`I am alive!’ Room to Heal summer retreat 2012
News 27 July 2012
In June, men and women from Room to Heal set off for a five day rural retreat, to ‘the Grange’ in Norfolk. The Grange is a new retreat centre, run by Sophie and Ben, a kind and committed young couple who recently left their jobs in London (Ben was an environmental activist and Sophie a Doctor) to set it up. They welcomed us on arrival, telling us generously ‘our home is your home.’
Thanks to their efforts, and the warmth of our community, the Grange did feel like home. Over our time there, we held support groups by the fire, sharing and getting to know each other on a much deeper level. We cooked and ate delicious food together, cultivated the vegetable gardens, fed the pigs and worked on the stories that our members wanted to perform at the summer event.
We took a trip to the sea and one of our members was so excited he ran into the water shouting ‘I am alive!’ Thanks to the English summer we were enduring at that time, he quickly began to sneeze, but despite the cold he suffered for the following days, he found a new lease of life through the retreat, as did we all.
For our members such a sustained, positive experience of belonging was incredibly powerful, bringing back painful memories of all they had lost, but also showing them what could be created through our community.