The retreat starts properly on Saturday morning but most of our guests prefer to arrive on Friday, it gives you a chance to settle in, relax and start to slip into a mindful state of awareness. Arrive any time after 5.30pm, don't worry about arriving late, there's no fixed time and we know some of you will be coming after work, we’ll have a warm welcome and a hot drink ready for you. Get yourself settled into your accommodation, meet the others, chill out at the retreat or you can go for a mindful walk through the three acres of beautiful gardens. You’ll get the chance to meet the team and explore what it is to live mindfully and you’ll get a taste of what we’ve lined up for the weekend. 7.30pm: Dinner (a hot vegetarian meal) 9.00pm: Welcome/Introductions & Meditation If the weather permits we’ll get the camp-fire going.

8.00am: Wake Up With Jihan - Mindful Yoga - Jihan is a wonderful insightful teacher and will show you how, through yoga, you can find space in your mind and connect to the body

9.00 am Breakfast – Coffee, Tea, Herbal Tea, Paulette's very special porridge, fruit juice, cereal, toast, fresh fruit

10.30am Mindfulness the Basics with Adrian We’ll start with introductions and a short welcome talk. Adrian will give a talk exploring the key principles of Mindfulness. We will explore what Mindfulness really is, but most importantly we’ll do some mindfulness exercises to help give you a direct experience of thoughtless awareness for yourself. Together we’ll explore the main portals into mindful awareness and the possibilities they offer.

12.00 Break

1.00 pm: The Way of the Body with Adrian Mindfulness is the art of aligning mind and body. Adrian will introduce you to the mindful practice called The Way of the Body and he’ll explore how body awareness is the perfect way to bring mindful attention into your everyday life.Adrian will introduce you to some simple but powerful mindfulness practices from the Great Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh.

2 pm: Mindful Eating Meditation and Lunch

3.30pm: Walking The Mindful Path and Ch Kung In small groups you'll get to walk the mindful path. You'll learn how to use the simple action of walking to bring you into mindfulness. At special points on the walk, you'll meet a teacher who will slow you down, get you to look mindfully, hear mindfully smell mindful, sit mindfully and how to suck every juicy drop from the experience of being alive Now. You'll learn how through body awareness you can bring mindful attention to your balance posture and movement. This is the best way to bring mindfulness into everyday activities and to help you discover a richer more profound experience of your day to day life and is the perfect antidote to a busy analytical mind.

5.00pm break

6 pm: School of Meditation with Jihan - If you really want to understand mindfulness, We would encourage you to do ten times more meditation than you do reading. If you already have a meditation practice then mindfulness will compliment it beautifully. In fact, meditation, if it has a purpose, is to bring you to a place of mindfulness. If you don't have meditation practice we would encourage you to get one. Jihan will teach you some simple and more advanced meditation exercises from mindful and yogic traditions and if you were to incorporate some of these into your regular practice it will take your mindfulness to a new depth and understanding

7.30 pm: Dinner

9.00pm: Dynamic Meditation . Finishing with some fun dynamic meditation or Campfire, weather permitting

8.00am: Wake up with Jihan - mindful yoga

Breakfast 9.00am:

10.00am: Mindfulness and Emotions Adrian will explore the link between thinking and feeling and how with mindfulness it becomes possible to manage painful emotions within your body. He’ll show you how by being mindful of our emotions you can process them effectively and move from “unconscious reaction” driven by your emotions, towards “right action”, which comes from a place of calm mindful clarity.

Adrian will show you how to sit mindfully with your emotions, and explore how when you are mindful of your emotions this results in more conscious interactions with the world. You’ll discover how mindfulness allows you to create a better world within yourself and how that can be reflected in the world at large.

We’ll explore why feeling is a good thing, how it connects you to your humanity and leads to the cultivation of compassion. You’ll discover how emotions are nothing to be afraid of and how they are the vehicle to a rich fulfilled life and to realising your humanity. You’ll explore how mindfulness of emotion is ultimately the key to your higher states of awareness, your higher intelligence.

When you run from your feelings you are running from yourself, if we can help you to stop running, be still, and mindfully face yourself, then you are in for a rather pleasant surprise!

11.30Break

12.15pm: Einstein and the Buddha with Adrian Many traditional schools of mindfulness express the importance of energy and mindful intention. Buddhist mindfulness, for example, will include practices such as “Loving Kindness Meditation” and encourage us to be mindful of our communications and to be compassionate and gentle in our interaction with others. The wisdom is simple, if you put out an energy of loving kindness and you tread gently in the world and act with true compassion, then you put different energy onto the world and the world starts to reflect that back. If you are happy and nice to people, they tend to be pleased to see you and they are usually nice back, and so your experience of the world changes – you have changed the world with energy and intention.

Central to this wisdom is an understanding of energy and the nature of reality. Every culture and tradition in the world has an understanding of our life force, an inner energy field of the body. In China, they call it Chi energy, in Japan Ki, and in India, it’s called Prana. Scientists are telling us, what the ancient masters knew many thousands of years ago, that when you explore physical reality at its most fundamental level, the atomic level, then you discover that there is pretty much nothing there at all. The atom is tiny specks of matter, that are held together in a vibrating field of infinite nothingness. Physicists call it the “quantum field” Taoists call it “the Tao”, and in India, they might call it “The web of illusion” and Buddha simply called it “emptiness”.

Adrian will introduce you to the world within, the energetic universe. They will help you find your inner space and show you how through mindfulness you can develop an awareness of the energy field of your body. This can bring a profound experience of contentedness and a shift of understanding that opens up infinite possibilities for deepening awareness, self-healing and ultimately influencing and bringing about the change in the material world.

Break 13.15 pm:

13.45 -Emotional Clearing Meditation with Adrian and Jihan The Emotional Clearing session for many of our regular guests is the highlight of the weekend. Based upon the work of the American psychiatrist and Vedic master John Ruskan, the Emotional Clearing meditation is by far the most powerful meditation practice that we’ve found for freeing and releasing past emotional pain. In the east, they call this practice karma yoga. It can have a profound effect, resulting in cathartic releases of trapped emotion and leave you feeling deeply anchored in awareness.

2.30 pm Lunch

3.30pm: Thank you, goodbyes and where now? Adrian will explore how you can take your mindfulness home with you, how to make mindfulness part of your life and spread your new found awareness to others. He will introduce you to the wider work of The Now Project and the support we can provide and introduce you to our little community and the part we play in the international Mindfulness Movement towards a loving compassionate world.

Loving Kindness Meditation

4.15pm: Retreat End