Circling by the Sea: Relating Arts Retreat #1

An invitation to grieve and celebrate life with us

Our lives are transitioning. After 12 years of partnership we have now moved apart and are slowly orienting our lives in new directions, but the depth, warmth and love between us is still very much there. Calling it friendship seems as unfitting as when we originally met and refused to call ourselves partners for years because the box somehow had the wrong shape for what we shared.

We have been talking about these retreats we have planned and if we should do them at all as our context has shifted so much. As we were talking about it today, what seems important is to welcome others into the transition we are going through and allow that to inform the work we will do during the retreats. It also means that the main themes present for us are:

Grief of endings and the joy of new beginnings.

Celebrating love.

Hope. Trust in life and the future.

This might seem a bit of a strange invitation. Mixing what is deeply personal to us with the practices and work that is most important to us. But that seems to be pretty consistent with who we are and how we want to be in the world. It also seems a more honest invitation, and - we imagine - one that can also touch something in most people, no matter where they are in life.

Peter Munthe-Kaas & Ronja Lofstad
June 2025

Invitation

With the Relating Arts retreats we invite you into an exploration of body and mind, moving towards effortless being and action in everyday life. The retreats are founded in the following practices: 

Circling
Surrendered Leadership
Authentic Relating
Nature Connection
Tai Chi and Qigong
Body Therapy

The retreats are intimate experiences for max 13 participants and takes place in the beautiful archipelago of Southern Norway.

Dates in 2025:
August 4-10
August 25-31

Here's a short video with some of our participants from 2024.

Programme

Each retreat starts off with a 2½ day immersion where we dive deeply into practice together and create a container for living from authenticity, presence and aliveness. The following days of the retreat we invite you to practice self leadership (with our support) into what is most important for you. We will facilitate morning and evening sessions to create a frame around these open explorations. 

The unstructured time will also be a chance to enjoy what the local area has to offer: organized fishing trips, oyster safaris, island explorations, mushroom picking, expeditions to the local bronze age settlement, swimming, sun bathing, forest walks and bike trips to local, scenic villages are among the possible options.

While the main scheduled activities at the retreat are based on Authentic Relating, Circling and Surrendered Leadership, we will also weave in other practices such as sitting meditation, bodywork, embodiment practices and various aspects of relating to nature. 
 

Venue

The venue is “Kaasestua”, a 300+ m2 house in a rural area located in the archipelago of Southern Norway, half an hour outside of Kristiansand. The house is close to the forest and 50m from the ocean. It  comes with a large garden,  private bathing bridge, boat and our own developing vegetable garden.

You are invited into the heart of Peter’s childhood for an all inclusive retreat, surrounded by nature and the sea. We will share three meals a day of healthy, delicious vegetarian/pescatarian food based on home grown vegetables, self caught fish and berries and mushrooms from the local forest.

We want to have the retreat at this venue to create an intimate, personal and most of all real setting for exploration of what it means to be human.

Facilitators:
 

Peter Munthe-Kaas
I am a Copenhagen based researcher, body therapist, coach and workshop facilitator. I am interested in practices that support me and others in relating and listening better and believe that the ability to relate to myself, others, society and nature is key to living a happy life in service of what is good in the world.

Ronja Lofstad
Ronja Lofstad discovered circling in 2014 and it has been an active part of her life since. She has facilitated circling evenings, weekends, retreats and courses for years and is a senior leader for Transformational Connection (formerly Circling Europe). Ronja is deeply inspired by nature and silence and spends a lot of time outdoors, listening to forests and mountains.