Therapists
Angela Craig
It all started when…
Twenty years ago, Ange Craig founded High Hopes with a vision of creating a Rumi-esque guest house and retreat centre: a place of refuge, stillness and deep inner enquiry, where people could step away from the demands of ordinary life and reconnect with themselves, with nature and with what truly matters.
The name High Hopes came with the property.
The previous owner, Johan Neethling, had inherited a garden in which almost nothing grew except a single Salix, or cricket-bat willow. Johan dreamed of creating a woodland garden where only one tree had grown before. The village told him he had “high hopes” of ever achieving it.
He did.
Over the years, Johan created a two-acre arboretum containing more than eighty-five species of trees, as well as a tree and flower nursery. Many of Greyton’s sidewalk trees were nurtured in these very gardens. The woodland became a reality, and Johan named the property High Hopes — a name we have lovingly kept.
Ange Craig
Ange is the founder and programme director of High Hopes, as well as the centre’s resident kinesiologist and counselling practitioner.
Her academic background includes postgraduate university qualifications in Counselling Psychology, English Literature and Music from Rhodes University, with further postgraduate study at the University of Cape Town’s Gender Studies Unit and at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre, where her work focused on psychosocial programmes for people affected by trauma.
She worked at Cape Town’s Trauma Centre for Survivors of Violence and Torture and subsequently spent eight and a half years as director and UNHCR partner at the Agency for Refugee Education, Skills Training & Advocacy, before moving into private practice, first in Cape Town and later in Greyton.
Alongside her psychological and counselling work, Ange has spent many years exploring complementary approaches to health and wellbeing. She is a qualified Reiki Master and Applied Kinesiologist, and has trained in Attunement Therapy, Cognitive-Behavioural Sleep Therapy and Chi Massage. She has also undertaken extensive further study in complementary and integrative approaches, including anthroposophical medicine and psychotherapy, and holds a Foundation Certificate in Astrology.
Her approach has always been integrative: recognising that wellbeing cannot be reduced to a single part of ourselves. At High Hopes, psychological, physical, emotional and contemplative approaches are brought together to support each individual’s particular journey.
Ange’s work is rooted in a simple question:
What might help this particular person come back into relationship with themselves — and from there, begin to heal?
This is the philosophy at the heart of High Hopes.
The word healing comes from the Old English hǣlan, meaning to make whole. For Ange, this speaks to the deeper purpose of the work: not to become someone different, but gradually to come home to more of who we already are — including those parts of ourselves that may have become disconnected, overwhelmed or hidden.
A life shaped by healing, music and community
Ange’s work has always extended beyond the consulting room.
Sixteen years ago, together with three others, she co-created the Quartet of Peace Trust, a South African not-for-profit initiative using four unique stringed instruments dedicated to South Africa’s four Nobel Peace Laureates — Albert Luthuli, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela — to raise funds for gifted disadvantaged South African music students to access tertiary music education.
The instruments were created by violin-maker Brian Lisus, with Sharon Peddie, High Hopes’ other founder, studying violin carving with him. The Quartet of Peace subsequently performed internationally, including at Boughton House in the United Kingdom, carrying a message of peace, reconciliation, freedom and hope.
The project’s founder trustees have since entrusted its continuation to the University of the Free State’s Music Department and the Odeion Quartet.
The Quartet of Peace began, quite appropriately, around the dining-room table at High Hopes. It remains part of the wider story of the centre: a reminder that healing and transformation can happen through many different languages — through therapy, music, nature, creativity, community and connection.
And so High Hopes…
Today, High Hopes continues to bring these strands together.
Ange’s love of nature, horses, music, painting, complementary health and deep human enquiry is woven into the character of the place. High Hopes is not simply somewhere to stay for a few days. It is a place created for people who need to pause, breathe, rest, reflect and find their way back to themselves.
Here, we believe that meaningful healing asks us to look at the whole person — body, mind, emotions, relationships, nervous system and spirit — and to meet each person where they are.
That same spirit of care, excellence and hope runs through every retreat we offer.
“The disease of the soul is both more common and more deadly than the disease of the body.”
— Plato
At High Hopes, we hold the possibility that healing is not about fixing what is broken, but about creating the conditions in which wholeness can begin to return.
Sharon Peddie
Sharon Peddie — Co-founder, Cook & Creative Force
Sharon Peddie is co-founder of High Hopes and the creative force behind much of what makes the centre feel like home. She grows and sources fresh, local produce, creates our delicious plant-based meals, facilitates mandala painting and leads guided mountain walks for retreat guests.
A goldsmith and violin maker by training, Sharon has always been drawn to working with her hands and to the transformation of beautiful raw materials into something meaningful.
She began her career with a diploma in jewellery design from Durban Technikon, while simultaneously studying ceramics and winning prizes for her work in national ceramics competitions. After gaining experience with established goldsmiths, including at Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront, she opened her own jewellery business, Scarab.
Scarab began in a beautiful Victorian building in Observatory before moving to Cavendish Square, where it remained for almost a decade, and later to a row of stylish independent shops in Claremont. The business became well known for Sharon’s distinctive jewellery and creative craftsmanship. When she moved to Greyton, she sold her shares in Scarab and embarked on her next great creative adventure: co-founding High Hopes with Ange Craig.
Food as nourishment
At High Hopes, Sharon’s creativity found another expression: food.
She personally prepares the breakfasts in our guest house and creates the meals for our retreat guests, with an emphasis on fresh, nourishing, plant-based food and beautifully simple ingredients.
Inspired by chefs such as Yotam Ottolenghi and the River Café’s Ruth Rogers and the late Rose Gray — and by what Sharon affectionately calls “fridge gazing until the vegetables speak to me” — she creates meals around each guest’s individual food preferences and personalised Top Foods List.
Following your initial consultation with Ange, your personalised food list is shared with Sharon, who then creates your meals around the foods that best suit you. The result is food that is not only delicious, but personal: prepared especially for you and your retreat.
From goldsmithing to violin carving
Sharon’s creative life has continued to evolve.
In 2010, she learned the highly specialised art of violin carving from renowned South African luthier Brian Lisus. Together they helped create the four unique Quartet of Peace instruments, dedicated to South Africa’s four Nobel Peace Laureates: Albert Luthuli, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela.
Some of this painstaking work was done right here at High Hopes, at Sharon’s workbench in the lounge — occasionally with the assistance of one of the resident cats!
The Quartet of Peace Trust has raised funds for gifted disadvantaged South African music students to access tertiary music education, and High Hopes has hosted concerts in support of the project over the years. You can read more about this remarkable initiative at qop.org.za.
Life at High Hopes
Today, Sharon is happiest with her hands in the soil, growing many of the vegetables that eventually find their way onto your plate. She still makes jewellery, restores wood and finds endless creative ways to work with whatever is around her.
And when she’s not in the kitchen or garden, one of her favourite things is to take our guests out into the exquisite mountains on our doorstep.
For Sharon, creativity, food, nature and hospitality are all part of the same thing: making something beautiful, nourishing and meaningful from what is already here.
Step into the magic.
Beverley Blumberg
Beverley — Hatha Yoga
Beverley has lived in Greyton for more than 18 years, where she teaches Hatha Yoga and works in property. Her teaching focuses on awakening an understanding of the body: becoming aware of posture, finding balance and establishing a strong, grounded foundation from which the practice can unfold.
After many years of dedicated yoga practice with excellent teachers, Beverley spent a decade running, swimming and undertaking demanding physical work on her olive farm and in her pottery studio. When she eventually returned to a regular Hatha Yoga practice, she brought with her a much deeper understanding of the body’s responses to strain, overwork, injury and the natural challenges of ageing.
Today, she loves returning to the basics of yoga and exploring how a regular practice can support us both physically and emotionally. She continues to deepen her own practice and teaching through workshops with senior yoga teachers.
Beverley believes that Hatha Yoga is a practice that continually unfolds, and that every student arrives with their own body, history and starting point. She is therefore equally happy working with complete beginners and with those who have practised yoga for many years.
Her aim is not to make yoga about achieving a particular shape or level of flexibility, but to help each person develop greater awareness, stability and connection with their own body.
She believes that, once discovered, a regular yoga practice can become a quiet and stabilising thread running through the whole of life — and she loves helping people find that thread for themselves.
Janine Hayward
Janine Hayward — Holistic Practitioner & Creative Facilitator
Janine Hayward is a multi-modality holistic practitioner, artist, musician and teacher who lives in the beautiful village of Greyton.
Her work is grounded in the belief that healing is an unfolding process of coming into deeper relationship with ourselves — learning, as she puts it, to “love all of me.” She creates a gentle, deeply restorative space in which clients can slow down, let go of doing and simply be.
At High Hopes, Janine offers Access Bars® sessions, providing an opportunity to quieten the mind, reconnect with oneself and experience deep rest and renewal. Her sessions invite greater ease, presence and receptivity, allowing space for clients to explore what may emerge when they step outside familiar patterns and ways of being.
Janine holds a BA in Eurythmy and, alongside her work at High Hopes, incorporates EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) tapping, Family Constellations and creative coaching into her private online practice.
She particularly enjoys working with adults whose early experiences made authentic self-expression difficult, supporting them to explore greater freedom, creativity and self-compassion as part of their ongoing journey of self-care and personal growth.
For Janine, creativity is an important part of this journey. She sees healing not simply as moving away from what has been difficult, but also as discovering more space for aliveness, self-expression, ease and joy.
Juanita Praeg
Juanita Finestone-Praeg — Movement, Performance & Embodiment
Juanita Finestone-Praeg is Emeritus Professor of Performance Studies and Choreography at Rhodes University, with more than 38 years of experience as a performer, choreographer, educator and researcher.
Her work has spanned the university and professional performing arts, as well as community and development contexts. She holds a PhD in Choreography and Performance Studies and has devoted much of her career to exploring the relationship between movement, creativity, learning and the lived experience of the body.
Jan is the longest-standing member of the First Physical Theatre Company, having been closely involved in its performance, choreographic, educational, research and community programmes for more than three decades. She served as the company’s Artistic Director from 2010 to 2018 and continues to maintain an active practice-as-research approach to her work.
In 2011, Jan received Rhodes University’s Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award, recognising her contribution to teaching and learning in the performing arts.
At High Hopes, Jan brings this wealth of experience into a more intimate and personal setting. Her work invites people to become curious about their own bodies, movement and ways of expressing themselves — creating space to explore, discover and reconnect through embodied experience.
For Jan, movement is not simply about performance. It can be a way of listening to ourselves, finding new possibilities and allowing something different to emerge.
Gervaise Christie
Gervaise Christie — Holistic Health Practitioner & Bodyworker
Gervaise Christie has been working in holistic health and wellbeing for more than twenty years. Her journey began with yoga in her teens, studying with Glen Ross Hudson, and later completing her first Ashtanga Yoga teacher training with Jim Harrington.
It was through yoga that Gervaise became fascinated by the body’s capacity to change, release and restore itself. Drawn particularly to the hands-on aspects of the practice, she went on to train extensively in Thai Yoga Massage, completing beginner, intermediate and advanced levels.
Over the years, Gervaise has continued to broaden her understanding of the body and wellbeing through studies in nutrition, Kundalini Yoga with Pritam Khalsa and Craniosacral Therapy. She also explores conscious movement and dance as pathways to greater embodied awareness and connection.
An artist, traditional birth keeper and mother of two, Gervaise brings together her diverse experiences of the body, movement, creativity and life into a gentle, intuitive approach to her work.
She lives in the magical village of Greyton, where she continues to explore the many ways in which we can come home to our bodies, ourselves and the natural rhythms of life.
Jolanie
Jolanie — Wim Hof Method Instructor & Personal Development Coach
Jolanie is a qualified Wim Hof Method Instructor and Personal Development Coach with a background in holistic health and wellness.
Her journey with the Wim Hof Method has taken her through Advanced and Master Module training in the Netherlands and Poland. She returned to South Africa in 2018 and has since continued to share the method and its breathing practices with others. Her work has been featured in Glamour and GQ South Africa.
Drawing from a range of breathing techniques and complementary approaches, Jolanie works with care and attentiveness, meeting each person where they are. Her focus is on helping people explore limiting beliefs, develop greater emotional and mental resilience, gently expand their perceived boundaries and reconnect with a stronger sense of their authentic selves.
Her own life reflects this spirit of exploration.
She has climbed winter mountains in Poland in temperatures reaching -20°C, undertaken intensive outdoor survival training including a 72-hour solo experience in South Africa, and backpacked and wild-camped through Norway’s Lofoten Islands in search of the Midnight Sun.
These experiences have taught her that stepping outside familiar territory — physically, mentally and emotionally — can reveal capacities we may not have known we possessed.
At High Hopes, Jolanie offers a supportive space in which guests can explore breath, resilience and personal possibility at their own pace — not as a test of endurance, but as an invitation to discover what becomes possible when we meet ourselves with curiosity and courage.