This silent retreat is an invitation to take the lived body as the path of awakening. This is not the body we objectify, judge or identify with, or have ambivalent feelings about, it is the natural wisdom unfolding when we fully immerse mindfulness in the body. This, the Buddha said, leads to ‘whatever skilful qualities are on the side of clear knowing’.

Sometimes meditators skip over the importance of awareness in the body, perhaps through misunderstanding, anxiety or aversion. In this retreat somatic practices will be integrated as part of our meditation. Somatic practices aid nervous system regulation and help unwind deeply held tensions and habituated patterns of reactivity. They help develop the ‘felt sense’, or interoceptive awareness, enabling a more grounded capacity to ease difficult and painful emotions and thoughts and supporting a more open-hearted engagement with life. As the bodymind settles into wholeness and awareness clarifies, the more subtle aspects of embodiment will reveal themselves transforming our usual perceptions of self and world.

The program will consist of lying down, sitting and walking, regular guided meditation, dharma talks, occasional relational meditation and regular somatic practice sessions. These will include working with the breath, unwinding movement and yoga, and TRE (Trauma Release Exercise).