"The Celtic year follows the natural cycle of growth but does not begin in Spring when life returns. Neither does it begin in January when our calendars start afresh. The Celtic year begins in November when everything around is dying, because this is when the trees drop their seeds and the cycle of growth begins."

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Welcome, creative soul, to your retreat. Guided by principles of Environmental Arts Therapy and led by a qualified dramatherapist, this retreat is designed to allow you to enter into your inner world, held and inspired by nature, to (re)connect with your unique gifts, your true aliveness and your innate creativity.

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Mirroring the trees around us, we will explore what it is like to drop our leaves, releasing any burdens of the year that has passed, and with them sow the seeds of what is to come, putting trust in an unknown future. We will explore our relationship with stillness, particularly in relation to our creativity - for "nothing just bursts out of nowhere and takes off and away like a hare. All things begin gently with a seed, an idea, a dream, and this must lay dormant and await its proper time and season before it can grow". This will be a process that is contained by nature, transformed by ritual and guided by creativity.

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"The turning of the year invites us to descend again and again into the bare bones of our being to meet the child, raw and vulnerable, within. Only by peeling away the layers of our lives and revealing the soft core beneath can we begin to learn about our essential self, the free and powerful spirit that we were when we were born and still are beneath the tangle of the years and their struggles. When the trees drop their leaves they surrender to this process, giving up their dead and releasing themselves from the past. When they drop their seeds they trust to the new."

 

Quotes from Ian Siddons Heginworth's Environmental Arts Therapy and the Tree of Life