Mindfulness and Meditation Retreats for 2022/23
Enjoy a holiday from your head
Our weekend Mindfulness and Meditation Retreats are for everyone aged 18 to 90 who wants to explore the wonderful possibilities that Mindfulness and meditation have to offer.
Whether you are drawn to mindfulness to ease stress, relieve depression, tackle illness, improve your well-being or achieve spiritual enlightenment these retreats are for you.
They are perfect for complete beginners and mindfulness masters alike.
If you are new to mindfulness, you’ll learn everything that you need to be mindful in a weekend. If you are already practicing mindfulness then these weekends will take your practice to a new level. They are great fun, the food is fantastic, you’ll meet some wonderful people and you’ll learn something that could change your life.
“Join us for a weekend of love, laughter and learning and discover a profoundly better way of living”
What are our mindfulness weekends about?
It’s great to learn Mindfulness from books or lectures, but in truth Mindfulness is an experience, and books and lectures can only point you in the right direction. Mindfulness can’t be grasped intellectually because mindfulness isn’t a theory, or a belief, or anything to do with mental gymnastics. Mindfulness is a state of being. It’s a heightened state of alert awareness that allows your mind to go quiet. Then you can rest from the constant mental chatter, your problems, worries and head dramas and get on with the really important issue of enjoying your life.
The basic principles of Mindfulness are really simple and there really isn’t much to understand. Mindfulness is all about practice and direct experience. And that is what our Summer of Love Weekends are about, we’ll teach you everything that you need to know to practice mindfulness, but more importantly you’ll get to experience mindfulness for real and live it for an extended period.
From the outset we’ll help you to achieve a deep state of mindfulness and the retreat is designed to help you maintain your mindfulness for much of the weekend. And that will teach you more about mindfulness than any book, lecture or smart phone app ever can. We have a team of really experienced mindfulness practitioners who can hold a high degree of mindfulness and they will help to keep you mindful in between the classes, teaching you mindfulness and advancing your practice to a new level.
We won’t make you dress in robes or sit facing a wall for hours, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s just not our style. We prefer to teach mindfulness our own way, we have a modern, plain-talking approach to mindfulness, the teaching is no less profound but we want to make it accessible relaxed and fun. It is a holiday after all.
Go on, treat yourself, book yourself on our Mindfulness Retreat Weekend everyone deserves a holiday from their head – even you!
We've got a great weekend lined up for you
Friday
You can arrive any time after 5 pm we’ll have a warm welcome and a hot drink ready for you. You’ll get the chance to settle into your accommodation we are a friendly bunch and we want to put you at ease and let any stress you are carrying dissolve and the magic start to work.
7 pm Dinner Home-cooked vegetarian food (vegan / Gluten-free option)
8 pm Welcome talk and introductions
9 pm Evening Meditation with Steve – Yoga Nidra – Gong bath
Chill out and fun and games around the campfire
Saturday
8 am Chi Gong with Steve – Chi Gong is an ancient form of moving meditation a simple system of mindful movements which form the basis of Tia Chi It’s the perfect start to the day it awakens the body and helps to centre your mind for the day ahead (don’t worry if you have limited mobility you can even do Chi Gong sitting down)
9 am Breakfast
10.30 am The Fundamentals of Mindfulness – Adrian will explore the basics of mindfulness and help you enter a state of Satori – clearing the clouds of thought from your mind and into a place of clear blue thoughtless clarity. You learn the main techniques for achieving thoughtless awareness. It’s wonderful to be able to switch off your problem, worries and head drama, but it’s just the start really and Adrian will explore with you the life-changing possibilities this offers you
Break – Tea Coffee Cake
1 pm The Way of the Body – Adrian will explore an approach to mindfulness favoured by the late great Master Thich Nhat Hahn called The Way of the Body. The alignment of mind and body is the most perfect way to cultivate mindfulness and bring it into your everyday life. Mindful walking, mindful eating mindful breathing, mindful everything. Featuring the famous standing in a queue meditation and forest bathing. (It’s alright, you keep your clothes on)
2 pm Lunch
3.30 pm Mindful Walk – The art of mindful walking, never going anywhere, but always arriving. How to turn the simple act of walking into the most beautiful meditation experience. As the thinking subsides your senses come alive and a whole new world comes into view
Break – Tea Coffee Cake
5.30 pm School of Meditation – Steve’s passion for meditation has taken him on an incredible journey of exploration, he’s explored many meditation practices, lived in Ashrams in India and studied with Guru’s and masters, Steve will explore a number of different techniques .
7 pm Dinner
8.30 pm Evening Meditation – Sound bath
Chill out and fun and games around the campfire
Sunday
8.00 am – Kundalini Yoga (meditation)
9.00 am Breakfast
10.00 Mindfulness of Emotions – Adrian will explore the art of self-mastery – how to feel and process painful emotions in your body, without reacting to them and thereby spreading more pain and suffering into the world. You’ll discover that you don’t need to fear or avoid painful emotions, that they are not bigger than you and they need not ruin your quality of life. You’ll learn how to manage emotions consciously and move away from reaction towards right action from a place of calm clarity.
11.30am Break
12.00 pm The Energy Of Mindfulness – As the thinking mind quietens we begin to perceive a more subtle energetic dimension to reality. We’ll explore the energy of mindfulness and touch upon the potential for healing and ultimately world transformation
1.00 pm Break
1.30 pm Emotional Clearing Meditation – This is a powerful meditation and fantastic for healing unresolved emotional pain. Many of the people who come back to our retreats time and time again come for this experience. You’ll love it.
2.30 pm Lunch
3.30 pm What Now? – How to maintain your mindfulness and create a brighter world – ongoing support.
4.00 pm Retreat ends
Teachers
Adrian Rides
In 1999 someone bought me a book on meditation, I long ago gave the book away and can’t remember its title but the introduction has stuck with me. The author listed all the things meditation is good for. Depression, yes I ticked that box, anxiety, yes that one too, addictions, I had loads of those, tick that box. It was quite a long list and I think that I ticked pretty much all of the boxes. But then it said something which at the time seemed quite strange; it said that if you practice meditation and mindfulness with any degree of seriousness it will change you and fundamentally change how you understand yourself and experience the world. I thought no more about it. I practiced because I needed to find a way out of my suffering, and it worked, quickly I found that my mind was slowing down and I could enjoy some real space from my troubled mind. After a few months, I could find relief from my mind without recourse to alcohol, I didn’t need it anymore, so I stopped drinking.
And then it happened. I hadn’t been off the booze for long, only a few months when I experienced what I now understand to be an awakening. It didn’t last long and I’m no enlightened master (ask my partner) but it changed things for me.
Just as the book described, it fundamentally changed my understanding of myself and my experience of the world. I knew that the suffering I’d been through was unnecessary and that there is a way out and having made that discovery how could I stand back and watch the suffering of others and do nothing? I could see the possibilities Mindfulness offers us as individuals but also the wonderful potential mindful living offers for all humanity.
So ever since then, I’ve been telling anyone who would listen, very few at first, but now many many people want to listen.
It seemed obvious to me that Mindfulness offered the solution and in 2002 I was the first person in the UK to teach Mindfulness as a treatment for addiction and have helped more than 300 people to find a complete and lasting recovery to what is widely believed to be an incurable disease.
As well as helping hundreds of others with depression, anxiety, mental and emotional suffering. It’s been a wonderful journey, fantastic fun and I’ve made some wonderful friends. I’ve worked with top sportspeople, entrepreneurs, celebrities, senior executives at Blue chip companies; I’ve been on TV and radio and had my work featured in a BBC documentary. I’ve even been invited to the House of Lords (I don’t think I’ll be invited back).
But you don’t need to be unwell to practice mindfulness and it soon became clear to me that it could help everyone. In 2010 I founded The Now Project, to help bring Mindfulness to as many people as I can. The project didn’t have a name for the first three years and there was no real plan, but the project has evolved and is now so much more than me. We’ve run about 80 mindfulness retreats, hundreds of classes and introduced more than 5000 people to a better way of living. The Now Project is bringing Mindfulness to so many people and it’s a joy to do this work.
Ade.
Steve Dixon
Retreat dates
2nd – 4th December 2022 Fully Booked
27th – 29th January 2023
24th – 26th February 2023
24th – 26th March 2023
21st – 23rd April 2023
26th – 28th May 2023
21st – 25th June 2023
7th – 9th July 2023
21st – 23rd July 2023
25th – 27th August 2023
15th – 17th September 2023
£349
Fully inclusive: Prices are per person and include all teaching, workshops, and full board.
Skill level: For everyone! Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced
2nd – 4th December – Fully Booked
27th – 29th January 2023
24th – 26th February 2023
24th – 26th March 2023
More dates
Accommodation
Food
All meals are vegetarian with vegan and gluten-free options – Please advise of any food intolerances we need to cater for.
Location
Redfield Community, Buckingham Rd, Winslow, Bucks MK18 3LZ
The venue is in a recently converted stable block and outbuildings within the Redfield Community, set in many acres of countryside and tranquil woodland. It’s simply beautiful and being immersed in nature makes mindfulness much easier.
Getting There
By car – Easy Access From M1 – 1 Hour from London
Public transport Train 35 -minutes from Euston London and a 30-minute bus ride from Milton Keynes Station
About The Now Project
The Now Project is a growing mindful community. A bunch of like-minded people working together & supporting each other to enable real change in our shared experience of this world & to the world around us.
Mindfulness has helped each of to us overcome our own issues and to find a well-being that we never realised possible. Together we are glimpsing the amazing possibilities that a more mindful way of living has to offer us as individuals and the world as a whole.
Through our mindfulness practice we are discovering a better way of living, a way of living where co-operation is more important than competition, where helping and supporting each other brings more satisfaction and ultimately greater reward than climbing on top of each other and where what connects us is more important than what divides us.
Mindfulness helps us to really get the most from our lives and by bringing mindfulness into what we do, we find more joy in our everyday experience and through our mindful interactions become a vehicle for peace and healing in the world. The Now Project is here to help you live this possibility too.
What's Included
- Daily meditation classes
- 3 daily delicious and nutritious meals
- Water, tea, coffee served throughout the day
- Pre and post retreat support from our team
- 2 nights accommodation
- Full programme of teaching
- Fun friendly team
- Parking
- Long term support with your practice
What to Bring
Reviews
I chose this retreat due to its location, reasonable price and description of activities. I enjoyed that there wasn’t a huge amount of free time like other retreats, it’s not the reason that I’m there.
This was a powerful reminder of how I like to live my life and support in processing grief. Though our opinions sometimes differed it was beautiful to be in the company of like-minded and supportive individuals and I left grounded and back in the present which I’d been struggling to get back to for about a year.
Highly recommended. I felt an affinity to the teachings, it was a lovely relaxed atmosphere and acceptance was given to each individual irrespective of where they were in their own journeys."
We wanted to get away for the weekend and decided to try a retreat, there was no specific issue, we just wanted the experience. So glad we did x
We picked this retreat as it resonated with our spirit. We read the bio of the people running it and knew they were our kind of people. We had a magical experience and loved connecting with like-minded, spirited people and exploring greater depths.
The sound baths were incredible, I felt the vibrations really deep and felt cleansed. This retreat is definitely worth experiencing. Adrian, Steve and Chris were amazing and I felt a deep connection and unity with them all. I gave 4 stars as there is always room for growth and expansion not because of any lack."
I chose this retreat because it was close to me.
It was the best decision in my life
It gave me so much more than I expected.
It was more therapy than a retreat.
It was amazing and very healing. They put a lot of work into it. It was amazing. Cannot describe it with words.
I get regularly stressed out and mentally put down due to diverse issues in my life, however, most of them are out of my control. I was looking to find a way to not just cope but to enjoy life again.
The description of the retreat, wording and between the lines messages gave off the right vibes which just felt right. And not to forget that the reasonable cost showed that this retreat is there to “spread the word” and not to make loads of money.
I experienced a state of peace and joy I have not felt for a very long time. I am starting to see the world in a different light.
Ade and Steve are the most amazing teachers I have met. They will lead you to the most amazing places if you are open to let them do it. Come with an absolutely open mind, don’t expect anything. And last but not least, the food was absolutely delicious thanks to Chris, who put her heart and soul into it.
