Our Beginner-Friendly Silent Retreat Experience (Ep.55)

In this episode, sisters Hannah and Sarah explore why so many of us are feeling deeply burnt out, especially in winter, and why silence might be the most accessible, powerful (and completely free) tool we’re overlooking.

Fresh back from co-hosting a beginner-friendly silent retreat in Kent, the sisters share what really happens when you slow down, put your phone away, and allow yourself to rest deeply. From mindful eating and nervous system regulation, to shared rooms, sound baths, fire rituals, and the unexpected ease of silence, this episode is a gentle invitation to reimagine how you care for yourself.

They also open up about the beauty of the retreat venue, the role of nature and birdsong, the power of presence, and why less really can be more when it comes to healing and transformation.

Whether silence feels intriguing or intimidating, this episode will help you understand why it’s so needed and how you can bring small moments of silence into everyday life.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why winter exhaustion is real (and not a personal failure)
• Silence as a free, life-changing tool for mental and physical health
• What a beginner-friendly silent retreat actually looks like
• Mindful eating and how how you eat matters as much as what you eat
• Shared rooms, co-regulation, and bonding without words
• Nervous system safety, birdsong, fire, and rest
• Yoga nidra, sound baths, and deep, restorative sleep
• Why integration after retreat is essential for lasting change
• Simple ways to introduce silence into everyday life
• Details of the next Silent Retreat in Kent (May 1–3)

Upcoming retreat:
✨ Beginner-Friendly Silent Retreat
📅 1st–3rd May (Bank Holiday weekend)
🔗 Visit https://holistichealthc.kartra.com/page/silentretreatinfo

If you would like our free moon download to get the list of the 12 astrological signs and how they impact your body parts and emotions, grab that here: https://holistichealthc.kartra.com/page/moondownload

If you are looking to balance your hormones naturally, then try our free 5 day hormone balance challenge, back to balance. Register here: https://holistichealthc.kartra.com/page/Backtohormonebalance

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Where you can find out more about of women's health retreats, our healthy products. our online health membership for peri-menopausal women, online courses and our in person events.

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Transcript

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Yes. Welcome to the Holistic Health Sisters podcast of Wellness and Real Life Sisters Hannah Carr and Sarah King from the Holistic Health Collective. In this podcast, we're going to be sharing our passion for, of course, holistic health, but also spirituality, healings, hormone, plant medicine, seasonal living, our love of nature, and our love of community. So we are gonna invite you to take a pause and take a nice deep breath. And join us on a path of healing, of self-discovery and self-love, and of stepping into the brilliance of who you really are. This is a podcast for the seekers out there. Those of you who know there's more to life than just surviving or going through the motions, and you want more, more health, wealth, happiness, love, compassion, connection, trust, surrender, and more faith, and you want that for others too. So we can make this world a better place for us all to go and grab a cup of ceremonial grade cacao and join us as we explore what moves through us, that which is divinely led, so we can all move from fear to walls, more faith. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Hi, loves, how are you? Because what I've heard, more than any year I've ever lived on planet Earth, you folks took a break at Christmas. And realize just how exhausted, how burnt out, how unsustainable it is to live in the way that we've carved out our lives, or maybe it's been enforced on us and we think it's normal. So you had that break and then you got back and you realized I need longer. I absolutely like my mental health, my physical health, I'm exhausted and rightly so because as we record this, we are still in. Winter, we're still in January. There is very little light in the uk, just a few hours a day and we need longer to rest. And we are going to talk about a completely free tool, and we're gonna share live examples of how life changing it can be to use this tool for you, and how you can bring it into your life. And it's so necessary all year round, but I would say even more in the winter as we were invited to go inwards into this introverted inner listening. So welcome to this week's podcast episode with both sisters. Hi, I'm Hannah, and that was Sarah just chatting to you. And we are fresh back from our silent retreat that we co-hosted with our good friend Haley B. And we've got so much to share about. How silence really is golden and how it really can help you in your life. Sarah said, it's a completely free tool. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, where you are in your working life, your home life, you can use silence as this easily accessible tool to offer so much spaciousness and nourishment to yourself. And so let's dive into the episode and tell you all about what we've been up to. Sarah, should we start off with the venue? We'll share the practicals of how our silent retreat looked, because you may have heard silent retreats called vipassana. Classically, they can be 10 days long or seven days long, but ours was designed with beginners in mind. So we did a Friday to Sunday retreat in our home county, which is Kent, and a beautiful venue called Mount Field. Hannah found the venue. Why don't you share that? Mount field is just makes my heart sing. I had to message the venue owner to say, your property makes my heart sing. I'm an ex interior designer, and I have realized that. Beauty makes your soul really happy. It's very nourishing, like going to perhaps an art museum or a beautiful historical building if you appreciate those types of offerings. And Mount Field is. A huge home that really is quite high end. Someone did describe it as a five star hotel experience, and we would have to agree. So like Sarah mentioned, vipassana is often a very stripped back, paired back type of retreat. With minimal comforts really, and Sarah said, because we're offering this for beginners. And we know a lot of you are squeezing this in between family life and between busy jobs and just managing life, that we want to offer something that is cushioned, that is supported, and that you can enjoy being in beautiful and comfortable surroundings to make your first entryway into silence. More comfortable and based on that, you can decide what you want to do going forward. In future, we are thinking about adding a sort of an intermediate level ourself, actually perhaps next year. But it might be that after that you realize that you are ready for apasa, but to go from never trying. Any silence to 10 days is a really big jump and a really big ask. So this is that step in between. So Mount Field itself as you walk in through the hallway, you've got huge vaulted ceilings and those ceilings are made of the most gorgeous woods. It's got such a warm feeling. And as people walked in, Sarah,'cause I welcomed a lot of people at the door. They just had their neck facing up. Just trying to drink the property in through their eyes. The property's so well equipped. It's got everything and beyond that you could possibly ever imagine. But just to paint the picture, we are talking about stained glass windows, reading nooks, beautiful crown moldings luxurious carpets that feel soft under your foot. Beautiful herringbone, not only floors, but ceilings as well, and so many spiritual nods as you walk around the property. From the om symbols on the fireplaces to the gorgeous paintings that draw you in and plenty of places to burn incense, light candles, and even its own Buddha in the garden. And I think the garden deserves its own mention because although it's an. Urban retreat center and you can walk from Tonbridge train station. It's down a residential road. You have to go down a private alleyway to this house that just, it feels like it's in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by these well established gardens that, again, is so well equipped with pizza ovens and saunas and ice bath and a private garden room for your own space and what about the bird song, Sarah? Yeah, it was so lovely in January in the uk, a lot of bears have migrated and so the ones that stay, you really pick them out and appreciate them. It's like when you go to the woods in the winter, it's all stripped back, and if you see the flash of a robin's chest, you feel I feel excitement. There's still life there. And we got quite a lot of comments to say, I just really listened to the bird song. And what I'd say from a nervous system point of view is birds. Without us knowing this on an intellectual level and nervous system, know that birds birdsong. And the sight of a bird means safety because when there's danger, when a threat is coming in, a bird will signal to other animals, something's coming. Flee, basically or hide. And then you see the birds flying away when there's danger. So when they're there, your nervous system knows I can relax and I can switch off. So the little things, all of these things help the experience to be deeply profound and life-changing. Absolutely. And just to finish a little bit about the property. Probably the main worry for participants of this particular retreat is the rooms are sharing, so generally it's three or four people can stay in each room. And when you're used to, obviously the way that we live in the Western world, we are very isolated, aren't we? And we think that's what we like, and we think that if we don't know other people, and especially if we can't talk, it's going to be really awkward to share a bedroom. It does on some part require a leap of faith. Sarah and I have both experienced staying in properties and dormitory style bedrooms and what we noticed for ourself is it was only a worry in our head before the retreat, and the reality was very different. And this is the feedback that we've actually got from multiple retreats that we've run. So we were very confident in our offering with the shared bedrooms, and there was one person particularly who shared that was her biggest worry. But actually we'd paired people up so well on this retreat, and we did actually put like-minded folk together. She said that if she had to choose again, she would choose to share with the very same people rather than take her own room. So if you are ever interested in doing a retreat with dormitory style bedrooms, just to say it's probably a risk worth taking and seeing how it works out for you. Can I just add there as well that there was deep bonding made between the people that shared rooms and the whole retreat participants, even though they weren't speaking to each other. So it really proves this co-regulation and this communication when we communicate in nonverbal ways. That we are bonding with each other. So it was really lovely to say to see this bonding happening. Absolutely. Let's talk through a little bit of what happened on this retreat then. As people were welcomed. We planned this all down to minute detail as space holders differently, Sarah, but people were taken to their bedroom, had time to unpack, and then we gave a group tour, the whole property, because it is a large property, we've a lot to get familiar with, and obviously you're not really asking questions once you move into silence. Yeah, so they, they walk into lovely lit fires, crackling logs, and I wanted the smell of baking to be in the air. All the food was completely plant-based and designed through the Ayurvedic lens and also as, as much as possible organic, because people will be eating very differently. And I wanted them to get the flavors and the. And clean food because when we're going into silence, we can start to hear it in a voice and we might get our inner critic come up and we can really aggravate that with the way that we eat and the foods that we eat. So we design the menu to be as clean as possible, easy to digest. The first. Meal needs to be a bit of a home comfort meal. I was taught so nothing, that you would perhaps never have had before. So we had muffins on arrival, and then we had a lovely warm, sweet potato shepherd pie with all the beautiful vegetables with dressings on them. Absolutely. The food was really abundant. Really delicious. And this is one of the nice things about retreat, especially for women. Probably you do a lot of cooking at home or you're providing food in some way, and it's a never ending job, isn't it, Sarah? You know that from this weekend, but the food is a never ending job. And we can find joy in preparing food, but often anything that we're doing every single day, we do want a break from at some point. So I actually had my own silent experience. At the beginning of 2025. I shared that in episode 18. If you want to go back and hear about some of the things that, it came through for me, like seeing my own energy field. So you can go back to that episode if you'd like, but one of the things I was doing was preparing my own food and I realized that takes up a lot of time, mental space preparation, and that can add to the stress of creating an experience and enjoying an experience. So it's one of the huge benefits to not only be trying plant-based to see if that suits you to be having Ayurvedic food, to be having organic food. To have it all prepared for you and your only job is to sit down and enjoy it is a huge benefit. And while we talk about that, actually, Sarah, let's talk about the mindful eating and some of the concepts that we introduced. Yeah, what a wonderful concept. Mindful eating. And that means, one single task. You are just eating your food. You're not on your phone, you're not reading a book, you're not having a conversation. And you know the food. Such an important part of living as a human being. It nourish us, nourishes us. It gives us everything that we need to do, the tasks that we do and can avoid illness as well if we eat correctly. So we invited mindful eating, which I have to say, everyone really took it on board. And I could see people closing their eyes through the whole experience, putting their fork down in between mouthfuls and just. Eating, and I try to do that when I'm at home, but it's not an easy thing actually, unless you're in that retreat environment and it had such an effect. I think the first share in the sharing circle at the end was saying, I just realized how much I'm stress eating normally on a day to day and. How my children, how I'm modeling that to my children and how important it is. Not even so much what you are eating, but how you're eating. And Hannah has taught this for years inside her program, exhausted to energize method She's taught that can really avoid. Or quite down IBS type symptoms. You can actually take the nutrients out of your food and then that's something that I've been introducing through my food and learnings recently as well. So that was a really big takeaway for a few people mentioned, the mindful eating. And we have to say at this point as well, their phones were taken away within I think the first hour. You need to take them away. They were voluntarily throwing them towards us, saying them take them. I'd just love to add about the the mindful eating there. That was my most moving moments of the retreat. For me personally as a space holder, I actually realized that I have never eaten with other people. You might describe it as in community. Before and done that in silence and it felt extremely privileged and mind blowing in many ways that we had all chosen that it's so simple, but who does it? And it was like everyone has chosen to come here and experience this and we could choose to experience like Disneyland or all these exotic places and the experience that we've all collectively chosen. is silence. And what we were really gifting to ourselves is presence. It's something that I've been really aware of in the past few months. That presence, I'm starting to understand is a huge gift, a massive gift, because we are not present in the world so much. And when you are with someone and they give you their full presence, you feel seen, heard, valued, loved. Often what we are not doing, especially if you ever feel lonely or you wish you had deeper connections with people. What we are missing is giving presence to ourself. So as we sat there at the table and chose to mindfully eat, which included things like taking a breath before you ate and then noticing the colors in your plate and maybe smelling your food before you even took a bite. And Sarah said, putting your fork down between eating. You are gifting yourself presence. And what I really observed with the silent eating and it wasn't awkward, I'd just like to add that as well. My daughter asked me when we got home wasn't that awkward? And I was like, no, it actually wasn't. Haley is. A curator of sound, really, and sound experiences. And although the vast majority of the retreat was in silence and no one was talking, sometimes we had ambient sound such as birdsong around the dinner table, just as a very background noise. So it wasn't completely 100% silent just to help people relax. As we said, it's aimed at people who are new for that experience. So what I really noticed was after people had finished eating, no one was in a rush to go anywhere. So we of course, didn't have plans after dinner. There was nowhere to rush to. But I realized that people want to take more time over their food to let their food digest and to be present with their self. And if we look at cultures such as France, who are known for taking long, luxurious lunch breaks, and the Italians are known quite well for, gathering a family over an evening meal. I think it is something that we're actually craving as humans on this planet is more presence and less rushing with our food, Sarah. A hundred percent. And two lovely points of feedback was one lady said, I have had trouble sleeping for the last six and seven years and I've been trying to work out. Why I had the best night's sleep in, half a decade. What was it? Was it the silence? Was it, but the rest and digest after food will definitely be impacting people's sleep for certain. And somebody else said, when they made a cup of tea, it became an event and it was like, Ooh, I get to look forward to make my cup of tea moment and just sip my tea and realize how lovely that moment is. So yeah, the gift of presence is so true. It's like a little tea ritual, isn't it? Like they do in Japan. And we are making a whole ceremony out of a phrase that we've used in the past is making magic out of the mundane. And you're literally making a little ceremony over making your tea. But everything in our life can be seen through that lens of beauty. Yeah. They say life is a ceremony, right? So when we slow down enough and we listen in we get to actually embody that on a deeper level. Yeah. So let's just share a bit about how we introduced the silence. After people had arrived and had a tour, we had an opening circle. And an opening circle is a lot about logistics, about, how to communicate if there could be an emergency and you need to speak to someone. So we, we have different methods of communicating things that was all shared in the opening circle. And then there was an invitation for people to share why they come, what their intention was. And anything else that they wanted to share. So we knew a little bit about the people who we were with. We find that all of our retreats and events that this is just such a valuable experience and this is how people really get to make new like-minded friends. So after we'd each done our share, we then spent some time dropping inwards and we actually went into the silence through the portal of the so the sound that created the universe, and it's going from talking to making a sound and then going into the silence, feeling the vibration of that sound. So it's just a lovely transition. There was then some time for, of course some silence and being with oneself and noticing what was coming up for self. We had a gorgeous dinner that evening. Sarah mentioned that already. And we had a yoga nidra that evening. Tell us about when you said you walked in and everyone was just ready to go into Savassana Sarah I've noticed on the last few retreats that we've held space for, Hannah and I would. We'll do a range of things from dancing, yoga, breath work, talking circles, medicine circles, but of late, as we've invited people onto their mats, they just lie down immediately without any invitation or suggestion or instructions. And that's showing us as space holders as trauma informed space holders. We need to meet our. Participants and clients where they're at. So there's no point saying everybody stand up and we are gonna shake or dance. Now they're showing us I'm ready. Now I've had a really mindful day and I can feel the tiredness. I'm not fighting it. Yeah, absolutely. And so that yoga nidra was an invitation to come in your pajamas so you could go straight to bed afterwards. We recommended some self-care. Some of the things that we don't get time to do ladies is so perhaps a little bit of self massage. Some people had face packs and all sorts of packs for the feet, and the hands are just a little bit of taking care of one's body before a fairly early night. And then the next morning was started with. Movement. So we got back on the mat and it was very gentle way to move the body, move into breath work, and then meditation. So that's in a held way. You are guided before opening the space for more exploration of the silence alone for more hours of the day. So at this point you are probably thinking, oh, I could give that a go or no, that's definitely not for me. But nearly every single participant said the silence came surprisingly easy. Give me more, particularly when it come to phone use. Some people said they were even reaching for their phone or hearing their phone even though it wasn't there. That really shows us the programming and the phone addiction, and I'd include myself in that as well. I think it's really important as most of our less listeners, we were probably born seventies, eighties, nineties, those decades, and our nervous system remembers. What it was like to have, and I said like a boring Sunday, like no TV shows, no shops open, no telephones, and boredom is. Extremely regulating for the nervous system. It means that we can repair because we're not being vigilant, we're not being switched on, we're not being responsive. And I don't see that anymore. It might be an hour and a yoga class. Yes. Or a walk, but most likely you've got your phone on you and you may be checking things. So we do find that the feedback said I'm definitely gonna put my phone away maybe once a week. Or even once a month. So what's really important for us is when you have a life changing experience on retreat, that you take some of it, you won't be able to take all of it. Let's be realistic'cause we don't live on a health retreat, but that you take some of that. So we've also held an integration container, which is vitally important for long-term healing and long-term change. So we'll talk about, Hannah can talk about the details of that in a moment, but some of the incredible shares we ask for reflections at the end, and we've got a regular participant that works with us quite closely in our healing portal, and that comes to retreats. She said, I realized how far I've come on my journey, and this is an awakening for her. She says she normally focuses on what she's not achieving or what she's not managing to do. You know that to-do list 20 things on. We never look at the two things that we did and that we did well. We're always looking at things we didn't do. So she said, I realize that I have come on leaps and bounds from that first retreat, from sharing a room to driving to a new location, to making friends. And we witnessed this in the growth. It's very easy for us to see, the confidence, the ability progress to try things. So that was that was a mo, a really moving moment for someone to say that, another piece of feedback was I came home on a cloud on Sunday, on the last day of the retreat. More rested than I've ever felt coming back from other retreats and longer retreats, so less is more, and this is something that. Wasn't in my belief system for a long time, and Hannah and I are really starting to embody this and take our clients there, and you as a space holder and you as someone looking for someone to hold space for you, you can only take your clients as far as you've gone yourself. So if you're not doing the work, you can intellectualize it and suggest it, but we are co-regulate. People can feel it if you're doing it or not doing it. They know what's true, even if the words are different to to what you're saying. We know how to get people shifting and changing and getting to where they want to be in a shorter amount of time. We're, we are more impactful with our work now, and that's why we've been changing the way that we hold space in our business as well. So yeah. Sarah mentioned integration container. What does that mean? Before we were deeply in the work, deeply on our spiritual journey. We knew about perhaps retreats or doing work on ourself, but we didn't understand the integration afterwards. And what that means is. You can learn a lesson, but you're not really embodying it, you're not really taking it into your everyday life. You, you learn to in your mind and then you can lose it very quickly. And after a retreat, a lot of things can unfold and come up for you. And without creating space, you might even miss. What's coming up for you? So there's multiple reasons why you want to allow time for integration, but one, it's like your own reflection time. Two is to continue with your practices to really get them embedded in your life. Three is to embody the lessons. Four is to notice, create the spaciousness to notice what else is coming up for you. And so we are gathering five times together on Zoom early in the morning so people can do it before work and also get into that habit. What I've shared in these integration circles is it really is the quiet time of day, and I know for so many of us, myself included ladies I would rather be in bed, get another extra hour's sleep, but the truth of the matter is with a family and a business. I'm talking for myself, but I'm a reflection of you as well. I can have all the good intentions in the world, and it is so much less likely that I'm going to be able to create a space for myself in my busy day. If I can create space for myself, but my day has already started, I might already be in flight and fight response, and it is very hard to relax the mind. So you want to give up very quickly. You feel like you're not good at meditating, and that could be a story for lots of people. So really to. Trust, I said to the participants one morning, I used a mantra, I always get the perfect amount of sleep every day. So even if that was four hours and in the past, I'd be counting that on my fingers and worrying that I'll be tired the next day. What I just say to myself is I always get the perfect amount of sleep. I wake up. We do the practice and we are remembering what we learn on the retreat, or even if you know it already, but you haven't got it into your everyday life. So things like more silence, breath work, meditation. We are using mantra work as well. We started with a sharing circle and we are closed with a sharing circle and someone has already fed back in that container that I won't go into the details, but she had. A spiritual experience that she's never had before that I believe was she created the space on the retreat, so the silence in the mind, and then when she came home and created more space, it allowed that experience to drop in. The experiences are always available for us, but we may not. Be ready for them. See them, hear them, feel them, believe them, and where she had this spaciousness that was able to drop in for her. So you know, you may be able to have that experience that you've always wished for or hoped for, and you're not trying for the experience. It doesn't work to try. But when you create the space, you never know what's gonna drop in. And so we're only, we're not even halfway through that integration container, but it's ongoing support for two weeks following the retreat. And I've personally found integration containers really powerful. I've attended retreats myself and I'm really grateful for that continued connection with the facilitators with the fellow participants and to deepen my own practice as well. So I feel like that's been really valuable. And I did actually record it this morning, Sarah,'cause there's a few people that you know that maybe they've got a gym routine in the morning or they're up super early with the kids and they genuinely can't make it logistically. So there is also an opportunity. To catch up and do it in your own time, but we are really encouraging people to move things. Do you know what I mean? To prioritize it in your diary and to move things to show yourself that it's important to you. Absolutely. And there'll be inspiration that happens on retreat that you can pull through to your everyday life. Like we already mentioned about the one phone free day a week, and somebody messaged to say that they tried out one of the recipes from the retreat because they woke up thinking of it the next day. So they've tried that out. A nice healthy seasonable. Nice, healthy seasonal meal, which they can now share with their family. So spreading the joy there as well. And. Forgiveness was quite a theme. Hannah held a beautiful meta bana meditation, a forgiveness meditation, and this really deeply moved one of the guests, and for me, as she was saying this, I was thinking this is a full moon practice. Now we do that, we gather with a community every full moon, and we drop into a forgiveness practice because it is a natural part of a healing cycle. So it is really. Important to have that ongoing integration. So look for practitioners or space holders that offer that. And of course we do that in a longer way as well without online community. But there was two other sort of really big highlights there. Haley be held, a sound bath, which I have to say I actually haven't felt jealousy for a long time, but when people were explaining her sound bath and I have been honored to have one and I will be again soon, I was thinking, I wish I was there because it. Moved a lot of people into deep rest. People that can't normally rest in sound baths, that might be a bit restless. They found that they could deeply rest and they had visuals. They had felt exp felt sense experiences and as they were explaining them to me afterwards, I was really seeing the inner. Transformation of healing that was happen happening for them. It was very obvious what they were explaining to me. It felt like you are really healing some trauma without needing to know about it, without having to get involved. But you are seeing the light there. You're seeing the light within you, which was actually that's moving me now as I'm even. Remembering that and sharing that. I think it's worth just adding there, Sarah, that we have worked with plant medicines before and plant medicine's. Can be a great facilitator on your spiritual journey, but the truth is everything that plant medicine offers. You can get there by yourself. And for us westerners, that's very challenging.'cause what it requires us is us to go deep within and we can't even, like Sarah said, we are restless. We can't get deep within. So they're tools that can be used but really. That's what, that's the kind of, in visuals in a sound bath, you're almost having your own plant medicine experience. But the silence has facilitated you changing your nervous system state to allow the deep relaxation, to allow access to everything that is always there that normally we cannot access. So it is just that simple, really. Absolutely. And. This is a lovely entry to silence. A lot of people and myself included, has fed back. Hannah, I haven't even shared with you, but I wrote a list of 50 things that I wanted a couple of years ago with a business coach who's very spiritual, and I was really challenged to write 50 things. It was very edgy for me, and we've actually bought that into our containers for people who also have a challenge doing that. But we need to know what we actually want in life to get satisfaction. Otherwise, it's gonna feel like a really hard. Slog. And on my list of 50 things I'd written, I want to go on a silent retreat. And I found it a few months ago and I thought not only have I done that now I'm co-hosting them. But we did get feedback to say there aren't many silent retreats in England. There are Wales, there are island Scotland, I'm not sure, but in the uk certainly not many in England, and certainly not. A weekend, which is that accessibility. So I'd really invite you to to start that yourself in some way. It doesn't, obviously, we would love to host you, but what about half a day? Phone off? What about a day a month? What about the seasonal change of the year, the eightfold wheel of the year? Could that be the day that you unplug a little bit and spend time in silence? What about trying it with your other half or your family saying, shall we for fun? And I know it, it might be an odd type of fun, but for fun, shall we all eat a meal in silence, and then afterwards we could share what we noticed with one another. It wouldn't be exactly the same as eating by yourself, because often you would eat in silence by yourself anyway. But if you are by yourself eating that meal, it would be to not listen to music, to not be on your phone, to not be watching anything or not be reading anything and being. Totally present, taking that breath smelling the food, noticing the colors, and really chewing every single mouthful. These are just small ways that we can bring in silence every single day. And we've got one more thing to share about the retreat, but before we do I think this is a good point to share when our next. Silent retreat will be. So we are back at Mountain Field. We are running exactly the same retreat because we've had such good feedback and we enjoyed it so much, and we're there over a bank holiday weekend. We've specifically chosen this, so you have your own integration time at the end on the Monday without needing to rush back to work. And the full blown everyday life. So we are running it again from a Friday to a Sunday, so it's the 1st of May to the 3rd of May, and then perhaps with your work, you may have the Monday off anyway, offering you even more spaciousness after the retreat. So the bookings for that are now open. You can either go to the show notes and find the link for that, or if you're driving or multitasking at the moment, just go to our website. Holistic health collective.co uk find the tab for retreats and you'll find any of our day retreats or our weekend retreats on there. Should we just close talking a little bit about the element of fire? It's such a huge part of the weekend, wasn't it Sarah? Yeah, Hannah mentioned the open fireplaces, which were spectacular and. The host. We hosted this in January, so we really got the warmth of the fire and it became an absolute focal point. We used fire in a lot of our ceremonies and actually within the work, the body of our work as Hannah, learning about traditional Chinese medicine, Hannah works with, recognizes this and so does yoga and Aveda, that we are made of the elements and each one has their strength. So we lit the fires throughout the day and the evening we did fire meditations. We just relaxed with the warmth of. And there was somebody on retreat who's familiar with the element of fire. They're a fire maker, but they connected on a deep level. They almost felt the spirit of the fire as I think you actually also felt that Hannah. Yeah, I absolutely found in one of the meditations that. I realized, I've read it in books, so I've known it cognitively, but not in an embodied level that, oh, fire's actually alive. One, it's dancing. Two, it's providing energy, but three, we have to keep feeding it. If we're not feeding this fire, the fire dies out and it's gone. Completely gone. I really realized the aliveness of the fire. Also, I always feel into the ancient storytelling that our ancestors would've gathered around the fire, and it would've been a place of connection and uplift, and also it would've been a survival strategy for our ancestors. So I really would invite you to, particularly if you suffer from, January. It feels like the January the 87th, doesn't it? But the January blues or the winter blues are really normal. Let's just normalize that, chemically, hormonally, energetically there. There's a really good reason for that, but our lifestyle does not adapt around it. So something simple like lighting a candle in the morning when it's still dark and have quite a big effect on your energy. Slightly feeling that warmth in the body for a start, but looking into the flame as well. It clears. The mind'cause it clears the vision. And we did aac medi meditation which is a yogic meditation as well. So it, it goes deeper spiritually, but just to invite that connection to the fire. And I haven't really met anyone that doesn't, absolutely love gathering around with like-minded folk around a fire. We done a 45 minute meditation around the fire, and when we said we're finished now thing, no one wanted to leave the room and no one did leave the room until the fire had completely burned out because it's absolutely hypnotic and a great tool to use in silence. So there's a summary of our retreat. We really enjoyed it. We've received amazing feedback, and if you're interested in joining in May. I'd say don't delay in booking, just putting a deposit down. We've been running retreats for more than five years together now, and our retreats tend to sell out quickly because we have returning beautiful ladies who come again and again. This one is open to women only this time. Yeah, so don't delay. Come and book. Join us in May. We would love to see you in Kent, and honestly, do not be scared. That's the biggest feedback that we've heard. Of course, there's some fears, there's some worries, and you needn't have those fears and worries. Just notice that they're there and do it. Anyway, we would love to welcome you, so thank you so much for joining us on this episode, and we will see you on our next episode. Thank you a million times, Ava, for joining us on this podcast episode. You can support the show by giving us a follow on any podcast platform you're listening to this on. If you already follow us, then thank you so much and maybe share this episode. If you think of someone, someone comes to mind where you think they'd really benefit from listening to this. This is one way that we like to spread the love with our friends, is sharing podcasts or playlist. So let them know that we are thinking about them. So just send it on to them with a few words about why they might enjoy it. And if you'd like to check out any of our in-person events or retreats or our online offerings, head over to our website, www.holistichealthcollective.co.uk. We'll see you in the next episode.