Befriending Yourself by Tom Lidström

There’s a place inside where everything belongs – even the parts you’ve been trying to change. This retreat is about finding your place of belonging; and bringing love and integration to each part of you from there.

A four-day immersion integrating embodied, relational and meditative approaches to healing & awakening. Attending together to what needs healing, and awakening to what is always whole inside each of us.

WHAT IS THIS RETREAT?

What if the spiritual path isn’t about transcending our humanity – but one of deeply embracing it? A way of finding true belonging and integration for all that you are?

This retreat is designed to create the conditions for that to happen – not through force or technique, but through presence, attunement, and genuine connection. We will explore the meeting point between healing and awakening, and why both are needed for our sense of wholeness and aliveness in life. 

You are invited to experience meditation, inquiry and deep relational and embodied healing in a safe, supportive container – the kind that reaches the pre-verbal and somatic layers where our deepest attachment patterns live. 

Our approach is one of befriending, honoring and respecting rather than trying to push for change. We cannot arrive at genuine presence when trying to avoid or change what is present. 

It is an uncomplicated path to embodied wholeness – designed not to transcend your humanity, but to deeply inhabit it. 

A place to rest, renew and truly befriend yourself. 

“Attachment is the most important need of a human being, but authenticity is the most important need of the human soul. Healing is finding the place where they are no longer in conflict.”

— Dr. Gabor Maté

WHAT happens during the retreat?

Over four days, we move into a new way of being; meeting all that we are with curiosity, support and compassion. We draw on simple, timeless approaches that speak to the various layers of our psyche and nervous system – practices that have been part of healing and spiritual traditions across cultures for millenia:

• Movement, Breath & Touch: Our non-verbal parts heal through felt experience, breath, movement, and safe, attuned touch. We uncover and gently free old memories and habits – learning to inhabit rather than manage the body. This reaches the places that words and insight alone cannot, freeing up a new sense of possibility and aliveness.
• Human Connection: Much of what we carry was shaped in relationship, and can heal in relationship. We explore how early attachment and relational experience shape the way we relate and practice, and what becomes possible when those roots begin to heal. Depending on the group and what emerges, we may also look into how our family systems influence our ability to relate, regulate, and integrate through constellation work.
• Stillness & Presence: Meditation for Humans is an accessible, grounded approach to meditation and contemplation, working with the nervous system rather than against it. Through meditation, inquiry, and deep relaxation, stillness becomes not an escape from what is difficult, but the ground from which it can finally be met. Recognition practices help you touch the ground of being that was never wounded.