Reflections on Aura’s third retreat-based course, Facilitating the Feminine

May 2025 at the Bertha Retreat, Boschendal, Stellenbosch, South Africa.

The 22 women who arrive are wonderfully diverse. Each except one has been referred to Aura by a friend. The women range from unemployed to senior health community workers, from visual artists to a doula bringing babies into the world differently. Someone deeply rooted in plant knowledge and practice, and another working with traditional African beer-making by women with knowledge passed down by generations before them. Artists, ecological practitioners, women rooted in food, finance and community development. A mixture of wisdom, understanding and practical action in different communities. 

Their own words speak of their experience on retreat in a form of poetry, to be read slowly and savoured:

And perhaps the line that says it simplest:

We are just like a river. 

It is a radical request - to consider slowness, kind, quiet, restful ways of doing things as part of everyday life. Is this merely middle-class indulgence? And yet there’s an insistent whisper - a modern world that emphasises progress, speed, outcomes and factory-like working conditions seems to have colonised ways of being that understood living simply.

Where embodied feelings of creating, making, connecting with herbs and plants, gardening, breathing, playing, grieving, stories and letting go find their way back into women as sensual beings ..women coming to their senses. 

As we tentatively feel our way into what eco-centric economies may be in a post capitalist world, women selecting Aura show ways of remembering other ways of knowing, seeing and being. Where an invisible softness starts changing their faces, and a gentleness creeps in that has been kept at bay for too long. Carapaces protecting hearts break open, and deep listening turns into powerful rivers making their way to the sea.  

We notice so often that we stumble on too many words: intellectualising, trapped in the conceptual, psychologising and overriding the seemingly infinite intelligence of our bodies, and wombs. And when the deep inner work of retreating starts happening, how words become fewer and fewer, until there is timeless silence. A joyful stillness that lives in the heart, beyond words.

We sense that this is what it is: coming home.

In gratitude,

Eve Annecke and Renata Minerbo