The

The Welcome back to Nomad Podcast. I'm Tim Nash, this is my Contemplative co-host. It's Anna Robinson.

Hello, hello, hello. Well, on the subject of contemplation, you're fresh from leading two retreats, I think, aren't you? An in-person retreat at Ashburnham and then an online retreat. How did they go?

Oh, really well. Ashburnham, just love it there.

And yeah, shout out to those who listen to the podcast. It was a great group. And we had a lot of

fun contemplating a threshold. Such a fascinating topic. Yeah. Thresholds, yeah. And they happen to have

big thresholds in the house. There's a really old house with loads of beautiful woodlands. But the house has got, you know, a threshold is like the gap between the door, the inside and the outside of a door. But most doors are quite thin. But there they have these really big doors where you can literally open one door between the rooms, stand in the threshold, close that door before you open the other door to go into the other big room. Wow. That seems a little unnecessary. I know. Is that where the, is that where the servants used to hide or something? I don't know. I don't know what that's about. Did you draw on that powerful symbolism? Oh, Tim. You were all over that way. I don't know why. I've run this retreat four times, but for some reason, we were in one

room and we have another room, so we have the beautiful library, but we also have this lovely

room with a fireplace. The rooms are beautiful. And in between those two rooms, there's three

of these doors, but all three other massive rooms. So I checked all the rooms, and I saw they

were all empty, and I thought, we could just walk through these thresholds as an embodied kind of meditative experience. Nice. And so it just came to me that morning and we did it and you know it was right at the beginning and it was so profound for so many of us. Just that physical act of kind of going in, being in the dark, coming out. You know, it was, it stayed with a lot of

people during the retreat. So that was quite fun. Pressholds. Interesting. Yeah. And then the St. Brigid

in bulk retreat was really lovely yesterday. Yeah, I had loads of people came and some people

booked on to watch a recording. And I just love Bridget. I love St. Bridget, who kind of evolved out of the goddess Bridges.

And it's, for me, she's fascinating. And actually, has had a huge impact on my faith, spirituality, the way I operate in the world, my work.

Her along with Julianne of Norwich, I think, are the two kind of key figures for me that I draw on. Yeah, so it was really fun. I've not done

that one before. So it was a new edition. Have you ever led a retreat that was a little bit

rubbish? I have to ask people. Yeah, but you must sense when it's not, you know, do you have a

kind of thing, oh, no, I just don't think this is really working. No, that had, that has, amazingly, that hasn't happened to me. I've definitely had experiences in retreats, usually in person retreats, where you understand you've got people gathering and everyone's coming in different ages and stages, different things in their lives, they're going to be feeling different emotions about being there with essentially a group of other strangers. Do they trust me? How is this working? So you've got a lot of things floating around and I'm very intuitive, so I pick up a lot of that energy and a lot of that information, whether I like it or not. And so a retreat, by the very nature of it, when you slow down and stop, it can bring up stuff and it can be uncomfortable. And I sort of try to hold a

space for people to lean in a bit to that discomfort to maybe discover if there's something going on. But sometimes you can land and then I feel like I do a session or start and I think, oh, in the past, it doesn't so happen now, but in the past I'll be like, I'll be on the phone to gym going, it's a nightmare.

You know,

I feel like I'm really worried

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