Self-knowledge Retreats

Your Journey to
Self-Discovery

What does the Retreat include?

Mindfulness thru movement yoga class (all levels).
Introduction to self-knowledge.
Mindpower, journaling and visualization.
The causes of human suffering.
Living a purposeful and meaningful life.
Walking the labyrinth.

What do you 'takeaway' from the Retreat?

A broader knowledge of yourself.
Tools to support you in your every-day life.
The life-changing magic of decluttering.
Sadhana practice for spiritual self-care.
Like-minded friendships.

Who is my Retreat for?

Anyone looking for a deeper meaning in themselves and in their lives; and cementing a better relationship with themselves, with others and with their bodies.
1:1, couples, families (ages 12+), friends, groups, team building, retreats and online.

Self-discovery is the act or process of gaining knowledge or understanding of your abilities and character – it is a deliberative consideration of one’s thoughts and feelings – self contemplation, introspection and reflection. We all have a purpose, it is to figure out what it is and go out and do that.

During our time together, you will be taking custodianship and responsibility for learning more about yourself. It will be a journey of self-knowledge through the content of interactive booklets. It will enable you: to better understand yourself – why you are the way you are, do the things you do, say the things you say, feel the way you feel; learn to put healthy boundaries in place; and essentially find joy in your everyday life.

What propels the action is the intention – you must have clarity on your motivation and your intention. The intention determines the reaction / result / the consequence. Everything should be fueled by you wanting to be a better person and to live by example.

Everything that is happening to you in your everyday life is happening for you, it is for you to pay attention to your life – it is your greatest teacher, it is trying to bring you home to yourself.

All pain is the same, the common denominator in the human experience is our emotions and our feelings – there is not one experience that has happened to you that hasn’t benefitted you or helped you rise.

We are going to apply our emotions and experiences. You want a clear image of what your goals/ future holds for you, not limited by past experiences. When you betray yourself in relationships, you are then no different to the person who betrayed or hurt you.

We are going to take ‘why did this happen to me?’ and learn ‘what was this teaching me?’… When we are unable to accept the pain of the past we spend our lives rehashing the same old situations, making the same old mistakes, unable to accept new realities, and dissatisfied with everything. We justify our unsatisfactory existence by blaming others, blaming time, blaming life itself and blaming ourselves.

Some insight... When you listen to an instrument do you hear the music or do you feel it? You hear the music through your ears but it touches your heart, so in actual fact, you feel the music through your heart. This is the same in life, we experience life through all our senses but we feel all these experiences through our hearts. You see, it’s the heart that feels and we associate the heart with love, so when our hearts are broken we no longer want to feel the hurt.

But in reality the heart feels everything. It’s the mind that tries to make sense of the experiences but it’s the heart that feels and therefore only the heart that can make sense of what is felt. The heart is like a central portal in our body, the point at which opens and either remains open, or closes – related to how we experience life and how we manage life’s experiences.

NEVER GONNA NOT DANCE AGAIN….

Question: When did you stop dancing?

“In shamanic societies, if you came to a shaman or medicine person complaining of an ailment, being depressed or disheartened, they would ask: “When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop hearing the silence?” For where we have stopped, is where we have experienced the loss of the soul.

An experience that causes us pain and/or disappointment, it hurts. We therefore consider this to be a bad experience. But somehow, an experience that causes us happiness and joy, this doesn’t hurt, we therefore consider this to be a good experience. The painful experience and the joyful experience are both experienced the same way – through the heart. We just make a choice within ourselves that if the painful experience hurt too much (in some instances it can even be considered a trauma – we carry it with the same weight, ‘big’ or ‘small’). We withdraw, close off and protect our hearts. However, the joyful experience, which was a happy one, we open our hearts and carry on living life…

The truth is, we grow in ourselves through both of these experiences – good and bad. In essence, our life is an ongoing daily process of personal growth and transformation – we just need to change our perspective here and see it for what it is – an opportunity to organically evolve and grow.

The body communicates through its universal language: pain. Your psyche communicates through its universal language: fear (self-consciousness, jealousy, insecurity, anxiety, anger, etc. they are all fear). Physical pain is only there when something is physiologically wrong but inner pain is always there, underneath, hidden by the many layers of our thoughts and emotions.

This inner pain is a psychological pain and we feel it most when our hearts go into turmoil, like when the world does not meet our expectations. As we try to express ourselves daily, we carry an inner weight – the fear of experiencing the pain, so we are either feeling it or we are protecting ourselves from feeling it.

When Buddha said that all of life is suffering, this is what he was referring to. Knowing this is quite liberating when we realize we can actually enjoy living life instead of fearing it.

Over time the heart builds up impressions. These impressions get triggered by the outside world stimulated by our senses, allowing us to re-live the unprocessed experiences we’ve held in our hearts over a period of time (sometimes many years with the root problem being buried under all the shallower issues which are actually about avoiding the deeper ones).

Do you see the importance for us to release both the good and the bad experiences? By holding onto and repressing these experiences, thoughts, feelings and emotions we hold ourselves back from embracing life fully and all its many wonders and opportunities.

The mystery begins with our history. Although the physical body travels forward chronologically, one’s emotional consciousness always lingers at any point of departure. Before we can fully surrender to the mystery, we have to go back and heal the wounds and memories that obstruct us. This is the ‘power of then’. We’ve got to be there then, before we can be here now.

Jeff Brown

References: Louise Muggeridge - Shakti-Life; Oprah - The Resilient Mind, trust yourself, trust your power, trust your intuition; Michael A Singer - Untethered Soul, the journey beyond yourself.

“what does the inner life say?”