True to her vision to create a ‘Rumi-esque’ guest house, Ange Craig, founder of High Hopes Retreat Centre fifteen years ago, is the resident kinesiologist and counselling therapist at the centre. She kept the name given to the gardens by the previous owner, who wanted to create a woodland garden where only one tree grew, the salix or cricket-bat willow, and succeeded not only in doing so but in creating a two acre arboretum with over eighty-five tree species. The village told him that he had “high hopes” of ever making a woodland garden in Greyton. He not only did so, but went on to create a tree and flower nursery, and many of Greyton’s sidewalk trees today are trees nurtured and grown in these very gardens. Woodland accomplished, Johan Neethling so named this property, which still keeps the name today.

Ange holds post-graduate university qualifications in Counselling Psychology, English Literature and Music from Rhodes University. Ange has done post-graduate work both at UCT in the Gender Studies Unit and at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre, specialising in psycho-social programme creation for people in trauma. She worked for a year at Cape Town’s Trauma Centre for Survivors of Violence and Trauma, and was director and UNHCR partner for eight and a half years at the Agency for Refugee Education, Skills Training & Advocacy, prior to going full-time into private practice, first in Cape Town and then in Greyton.

Ange’s love of complementary health practices and of deep truth inquiry, led her to build this place of refuge to spiritual seekers and to people of all ages and walks of life wanting or needing to find a way of ‘living within’, re-connecting with higher and simple truths in the journey to wholeness (root word of heal is ‘hal’, to make whole, or know and embrace all of oneself, integrating the shadow with the light aspects of oneself).

 Apart from psychology, Ange is a complementary health practitioner. She is a qualified Reiki Master, Applied Kinesiologist, Attunement Therapist, Cognitive-Behavioural Sleep Therapist,  Chi Massage Therapist and holds a Foundation certificate (2 year training) in Astrology. Recently, Ange has annually attended the five year Anthroposophical Medical and Psychotherapy Postgraduate Training. She loves life, painting, horse-riding, reading, music, adores living in the mountain village of Greyton with her partner and their horses, cats, dogs and chickens.  She says Greyton gets better and better each passing year, a place of stillness where one can walk in the hills, grow your own food and participate fully in the contemplative life amidst a beautiful community.

Seven years ago, along with three others, Ange co-created the Quartet of Peace Trust (www.qop.org.za) . Ange still serves on the Trust as a founder trustee,  a not-for-profit organisation, which, using its four stringed instruments dedicated to South Africa’s four nobel peace laureates, raises funds for gifted disadvantaged South African music students to access tertiary music education, at the same time spreading a message of peace in the world through music.

“The disease of the soul is both more common and more deadly than the disease of the body. … To heal the body one turns to the practitioner of the art of healing the body, but to heal the soul there is no doctor to turn to, and each of us is left to become that doctor unto himself. “                        PLATO

High Hopes aspires to offering a combination of therapies and approaches to always look at both the healing of the soul and of the body, and in this work we rejoice.