EMBRACING THE SHADOW RETREATS
Come & join us on a highly practical & experiential retreat of engaging with and integration of ‘the shadow’.
If you’ve tried mindfulness, counselling, therapy, analysis, other forms of personal growth & spirituality and still feel nonplussed, disempowered & confused in the way that you live your life and relate to yourself & others, this retreat maybe for you.
‘By shadow I mean the ‘’negative’’ side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious.’ Carl Jung CW 7, par. 103
This is a dedicated retreat to help in:
Post awakening & plant medicine integration
Making the unconscious conscious
Identifying the root of bewildering behavioural patterns
Harmonising the opposites
Trauma release
Creativity Unblocking
Is it just seeing the nasty stuff and feeling horrible? No! We learn that by coming into conscious contact with the primacy of our experience, as we meet it in our somatic reality - the body, it changes.
As our experience is changed by conscious contact we too are transformed as an individual, bringing insight, freedom & aliveness as well as humour & joy. We become more individuated and self confident, helping us to reclaim our inherent dignity.
During the retreat we learn solo practices that put us in touch with our own resourcefulness, that reconnect us to our own agency as an individual and bring awareness to our embodied reality. But the core of the retreat introduces you to Somatic Dialogue, our unique blend of embodied partner based practices that connect us to the primacy of experience.
Somatic Dialogue includes dyad communication cycles, partner based psycho-technologies for insight and integration, which also improve our ability to relate.
You can read more about dyads here.
“‘The somatic man, ‘’the adversary’’, is none other than the other in me.’”
The practices go beyond mindfulness in that one becomes curious towards one’s experience, including the ‘felt sense’, that which is within our experience but as yet cannot be described. During this process words, images and feelings help to bring more meaning & understanding in an unfolding relationship between the conscious and unconscious, which when embodied & expressed help us to become more whole.
Through invitational and directional Somatic Dialogue we meet parts of ourselves that have been ignored, welcoming all that has not been felt or listened to and learn to access the wisdom of our body and what it has to say. It provides the arena in which it can be embodied and communicated fully, all it has ever wanted to do. It’s a great way of processing guilt, shame & unworthiness that society no longer has a capacity for, nor the capabilities of handling successfully.
It also helps dissolve the glue that keeps our unconscious ‘complexes’ together, internal functions that keep us in states of fight, flight, freeze or fawn that drive us to behave irrationally & unconsciously.
More than this it helps free us from our encultured minds and find our own way in life with our talents & gifts and what’s sometimes called the ‘golden shadow’, that which has been dormant or suppressed.
Rather than a dragon to be slayed, we bring a playfulness to an approach that befriends our shadow & that changes us for the better, recognising that this power and wisdom once owned, alchemised and embodied, becomes ours to draw upon when needed. All done within the safety of a retreat environment with facilitators who have extensive experience of the work involved and an ongoing shadow work practice.
Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.
~ C. S. Lewis