Return to Belonging

Encountering soul through story and ritual in the Holtingerveld

If we can spend time for just a weekend, caring for our words, our actions where our attention goes, we can return to the world with our perspectives shifted, our sense of ourselves and our place in the world intact.

The world is moving fast and it is calling for response. But knowing where we can be most effective takes reflection and slowing down.

The great thing about story and ritual is they take us into uncertainty and then bring us back. They let us feel what it is to be unsure of our footing, so as to be almost weightless. We become aware of the soil around us, the birds in the air, the pattern of trees. Our senses get used to their natural work. Our attention for ourselves and each other gets sharper, clearer and more kind.

Then the place where we are, the stories we’re told and the people we’re with become a theatre of nourishment. An offering to be gentler and more awake.

This is what stories, ritual and land listening offer us continuously. And that’s why we’re offering this to our community, to embrace a wider circle of people in what it is think and move more slowly, be disrupted by nature’s flow and hear stories passed to us by ancestors that remind us that whatever conundrums we face, there a place of returning is always available to us: a return to belonging to ourselves and the Earth we walk on.

What you will experience

– The whole weekend is a ritual of story, nature connection and listening to self

– Practices to guide connection to self, place and others

– Myths that speak of the land and the ritual journeys we are on

– Space for enquiry and contemplation, sharing if you wish with others 

– Warmth, conviviality, eating and celebrating together

You’ll love this if…

 People that have signed up include anthropologists, activists, experience designers and storytellers. You’ll be at home joining them if…

– You long for depth of connection to land, yourself and others

–  You want to sharpen your sense of purpose and leadership in a turbulent age

– You’re inspired by ancestral myth and how it awakens our relationship to soul

– You don’t mind tangling with tricky questions

– You’re looking for nourishment and renewal

– You want to connect to a similar community looking for experience of similar things 

Your team

Simon Hodges

Storyourself

Over 12 years of telling stories, I’ve felt most at ease telling them in relation to the land. Landscape is where they come from and where they feel most alive.

Visiting hunebedden in Drenthe for the first time, it felt like centuries peeled away. We’re heading into this fantastic place, with stories just as old, to lose layers of regular thinking and head home with urgent vital ideas about how to tackle the challenges and joys of current life.

Location

We’re off to a beautiful stretch of moorland called the Holtingerveld, near Uffelte in Drenthe. We’ll be on the land as much as we can during the day, walking around the majestic hunebedden (burial mounds) that dot the local heath. We’ll have group sessions on the land and back at the hostel.

Overnight we’ll stay in a stripped back friendly hostel with our own spaces to gather and a good kitchen to cook in. Bedrooms offered are basic but comfortable, shared with one other person of the same gender. You are also welcome to organise your own accommodation and travel on and off site each day.

Interested? Sign up below!

 We’ve got a beautiful place to stay, great stories to tell and a beautiful people joining us for the experience. The weekend includes rituals, stories, practices, and dialogue and guidance, time on your own and food and accommodation. The cost for this is €375.

Here’s how to sign up:

1. Fill out the form below

2. We’ll then send a request to pay a €100 deposit

3. At the end of September, we’ll send a request for the rest of the balance

 If you have questions, send Simon a whatsapp or email. 

At moments where we collectively open our awareness, we participate in something bigger ourselves. We enter a world as we know it really is – alive, nourishing, consciously awake.