Permission to Pause retreat days: emotional honesty, community and creativity
“It’s a privilege to feel…”
I just ran the last in my four-event series of Permission to Pause retreat days. This time, we explored the theme of trusting ourselves. In previous retreat days, we explored themes of rest, letting go and self-love.
The beautiful room at Didsbury Parsonage, where I run my retreat days (and also my weekly breathwork classes)
These events weren't just about resting, finding calm and acting zen. They were about exploring how our relationship with ourselves changes when we allow ourselves to pause and pay deeper attention to our human experience. And how it becomes so much easier to FEEL when we do that.
Most of us in the west aren’t taught this growing up, but it’s so important to learn how to compassionately experience our emotions, in our body. Rather than judging them, intellectualising them, pushing them down and feeling ashamed of them. I did this myself until my thirties; deprioritising my feelings, deeming them as lesser than thinking, doing, achieving. Ranking my emotions way below the things my our to-do list, if I even acknowledged them at all.
We push on, powered by adrenaline and cortisol, while those stress hormones act as a natural anaesthetic that prevent us from feeling pain. All the while, depleting our health and our spirits, until one day we realise that being in permanent survival mode is not a sustainable existence. If we’re lucky, we realise that before it comes to breaking point. Many of us don’t; yet those times of completely falling apart can become powerful wake-up calls to burn everything down and start anew.
When we do slow down, we access that parasympathetic (rest and repair) nervous state in which we’re better able to feel everything we’ve locked inside. As someone said, it’s a privilege to feel and we have to let it all in - the despair, heartbreak, and grief; along with the joy, love and gratitude. We can’t fully experience the light without the dark. People talked about how the world comes into colour when we learn how to feel our emotions; how wonderfully, viscerally accurate is that? Yet we’re made to think we shouldn’t go to those challenging places that makes us human and beautifully, perfectly imperfect and messy.
Some of the things people shared on these retreat days, the lived experiences and insights they passed on, will stick with me for a long time. There is such wisdom in embracing our humanness. I continue to be inspired and learn from the people in my community every day.
I love to choose venues that connect us with the natural world, and I love to bring the outside inside - so I picked these wild flowers from the nature park on the morning.
When we're giving ourselves that permission to pause, to stop doing and come into being, it’s so powerful. We meet ourselves as we really are. That can bring up a lot; it takes bravery to turn towards that, to listen inwards with curiosity and take those wounded parts of ourselves by the hand. Quite often, we’ll realise what our wounded stories and limiting patterns are for the first time. It takes a lot of energy to hold onto those so tightly, perhaps for decades. We can’t live as a whole human being when we believe the stressed narratives in our mind, over what we really feel deep down.
Our body feels the relief of it when we let go of being in that defended state. And it can also feel really hard to start processing these deeper beliefs and adaptations we’ve built up. For many, it means facing trauma for the first time, and having to start considering how to move forward with that new knowledge. While on some level, our bodies always knows that something is holding us back from really being our true self, it’s often really helpful to stay turned away from that until we’re ready, and can find the right support.
And there’s just nothing like being in supportive community, trusting other people to hear what we have to say and actively listening to what other people share. All anyone needs is presence. We don’t need advice or fixing, we just need to sit with each other in empathy and let each other know ‘I see you’. Then we realise we're not alone in the things we navigate as adults in the world. And that is everything. In a world that encourages hyper-independence, capitalist behaviour, looking out for number one, people are left feeling that there’ll be nobody to catch them when they fall.
We’re made to feel we must keep going, doing, controlling, making sure none of the plates stop spinning. Someone actually shared their worry that if we let go as adults, who will be around to help? What if we make a mistake? What then? (I invited everyone to question how much we might learn if we went through our whole lives getting everything right.)
Yet this person also felt deep down that this way of thinking wasn’t working for them. They expressed that there was another part of them which longed to let go, surrender to life and trust that things would work out; they just didn’t know how to access that feeling. Because it takes more than positive thinking alone to trust ourselves, and believe that our lives will work out for the best.
It’s more than me inviting people to change how they think; it’s more than looking in the mirror high-fiving ourselves, saying ‘You’ve got this’. Because when there are still hurting parts of us that stop us really feeling that self-belief, we have to go a little deeper and lovingly investigate them. Not through yet more overthinking, but by really feeling the emotions driving that self-doubt. We can’t gaslight ourselves into self-trust. As Rumi says, The wound is where the light enters.
But we’re encouraged to stay in our heads, over-analysing our thoughts, not trusting our bodies, believing this form of wisdom to be too woo-woo. It still boggles my mind how I ever thought that connecting with my body was ‘spiritual’. What could be more grounded and truthful than consulting our inner resources; that knowledge which quite literally lives within us?
Nature has me feeling so inspired, so venues as beautiful as this help me feel part of the great outdoors, do good work and absolutely love every moment.
Sometimes we tell ourselves things about the way we live that we've perfected as a story in our mind, perhaps even repeated to other people. Justifying the way we move through the world and treat ourselves (and often, other people), when we're not actually sure if it's the truth anymore. We're not speaking from the heart when we’re trying to perpetuate and make logical sense of limiting patterns; of unhelpful ways of being, of treating ourselves and reacting to people and circumstances.
When we feel into what we really believe, in our body, it's so much more authentic. Embodying our truth is a nice-sounding phrase that get used a lot, but it’s the best way of bringing words to this feeling. It’s the state we reach when we let our deeper emotions guide us, so our ways of thinking and responding come from a much more profound, genuine place.
Then we operate from our intuition, which can so often be dismissed, but it’s the best tool we have for living a full life and feeling whole. Rather than moving through life unconsciously, while a small part of us always wonders ‘Is this all there is?’ And often, one of the most powerful thoughts that arises when we feel lost is, ‘I don’t know who I am.’ We can feel such horror and confusion around this, yet in my opinion, it’s the start of something so potent as we attempt to find our way back to ourselves.
Somatic enquiry, conscious connected breathwork and meditation are powerful embodiment practices for accessing our inner guidance. For disconnecting from limiting thoughts of the mind and coming into a surrendered state of listening to our body. So I started and ended every retreat day by guiding people through those (I’m a qualified somatic practitioner). We also consulted our body’s intelligence and subconscious mind through guided written practices. And another powerful way of listening to our inner voice, which I take such joy from, is through creativity.
Some of the beautiful, heart-led creations from a creativity and wellbeing course I ran at the same venue in 2025
This is another process I absolutely adore guiding people in. I include creative practices on all my retreat days, and have previously led creativity workshops and talks that explored this very particular aspect of our humanity. Finding creative flow within ourselves can bring inspiration and personal insights like never before, without overthinking anything. It’s like a magical shortcut to accessing our body’s wisdom. I see people reaching such profound new understandings about themselves, and it’s so beautiful.
People move me to tears sometimes with the way they talk about their art. Often, a drawing exercise will only be 15-20 minutes long and they’ll come up with something which sums up a whole life so perfectly. Such profound, intuitive depictions of their state of mind, their way of living in the world. It’s also a brilliant way of connecting with our inner child, the essence of who we are, because we often lose that sense of play and curiosity as adults.
On the latest retreat day, someone talked about drawing themselves really small under a huge, endless canopy of trees, because they feel so protected and at home when they’re in nature. They had felt overcome by that during our mindful walk around the gardens outside. Someone else talked about a series of swirls they’d drawn, which represented their ebbs and flows of worry. How the bigger circles represented when she felt most anxious; and when selecting a colouring pencil, she’d felt drawn to this jewel shade of blue. It was the same shade as her stunning scarf, I noticed.
These are only a couple of gorgeous examples of how people connected with themselves through their art. And these are not ‘artists’ in any official capacity, but people who just happened to instinctively remember their innate creativity, which we all have. (It’s capitalism that tells us we’re not creatives unless we’re considered talented by others and sell art for a living.)
As people talked us through through their art and showed their creations, they were hearing themselves back and reflecting in the moment, ‘I didn't even really think about that’. And that's the key thing, which really gets me excited. You don't have to think about it in the mind when we get into this creative flow state. Truth just organically comes through from following our creativity, in a way I find so utterly magical. (I’m also an actor and writer, so I could have these kinds of conversations all day.)
Happy and full of heart after the first retreat day I ran in September 2025
I could write all week about these retreat days. I’ve just loved getting to enjoy them, feeling a part of something, rather than just a space holder in charge, because of the special energy people brought.
The life-affirming connection, whether in circle as a group, in small group discussions during the activities, or in the kitchen sharing tea and snacks (shoutout to my partner Matt for donating his lovingly handmade sweet treats).
The fact that people took a chance on vulnerability and on other people, to hear them without judgment. Often opening up emotionally almost as soon as we sat down, as I invited people to introduce themselves. It really stays with people when they see others expressing themselves so humanly. Dropping the mask and just showing up as they are; something about this shifts our reality as we hear it. It doesn’t just set the tone for the day and help people feel it’s a safe space for honesty. It helps both the speaker and the people around them to feel seen in a way that everyday life often doesn’t make room for; voicing fears, hopes and frustrations so tenderly.
The final aspect I loved about these retreat days was connecting with nature. This is one of my favourite things (you’ll see me bang on about nature a lot on social media). Walking around the abundant gardens on the grounds of this listed building, and turning up the volume on our senses. Appreciating a feast for the eyes, ears, and nose through technicolour blooms; symphonies of birdsong; natural fragrance better than any perfume. And people expressing with such thankfulness how much love and care had been put into those gardens; connection not only with plants and flowers, but the people whose generous work had seeded and tended them.
Every retreat day, I read a poem. I’ll leave you with the latest one I selected.
Allow by Danna Faulds
There is no controlling life.
Try corralling a lightning bolt,
containing a tornado. Dam a
stream and it will create a new
channel. Resist, and the tide
will sweep you off your feet.
Allow, and grace will carry
you to higher ground. The only
safety lies in letting it all in –
the wild and the weak; fear,
fantasies, failures and success.
When loss rips off the doors of
the heart, or sadness veils your
vision with despair, practice
becomes simply bearing the truth.
In the choice to let go of your
known way of being, the whole
world is revealed to your new eyes.
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