but that can be narrative-style, or poetry, or stream of consciousness, from inside (first person) or outside (the observer); it can also be as a design, on paper as a picture or as a collage or as an artwork in 3D; it can be in sounds, as music, or as sounds and sights in nature... However we do it, whatever the content, the telling of the story contains part of us, and to experience the telling is to make a mark in the world and confirm our place. Work will be facilitated by Simon and will be individual and in 'safe groups'. There will be contemplative meditation with guided visualisation, but also time for drawing on our natural surroundings in the garden with its places for reflection or on walks in the surrounding forest and hills. I like this ending of Petruschka Clarkson's poem 'Story as Medicine'...
To have
authority is to write your own story and help them to live their own their way
with their beat and their feet and the twistings of meanings and her-stories
into the plaits of time and the resonances of cathedral bells and a whistling
in the dark shrouded in fear and disgust, and what if they draw from the dreams
of early times or far worlds or the whimpering sirens of war, without Physis
suffering is just suffering and pain is just pain.
Telling the story is about healing and growing.
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