Retreat:  stories and identity

4 days/5 nights:  cost £395

alternative dates:  arr. Thur 29 April, dep. Mon 3 May - arr. Mon 16 August, dep. Fri 20 August

This residential is about stories… the earth’s stories, cultural stories, family stories, our own stories.  Stories are the essence of our existence.  In a sense, they are our existence.  We are nothing except the story of our being. And into our being we bring the stories of our families and friends and colleagues and compatriots and ancestors and the history of our peoples and their societies and their cultures… we are a universe, each one of us.  Suzuki in talking about meditation drew a picture of our breathing as a swinging door, allowing us alternately to become the whole universe and to be a part of the universe.  And Petruska Clarkson in ‘The Therapeutic Relationship’ ends her 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.”

With our stories we create our identity.  We made them and they make us.  So this time will be about respecting our own stories whatever the sadness joy pain remorse excitement regret contentment fulfilment they contain, so that we can connect with the universe they encompass.  It will offer time for exchange, contemplation, walking and discovery, rest and food and drink, enjoyment and satisfaction.