ALIGN WITH STILLNESS AND VITALITY
High Hopes established itself as a retreat centre 19 years ago
A dedicated small team of caring professional therapists and facilitators await you at High Hopes Retreat Centre.
High Hopes is one of the world’s only personalised retreat centres offering nurturing, quality retreats.
We present deeply transformational retreat programmes. Scroll down to page two to read about each of our core programmes.
Programmes range from and include trauma release, personal growth, detox, adrenal repair, immune-building, and basic health balancing options.
Our retreat programmes also include superb nutrition, for which you are given an individual protocol. They also include mindfulness, yoga, and/or a guided walk option and time in proper nature, with High Hopes being next to two nature reserves.
We are committed to offering compassionate healing one human at a time.
With a handful of well-rounded wellness programs to choose from, High Hopes Retreat is sure to have a retreat just right for you or to create one, especially for your needs.
Write to our counselling psychologist and programme director, Ange Craig, to request your retreat dates and what you need support with:
ange@highhopes.co.za
or call us at 060 828 0884.
With just four private garden-entrance rooms in the tranquil mountain village of Greyton, only an hour and a half from Cape Town – High Hopes is easy to find, and the village of Greyton is also really worth the journey.
We cook for you, listen to you, support you, help you to hear and hold the at conflicted parts within yourself, nurture you, help you understand what has overwhelmed you, and how to heal.
Apart from the High Hopes gardens themselves, you have great access to pristine nature immediately you step out of the High Hopes garden gates – exquisite walking and hiking trails full of light and colour, mountain pools, waterfalls and streams, wide open plains with meandering paths and delightful fynbos, veldt and mountain trails, extraordinary bird life, buck, otter, lynx, Cape mountain leopard, and even honey-badger, and for the cyclists among you, superb cycle paths.
But most importantly, it is the re-connection to yourself that is most transformative on a High Hopes Retreat.
The most frequent words spoken at the end of each retreat journey:
“That was simply life-changing. I have come home to who I am and feel comfortable in my skin for the first in a very long time.”
How DOES ONE HEAL?
The great news is, this is something we can train in. Yes, I said train. Because healing, from the root Latin word, “hal”, means to make whole.
And just like any training, we need guides, teachers, and we need to show up and be willing to, as Pema Chodron says, “Take the Good Medicine”. So what is the good medicine?…..
Through learning the daily skills of mindfulness practices, through great nutrition and through practising trauma release exercises, our nervous systems get out of cell danger response, they unfreeze, stop fighting or running. Our energy gets unlocked, and becomes available for living life again, rather than being locked into fear and anxiety. Our body’s immune system also becomes available to clear out toxins and pathogens. We start clearing a path and seeing a new future.
Two buzzword which are on the lips of leading doctors, enlightened therapists and cutting-edge scientists right now, are “trauma”, and “inflammation”. The most promising current research is talking about harnessing this power of our innate ability to heal from within to reverse even depression, panic disorders, fatigue, auto-immunity, cancer, heart-disease, diabetes, arthritis, chronic stress and other difficult conditions.
Our attention is being called through global crisis after global crisis, to find new solutions deep within ourselves. To limit the damage of this pandemic, and to be able to meet other new and future health challenges, we need to look after our nervous systems. In doing so, we also take great care of our immune systems.
When I help myself, I also help my loved ones and my communities. Being the change that we want to see in the world, by healing ourselves, we create the ripple effect out from this new me.
This emerging me, as I heal myself, is the most powerful tool I have to be a force for good in the world.
Beloved teacher, author, nun and mother, Pema Chodron, reminds us,
“The only reason we don’t open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don’t feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else’s eyes.”
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Immunity lives within each individual cell, within all of the body’s systems, but also in our relationships, our finances, our spiritual connectivity, our intellectual health, our emotional wellbeing and in our environment. When we learn to sit with all parts of ourselves, when we touch all parts with listening and compassion, new possibilities open up.
Our primary focus at High Hopes is to help you to befriend your nervous system and to safeguard both your immediate and your long-term immunity. We do this by walking with you into gentle, powerful and loving daily habits through our comprehensive healing programmes.
A primary focus at High Hopes is on harnessing your brain’s natural neuro-plasticity for effective change. One of the core ways we do this is by teaching you how to heal your own maladaptive stress response.
Together with our healing therapies, you can reset your nervous system from hyper- or hypo-arousal, to balanced, engaged and healthy. Nutrition also plays a major role, along with nature and specific healing modalities.
Setting yourself on a path of calm and ease is like getting an inner trust fund which you can draw on for your whole life. This is something that we can each learn. But first, as teacher Jack Kornfield so skillfully puts it, “we have to be present to win”. It is our deep joy to help you win.
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