You can book retreat tickets here

Do you often say yes when you want to say no? Do you often put other people's needs before your own and feel aggrieved that others haven’t done the same for you? Do you take on far too much work and feel resentful towards other people who haven’t done the same? Do you feel that you never have any time for yourself because you are always at the beck and call of other people? Do you believe that you haven’t been seen or heard in a family or work environment? Do you believe that your problems are petty in comparison to others? Do you see repeated, unhealthy patterns of behaviour in your life? Eating too much or too little? Drinking too much? Too much or not enough Netflix or gym time. Feelings of impostor syndrome? Are you not able to open up or trust easily?

All of the above could be seen as adaptive behaviours from childhood. Importantly, at the time that these behaviours were developed they were essential for your survival. They were essential for you to maintain attachment to an important relationship, they may well have kept you alive. Now that you are an adult these very same adaptive behaviours could be stifling and hindering your engagement in and enjoyment of the life you so desperately want to be living.

Given that you are reading this then I think it is a fair assumption that you, like me, are interested in personal exploration and a desire to understand yourself. What makes us be who we are? Is this expression of ourselves fixed and if not how do we go about entering into a relationship with all the parts of us that we have developed over our lifetime?

The Buddha said, ``With our mind we create the world” which is the underlying message in every single book relating to understanding the self that I have ever read, from The Bhagavad Gita written c1000 BC through to Eckhart Tolle’s ‘The Power of Now’ from 1997 and Gabor Mate’s ‘In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts’ from 2008. What we now know to be true through modern research and discoveries in psychology, medicine and spirituality is that before we produce our world with our mind, the world produces our mind. That is, that our environment has a huge part to play in who we actually are, how we project ourselves onto it and perceive ourselves to ‘be’ from it.

My intention for our retreat is to help you understand how your early environments and experiences moulded your behaviours, which we then adopted as personality and came to think ‘this is just how I am’ when in fact this is not just how you are, this is how you have adapted yourself to maintain attachments to your relationships, which can often be at the detriment to your own authenticity.

Understanding ourselves and those emotional behavioural patterns is the key to living presently. I know this is a term we often hear ‘to live presently’ or ‘to be in the present moment’ but do we really understand what it means? To live presently is to understand and be able to answer the question ‘What is going on for me right now?’ How is my body reacting to the present moment? Am I being triggered by a sight, sound,smell or emotion that is recreating an incident from my past. Maybe your colleague didn’t actually hear you and isn’t in fact ignoring you. Maybe your partner is late for a perfectly good reason and hasn’t abandoned you. Maybe you are able to express yourself in work and not need to worry about losing attachment to an important relationship.

Our Haven retreat at The Clandeboye Hotel will take place over two nights, from Friday till Sunday afternoon. I will demonstrate to you how to become aware of your repeated patterns of behaviour and thought and how to recognise if these patterns are helping or hindering you. I will encourage you to reconnect with the felt-sense through a variety of exercises and mini workshops. I will lead you through several guided meditations that will lead you into your body and allow you to be fully aware of what is happening for you right now. We will have an early morning yoga session from Debbie Wilson, one of my favourite yoga teachers and BodyTalk specialists. Debbie will lead us deep into the felt-sense, enabling us to reconnect with bodies and to be present.

We will also have a personal exploration and creative writing workshop led by Gillian Colhoun. Gillian is one of the founding members of Dark Angels who are an internationally acclaimed collective of authors. Gillian will guide you to a place of deep personal understanding through the use of reflection questioning and writing.

The theme over the whole two days will be Compassionate Inquiry.

“Compassionate Inquiry is a psycho-therapeutic approach developed by Dr. Gabor Maté that reveals what lies beneath the appearance we present to the world.

Using Compassionate Inquiry, we can unveil the level of consciousness, mental climate, hidden assumptions, implicit memories and body states that form the real message that words both express and conceal.

Through Compassionate Inquiry, the client can recognise the unconscious dynamics that run their lives and how to liberate themselves from them”.

Once we have identified the unconscious and made it conscious we can then start to really engage in the life we want to live. We can begin to plan without the fear of losing attachment. We can begin to express ourselves. We can begin to enter into a relationship with and be compassionate to the parts of us that are struggling to be seen and heard. We can begin to love all parts of us and not just the parts of us that we find desirable.

You will leave our Haven retreat with a renewed sense of who you actually are. You will know what you really love to do. You will leave with a renewed confidence in yourself and your ability to express your needs.

You will leave with greater insight and compassion for yourself and those close to you. You will be looking at the world through clear eyes.

You will leave with the ability to communicate in a non-combative, non-aggressive way enabling you to find resolution rather than conflict in your everyday interactions.

The retreat is full board in beautiful surroundings and you will be taken care of to the highest standards.

The all inclusive price of our Haven retreat is £695. Our earlybird price of £595 is open until the 31st December. You can avail of the earlybird price by paying a deposit of £195 before the end of December and then completing payment by the end of February.

We at inmynd are really looking forward to welcoming you to our Haven retreat and are happy to answer any questions you might have. You can get in touch here and you can find out a little more about our retreat here

Tickets are available from here

Here is to your every success!

Kevin and The Inmynd Team.