Yggdrasil Retreat Centre is the second pod to ripen on the Tree of Life. Interestingly, it doesn’t look anything like the pictures on the packets of seeds I brought with me from Switzerland and France to sow on the island of Bornholm. Those seeds had been patiently gathered during an odyssey sailing the tumultuous seas of inner leadership. From the onset of the voyage, bearing in mind that the purpose of an odyssey is to find our way back home having accrued noble and worthy achievements, I began to craft a vision for the second half of my life. After a fulfilling career serving educational development in higher education, I felt the call to leave the corporate world and the realms of organisational development. I was tired of getting lost in the labyrinth of endless administrative processes; I was annoyed by the visible and invisible loggias of policy-making; and I felt weary by the weight of personal and institutional inertia that slows down change, when it doesn’t kill off any soupçon of innovation before it has even had a chance to see the daylight.
The more I wrestled with my frustrations, the clearer what I wanted to do became. It was high time to emancipate myself from the organisations that had offered me nurturance and support for decades and to acknowledge that this was no longer the case. Despite or maybe because I was a successful academic, I realised that there comes a time when we really need to leave school and follow a larger destiny even, and particularly when, its outline remains hazy hovering somewhere in the cloud of unknowing. Grateful for all the lessons learnt during those fascinating years of scholarly pursuits, I wanted to create a place nurturing educational coherence, a living laboratory where, with others, I could implement change and innovation rather than remain stuck in the ruts of empty conversations. The initial dream was to buy a large property and to convert it into a residential centre focusing on educational development. This was the picture flashing at me on the seed packet I was holding in my hand. All it needed, so I thought, was to transform the old farm into a guest lodge with, above, a spacious loft for hosting events and gatherings.
I imagined welcoming small groups of guests or teams interested in exploring the phenomenology of consciousness. I wanted to understand the essence of transformational work and the unfolding nature of awareness spiralling through stages and states. I wanted to learn to receive reality as it is, to clarify my intentions and cleanse the lenses of my perception. And, last but not least, I wanted to be fully present to the seasons of transformation and the tides of change.
I imagined crafting an appetising programme with thematic and à la carte workshops. I dreamed of hosting week-long retreats following the seasonal celebrations where we would bring together the great traditions that beat the pace of our earthly sojourn. I wanted to offer individual sessions accompanying fellow-explorers through the circuitous pathways of consciousness unfolding unto itself, listening to the bespoke guidance reaching out to touch us. I imagined welcoming fellow-teachers and programme leaders so that we might sit together, in a circle of compassion, to share our wisdom around psychological integration and spiritual growth and the practices that bring new worlds into being.
The vision was so potent, my commitment so formidable that within short the renovation work on the farm was complete. I was ready to welcome guests and to launch the first week-long workshop. Furthermore, the first guest had just landed for a month-long retreat. Then the unexpected occurred: the pandemic invited itself into the dream. Needless to say that it turned everything on its head, fortunately in a good way and for a higher purpose, shaking out the obsolete and already outgrown, although it didn’t feel like that at all, as I navigated the sudden disorder and begrudgingly offered myself to the slow maturation and tempestuous reordering of the initial vision.
The interim time, courtesy of the pandemic, threw me out of my comfort zone and seriously challenged my imaginative mind shaped by academia and the rigours of critical thinking. It hurled me over the threshold of mindfulness and self-reflective awareness traditionally attained through structured workshops and disciplined devotional practices. It reduced to smithereens the programme of carefully designed events, each one with its specific learning outcomes, and it regurgitated me on the shore of the wild territories of contemplative consciousness. Slowly, a new vision rose from the rubble of the shattered dream morphing the educational centre into a centre for contemplative practices where contemplation is the destination.
During the pandemic, I devoted my time to an ambitious writing project and, in so doing, embarked on a new voyage: an odyssey with wholeness. My intention was to map the circuitous pathways of evolutionary consciousness that encourage us to first expand in wholeness, before dissolving in oneness. Following the migratory routes from cognitive psychology to philosophical theology, I uncovered the essence of contemplative consciousness. The chronicles of the odyssey appear in two books published in 2024, An Archaeology of the Personality and Pathways to Selfhood, and their contents shape the retreat centre, both in purpose and commitment.
The freshly minted Yggdrasil Retreat Centre draws on the gifts of silence, stillness and solitude for piercing the illusions of self-reflective awareness. Contemplative practices call us to pay deep attention to our subjective experience, to listen to all the invitations that surround us and to hear the silent music of existence. Contemplation is the disciplined art of gazing into the world looking back at us and, in so doing, reflecting back to us something of our inner world patiently, awaiting our full presence, our wisdom and our love. The verb ‘to contemplate’ means to bring together templates or patterns. It speaks of the symmetry between outside and inside, the ongoing invitation to align inner and outer worlds. Then, from the place in the soul bringing together inner and outer, to walk towards the pure embrace that becomes available with restored alignment. In this sense, the contemplative life is far from being a withdrawal from life’s challenges and delights; it is the conscious choice to live faith in action.
A contemplative retreat implies being open to a direct encounter with reality, face-to-face, and being receptive to the dark nights that become all the more luminous, and also admittedly all the more terrifying, in finer vibrational spaces such as, amongst many others, the sacred island of Bornholm. A contemplative retreat is a desert experience: a time for falling apart and stripping down the egoic operating system; a time of intense and shimmering vulnerability and heartbreak; a time of slow maturation into the next dispensation of our life; a time of learning not to return on our tracks to pick up what we have discarded or outgrown, least we be turned to stone caught in the historical entanglements of time and space; a time for appreciating the cradling waves of letting go and letting be ushering us towards the light of absolute reality.
There is more information to glean on the nature of a contemplative retreat and the circumstances that lead us into a fruitful experience of transformation and spiritual revolution.
