Integration-Exploration: The Interpersonal Retreat 2025

Next summer I will offer an opportunity for researchers and practitioners in my network to meet and share perspectives, resonances and inspiration around research as practice / practice as research through a very loosely structured, rhythmically attuned gathering in comfortable, nature-rich surroundings that support immersion in sense based awareness with playful interconnectedness. The Interpersonal Summer Camp is the first event of this length and scope that I have organised, and I am delighted to be able to invite you to share in the experience.

The Interpersonal Summer Camp offers time and space to land and unwind, restore, create, walk, swim and play. It brings the possibility for authentic mutual connection with others and ample opportunity to reflect and recuperate alone if needed. This is a place for easeful, enjoyable activity, supporting the parasympathetic systems, allowing you a safe return to spontaneity, childlike experimentation, and a renewed sense of presence with yourself as a relational being. 

The Summer Camp thus aims to quietly assist you to decompress, while also offering gentle introductions to (and/or ongoing explorations of) creative and collaborative inquiry practices, philosophies of relationally, and the posthuman, naturally evoked by the holding presence of the wild landscape at Trealy Farm. 

The Summer Camp is open to late stage trainee and qualified counselling and psychotherapy practitioners, researchers (including PhD researchers) and educators (including artists) with an interest in qualitative inquiry, creative methodologies, the posthuman and the psychosocial, and anyone whose work concerns relating with others who feels that they would benefit from participation. 

There is space for up to 10 participants at a time.

The Summer Camp will find its rhythm around daily workshops in the Pavilion, a space dedicated to group activities. Ways and means to explore may (or may not) include:

Sensation - finding relation with our surroundings

Vision – line, form, shape, light/shade colour, image as symbol or metaphor

Embodiment – somatic communication, movement and touch, energy transfer

Affection - feeling ways

Imagination – fictioning pasts / presents / futures  

Dramatisation – narrative flows as relational forms / forming relations

Sonic attunement – pitch, tone, rhythm and repetition

Realisation - to realise, to realise, to realise.

The afternoon sessions are designed to help you integrate and process as needed, through group activities determined in relation to the morning sessions and/or which feel appropriate to support the ongoing journey of easeful integration and co-presence in relation. 

This could involve engaging in :

• reflective or creative writing (alone or together)
• moving, making or other exploratory creative activities in the Pavilion
• facilitated creative peer group supervision sessions (if appropriate), 
• swimming in the natural pool or relaxing in the sauna
• experiments with music, yoga or dance 
• walking up the hillside and taking in more of the land around us.
• There is an option to book a one to one supervision session with Melissa 
• and/or to have a one to one session with the horses who live at the farm, facilitated by Ruth Tudor, our host at Trealy Farm. Read more about the horses here.

After dinner, your time is your own to use as you please:  perhaps sit round the pool or a fire together, read, and sleep very well!

My primary invitation participants is to leave the Summer Camp without obligation to follow up on the experience in any tangible sense, leaving the experience to integrate for the remainder of the summer.

However, counselling and psychotherapy practitioners may wish to form an ongoing peer supervision group together online. 

Artists and researchers may wish to collaborate with me, and/or one other, in producing public or published work as an outcome of the Summer Camp. 

The Interpersonal Summer Camp is taking place in Monmouthshire, Wales. You can read more about the venue here.

Price tbc, and will include tuition/facilitation, meals, tea and coffee, bedding and towels.

While I would like you to stay for the whole week, shorter stays may be possible for those whose responsibilities or resources don't allow them to commit to more, subject to availability.

For more information and to apply for a place, contact Melissa@theinterpersonal.com