Residential meditation course

You downloaded the app and sat for ten minutes, perhaps twenty. Your thoughts raced, your body was restless, and then came an evening when it did not happen, and then another. Or it did work for a while, but once everyday life started up again the presence disappeared as quickly as it had come.

It is part of meditating. Meditation is a skill, and skills need time, somebody to show you and a setting that helps you land. Ten minutes between two emails is rarely that setting.

With us meditation is the thing that lets you stay with something uncomfortable long enough to see what it actually is. During the week you meditate, you work with your breathing and with what your body is doing, and you get help putting words to what comes up.

You learn what you need during the week. Meditation can be done sitting, standing, walking or in movement, and you are guided the whole way. If you have never meditated before that is no obstacle, it is perhaps rather the usual thing here.

Step 1 is the foundation and requires no previous experience. You stay seven days and eight nights at Aspö kursgård, on an island in lake Båven, with forest and water around the house and without a phone. Outside the course room it is quiet, and that quiet is not a rule for the sake of good order. It is there because the work with yourself needs room, and room is precisely what everyday life never gives.

The group is about twenty people. We call it a course rather than a retreat, because you come here to work on yourself and not to rest up, but it is the same week whichever of the two words you were looking for.

Most people looking for a meditation course want something more than a technique. They want to know why their thoughts start spinning just when it has finally gone quiet, why the stress will not let go even though the holiday was long, why they feel lost although everything looks fine from the outside. Meditation opens the door, and it is the work with yourself that takes you through it.

During the week you work with your patterns, your needs and your reactions, in the group and in individual conversations. The meditation you learn you take home with you, and it works just as well on a commuter platform as on an island. Courses have been held in this form since 1985.

Are you wondering whether a week like this would work for you? Get in touch, and we will talk it through before you decide anything.