This retreat will be an opportunity to explore this threshold or alchemy between the body and language. Our practice will be Yoga and movement and reflective poetic reading and dialogue. This will lead us into our own writing practice, where we will explore certain themes. Our backdrop is the astounding beauty of the grounds, springs woodland and abbaye of Bonnevaux, and joining the resident community there for daily meditation.

These are some themes to warmly invite you into this exploration: movement, stillness and reflective dialogueare ways to re orientate our senses to a more physical understanding of our experience. Through the stimulus of ground, touch, breath, posture and language we can discover pathways that reach deeper than emotion, the psychologising of our embodiment, into something more spacious and compassionate.

How might this help us to uncover a more gentle, open and clear sense of what holds, binds and unites us, and set us free to see things from a new perspective? In this retreat we will learn through group practice how this applies especially to where we find discomfort, pain, learnt patterns of disconnection. How does movement and meditation apply directly to developing a greater relational intelligence?

All our events taking place at Bonnevaux offer an opportunity to discover the rich cultural and historical French and European heritage of the 12th-century Abbaye de Bonnevaux, as well as to explore the varied and natural beauty of the land which we cultivate as a model of ecological responsibility.