The Meditation Retreat

The Meditation Retreat: Cultivating compassionate awareness through stillness, movement and nature immersion

Join us in this beautiful, wild setting to take time to explore meditation and yoga practice in a welcoming and nurturing environment, including a period of 3 days of silence together.

Our facilitators draw on a wealth of knowledge and experience to offer a range of practices to enable your meditation practice to deepen, whether you are an experienced meditator or a complete beginner. These will include breathwork, yoga & movement, and nature-based practices.

The tranquility of the venue, surrounded by Dartmoor’s natural beauty, will allow you to unwind and explore your edges at your own pace. Meditation is not the same thing for all people - it needs to make sense to you, given your unique personality and how you want your practice to support your life. To help with this, alongside the group sessions, you will also have the option of 1:1 personalised guidance to support your journey and help you develop your personal practice.

There will also be plenty of opportunities to explore the beautiful surroundings in the heart of Dartmoor national park. 

The retreat includes: 

• Guided and unguided daily meditations both sitting, lying and with movement
• Meditation workshops to explore a range of approaches to practice
• Embodied flow and restorative yoga classes for 2 hours every day
• Functional breath practices and kriyas
• 3 days of silence
• 1:1 check-in session to discuss your practice
• Being in nature – fire, walks and optional wild swimming
• Delicious vegan food and snacks
• Comfortable accomodation  with either shared or solo rooms (see pictures below)
• Experienced facilitation and guidance

Our approach to meditation practice

Meditation, from one perspective, is a very simple act. We just sit (or stand, or lie down) and rest in the wordless expanse of the present moment. We bring a deep, sensitive presence that allows a natural peeling away of layers of tension and constriction.

Meditation is a movement towards simplicity - towards a harmonisation and unification of experience that feels like a huge relief, a kind of freedom. It sits in stark contrast with the complex tangle of the modern psyche in its “normal” state. However, simple doesn’t mean easy, or straightforward. When we sit down to meditate, we often bring a set of habits and attitudes that hinder our progress, create tension, and make the whole thing more unpleasant than it needs to be.

In this retreat, we will practice cultivating some of the qualities that can help create a much more supportive inner environment, in which meditation can be less a struggle against an unruly mind, and more a natural unfolding and exploration. Maintaining silence for a period of time is a huge support for this exploration. This reduction in stimulation allows us to rest into a sense of stillness and spaciousness, and see more clearly the habits of mind that lead to stress and tension. This increased awareness of those habits gives us a better chance of letting them go, to be much more deeply relaxed and at ease with ourselves.

There will be a focus on the qualities of compassion, honesty and curiosity - three foundational attitudes that support our meditation practice to bear fruit. We will practice meeting ourselves and our experience in ways that bring a sense of harmony and space, and that lead to a deeper understanding of our inner lives.

The facilitators:

Hazel Bugler: Yoga facilitator, Breathwork instructor and Chiropractor who has worked in the health and wellness industry for over 20 years. Hazel offers a range of classes, workshops and  retreats throughout the year alongside being a lead teacher on Yogasara's teacher training. Hazel takes a relaxed and friendly approach  to teaching , you can find out more about her here: https://www.hazelbugler.co.uk/

Will Evans has been meditating for a decade and a half in various different forms and traditions, informed by various Buddhist and Non-dual traditions. He teaches meditation on retreats at Sharpham House in Devon, as well as online courses and guided meditations. Will teaches meditation as an art, rather than a fixed technique or formula, encouraging a playful and experimental approach to practice. You can find out more on his website: https://willevansmeditation.co.uk/

Terms and conditions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R2-LkCjxmLevS9gYT-GO_RwDitLoZk3xxhQEGxh18BM/edit?usp=sharing 

Meditation room

Yoga Shala 

Solo bedroom 

Shared bedroom 

Garden

On the land of the retreat centre