'The Other Side of Anxiety' Retreat 🏝️
A project for reclaiming our emotional sovereignty
Dear friends,
I hope that you are tying a bow on the last pieces of 2024 and getting ready for some well-deserved rest and recuperation with family and friends.
As the year does pass, and a new one dawns on us, naturally questions arise as to what we can do to both set our goals and support ourselves in achieving those goals - to avoid a hamster wheel feeling that can come about when life becomes disorganised.
For those interested in taking a deep dive into deep self-care, I’ll be offering a retreat based on that re-calibration effort in early 2025, centred on the topic of the nervous system and regaining primacy over it as a tool, and not a hurricane we feel like we are a leaf within.
The title is ‘The Other Side of Anxiety: A Project in Reclaiming Our Emotional Sovereignty’ and we will be taking on the big questions such as:
Why does life wash off some people, and stick to others?
Why have my self-care attempts so far not brought about what I wished for?
How can I bring about the change I desire and deserve for myself and my loved ones?
The way we will be doing that is via a practical body-led approach (movement, breathwork, meditation) of restoring wellness via the experimentation of:
Releasing pent-up nervous system energy
Practising down-regulation of our nervous system
Picking up tools that help us to turn those calm states into a trait
In between that, whilst we are in receptive states, we will be having a few talks on where our pathways became corrupt, how that has created cyclical outcomes, and what we can do to break the cycle.
It is a day that sets about encouraging your own exploration of your internal domain, building your skillset and capacity to see clearly where we have exported some of those big ticket items of safety, connection and validation of our authentic experience and go about bringing that back home.
Retreat day program:
Practical bodywork - we begin the day as always with some body movement that allows us to safely release undischarged nervous system energy (adrenalin and cortisol) that becomes blocked when we are trapped in disorganised states.
Breathwork session 1 - next we experiment with throwing an anchor down to settle our attention in the moment and begin down-regulating the nervous system.
Meditation session 1 - as we enter a more receptive place we will learn to pick up the phone to the wisdom that sits inside of all of us, too often tuned out by our hyper-stimulating world.
Talk ‘Reclaiming our emotional sovereignty’ - I will deliver a talk that is designed to plant the seeds of curiosity surrounding the early social origins of anxiety, the contextual burdens that can make it persistent, and how our protocol we are practising on the day seeks to rescue us from the cyclical outcomes that can be born out of those conditions.
Breathwork session 2 - feeling motivated we will start a more advanced technique that utilises the vagus nerve (think gear stick of the nervous system) to hold ourselves in a down-regulated state.
Meditation session 2 - as our body relaxes, we will also practice turning off the brain's threat detector that pulls us away from caring for ourselves in favour of the ever-changing, never-ending external world.
Breathwork session 3 - the body and mind relaxed, we will utilise a breathwork technique tailored to kick start our ‘fear extinction pathway.’
Meditation session 3 - as our confidence builds, we will explore predictable areas in the body where memories are stored in order to start mapping our internal domain to promote putting down some of the bags we have picked up along the way.
Breathwork session 4 - with the day coming to a close, we will have our final breathwork session that is focused on increasing our ability to integrate our experiences, such as those that we encountered on the day.
Meditation session 4 - finally we will off-ramp by taking a final exploration into how we unconsciously find ourselves in situations of ill care and what we can do to rebuild a type of village that consistently supports our non-negotiables.
Naturally, as the day is designed to be highly supportive of our nervous system and our cognitive limits, there will be plenty of breaks to step away and dip-in / dip-out which will also be a practice in developing a safe container of down-regulation and re-integration of our emotional experiences in the future.
What you’ll walk away with:
A practical set of tools to meet you where you are today, in order to:
Take yourself to calm,
Begin to experiment with turning that state into your new default mode, and
Nurture a sense of curiosity around your experience that brings your emotional sovereignty back home.
Who is this suited to?
This is beginner-friendly but ultimately designed like a good book to activate inside of you where you are today, noticing what is important, and when that Tetris block falls into place, another one can follow with increasing significance. Those a little further on their journey will find benefit in it being a refresher or targeted solutions that can be used to further develop their practice.
How is it being delivered?
The retreat will be conducted live online to provide the greatest accessibility.
If you’d like to have a taste of a previous retreat, an extracted session is available in the below post:
When is it being held?
It will be an immersive 6-hour experience on Saturday, 1st February 2025, running on two different timeslots (i.e. I’ll be doing it live twice; you pick the session most flexible for your time zone):
How to book:
Pre-requisites
Aside from a general sense of curiosity, what will support you on the day is:
Stable internet connection
Quiet place free from interruptions
Loose and comfortable clothing
As always, to your healing 💙,
Jas
