Course overview:
Is there an absence of creativity in your practice?
Would creative approaches resonate with your clients?
Have you embraced your own creativity?
Would your creative self like some attention?
The Grove’s creativity retreat has a central aim: to discover and enhance your own creativity to allow you to better serve your clients in creative ways.
If you're a therapist or coach or wellbeing practitioner who'd like to make sure your clients benefit from sessions in a deeply meaningful way, then this retreat is designed just for you.
There are many ways to connect with clients. Connection may come about verbally but for some clients that may reach them. That’s where we might reach for our creative selves allowing alternative ways to better serve our clients.
The Grove’s creative resonance retreat is purposefully experiential allowing you to work with different creative modalities: from music, art, drama-dialog, playlisting, nature observing, sketching ‘parts’ of ourselves, all the way to expressive movement or guided visualisation.
The retreat will ignite your own creative self, empowering you to bring that resonance for your clients or supervisees.
The retreat takes place at a magical house by the sea with its own private gardens and beach (with plenty of parking). Waterwynch House near Tenby in Wales has been chosen for its creative potential. There’s a music room, grand piano, arts room, as well as a treatment room for embodied work. The house has been lovingly refurbished to a high standard, so that everyone can relax and unwind with lots of space for creative exploration during the retreat programme. There are 5 reception rooms and 12 en-suite bedrooms, ensuring a comfortable and enjoyable break all round.
Further information about the retreat venue
Waterwynch House in Tenby, Wales
This course will equip you with a practical toolkit of techniques and ways of working creatively with clients or supervisees.
A key part of the ethos for this retreat is also engaging with your own inner creativity, making you more adept at eliciting this creativity with clients or supervisees.
Aims of the course are:
- Gaining greater confidence working creatively
- Become more skilled in using creative approaches which resonate with clients or supervisees
- Experiential learning about a range of creative approaches
- Knowing how and when to bring more creative resonance to unblock stuckness with clients or supervisees
Friday – welcome and introduction to generating creative resonance
Saturday – how to access the creative self, exploring sound, art, writing, movement
Sunday – facilitation skills for creative resonance, when and how to use creative intervention
Participants are welcome to stay overnight on Sunday to depart on Monday morning.
CPD certificates will be issued to reflect 15 hours of CPD across 3 days of attendance.
The retreat leaders are Elliot Davis and Sarah Paton Briggs. Other facilitators may join us for part of the retreat.
Elliot Davis
Elliot is a director of The Grove Practice and a practising psychotherapist registered with UKCP.
Prior to becoming a therapist Elliot has worked at the highest levels of the entertainment industry for twenty-five years. As a musician, conductor and writer he has worked across crossed film, theatre, radio and concert halls across the world.
It was whilst writing and producing documentaries for the BBC that Elliot found himself telling the sometimes troubled life stories of artists and musicians. This led to his decision to professionalise his ‘listening skills’. At that point his psychotherapy training began.
Musically he has conducted, arranged and musically directed for some of the biggest musical names in the industry; from Burt Bacharach, the Bee Gees, Barry Manilow, Neil Diamond, Sophie Ellis Bextor to The Moody Blues amongst many others.
As a writer Elliot has written for film and television and is an Olivier Nominated for his stage writing.
Elliot's creativity forms a central role in his clinical practice and for this retreat, Elliot will focus awareness on how our creativity can make sense of our world and bring life to the therapy room and help us better connect us to our clients.
First though we need to embrace our own creativity.
Sarah Paton Briggs
Sarah brings experience of creative approaches to trauma therapy and supervision.
For this retreat, Sarah will facilitate creative exploration designed to translate into the therapy room for participants. Attending to what resonates with us and human emotion will add a deeper dimension to each practitioner’s way of working.
Creativity in therapy for Sarah has included sound and music, creative writing, drawing mandalas, as well as creative visualisation. Her belief is that therapy is inherently a creative process. So as therapists and supervisors we can bring forward different parts of ourselves to meet our clients in a more resonant way. Harsh or critical education methods, along with negative beliefs about “not being good enough” or “I can’t sing or draw” can play havoc with our natural instincts to express ourselves.
This means that therapy can be an ideal place to reconnect with a deep need to resonate with our experiences in an expressive way.
Sarah is a director at The Grove Practice. She has broad experience of facilitating CPD courses and group work – both with humans and horses (in her equine practice). As an accredited therapist, traumatologist, and supervisor, she works in a connected and relational way to integrate the lived experience of clients and supervisees for a more fulfilling way of being in the world.
Before training in counselling and psychosexual therapy, Sarah worked in several London advertising agencies – as an account director rather than a creative generator. Nonetheless, she loved being involved in the creative process for radio and TV commercials or printed adverts for magazines and billboards. Seeing creative campaigns taking shape from a blank space seemed like a wonderful process in which to work, being involved in the production process seeing an idea manifest into creative reality.
Nowadays Sarah focuses her creativity in a more commercial and therapeutic way, in originating courses or in finding ways to evoke creative resonance for her clients. During the retreat, Sarah will share examples and materials from her own practice, as inspiration for the group to draw upon.
The retreat will be held across 3 days in 2023, staying overnight for 2 or 3 nights.
Friday 20 October to Monday 23 October 2023.
The programme begins on the afternoon of Friday 20 October, finishing on Sunday 22 October.
Participants are welcome to stay overnight on Sunday 22 October before departing after breakfast on Monday 23 October. There is no teaching or programmed activity on Monday.
The cost of the 3-day retreat and 3 nights of accommodation is £2,000 + VAT = £2,400.
Payment plans are available for monthly instalments over 6, 10, or 12 months. The balance of the fee is payable 6 weeks before the retreat, by 1 September 2023.
All food and accommodation and materials are included in the fee.
The accommodation includes a private room and en suite, unless participants choose to share a room.
Travel is funded by each participant as required. Participants are strongly advised to take out their own travel insurance in case of transport difficulties or medical problems affecting participation.
Application criteria
Applicants are expected to be qualified and experienced professionals in a mental health or helping profession, who are established in their practice. This will be covered in the application form. All applicants are expected to:
- be qualified and experienced in their field
- be full members of their professional body with a code of ethics and complaint procedure for public protection (such as but not limited to BACP, UKCP, COSRT, BPS, AHPP, NCP, NCS, ACC)
- hold professional liability insurance
- have supervision arrangements in place for their client work as well as access to support for any clinical or organisation practice they undertake during the course
Professional standards
The Grove Practice is accredited by NCIP (National Council for Integrative Psychotherapists) as a CPD training centre. As such, all The Grove’s courses are awarded NCP accreditation for CPD (Continuous Professional Development). This accreditation provides reassurance regarding high standards of teaching and course content. The NCP is one of the longest established membership organisations for this profession, formed in 1971 following the “Foster Report” on the statutory registration of psychotherapists, with a national and international network of therapists.
This retreat is recognised as CPD as part of membership requirements for professional bodies such as BACP, UKCP, AHPP, BPS, COSRT.
