And breathe

Our retreat venue April 29-May 3

After my last diagnosis of breast cancer I noticed a pull to pay special attention to my body’s  reaction. Any surgery and diagnosis of major illness is a trauma which we hold in our bodies and perhaps not one we recognise enough. 

I was told a few weeks off normal activity and I would recover. I ached to take some time to just be still. I joined a mindfulness course (With Youth Mindfulness) which had four retreats in the year. I had applied before I was even aware of what I’d done. During the year I certainly deepened  my mindfulness practice and I learned how to deliver the training but mostly I recognised an almost primal need to pay attention to not just my mind-but also my body.

That experience drew me to approach my creative writing tutor Helen Boden ( i go to her class in which we write about art around galleries in Edinburgh) with the suggestion we jointly facilitate a retreat with creative writing, mindfulness and coaching. We’ve built up from one day to a weekend and this year at the end of April we offer a Monday to Friday opportunity to restore, reflect and review in the most beautiful of settings near Falkland in Fife. Jo has established a beautiful and mindful  home which we join for the week. We eat lovely food, walk ( if you can) mindfully in the glorious area, we write, we challenge ourselves to find our own path and we restore and recalibrate self care. If you want to join us; here is the link. We keep it a small group and there is excellent  accommodation in Jo’s house as well as space for local people to come each day. I’m so very much looking forward to it. 

I’ve recently read « The Body keeps the Score » which makes a compelling case for not only talking therapies after trauma but also helping to release trauma from our bodies. That’s not only important in relation to adverse childhood events but also those living with and through the trauma of serious illness or adult traumatic events. I recognise my healing from surgery is mind and body and I’m now f that retreats are a very good way to meet that need. My recent retreat in Cumbria (with the Sacred Space Foundation)  helped me leave behind a fog or exhaustion and helped face the next few months with my head up. Healing is so much more than medicine. It’s time to waken to that ourselves. In Mary Oliver’s words in her poem: 

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Our busy lives can serve to us ignoring our needs. My learning in my long and ongoing journey with pain and treatment for cancer is to improve, we need to give space and time to enable healing to happen. Medicine is not enough to do this. We need to create our own way of healing and it takes time and focus and self care daily. It’s taken me a while to understand this and in many ways I’m learning every day but I’m so grateful to know this now.

Wishing you to the opportunity and space to heal if you need to....and let’s be honest that would be most if us in some way.