i took some notes during the weekend and i've just tidied them up a little to put down here. i don't want to give away any of karen's work, as this is how she makes her living, after all, nor do i want to go into any detail of my personal issues which came up, and i won't name the other raw retreaters either, so parts will be vague.
i arrived on friday evening. karen and one other attendee were there. we chatted briefly but they both went to bed early and left me to my own devices.
i'd taken left over lunch salad for dinner on friday so i had that, but the rest of the weekend we all helped prep the food in the kitchen with karen. so we learnt a couple of recipes, tricks and techniques too. i learned that i can handle more green than i'd previously thought plus i had a go of the mythical vita-mix blender and champion juicer. both awesome beasts, i must say.
on saturday morning we made huge amounts of green juice, with spinach, watercress, parsley, apples, oranges, lemons, red pepper, ginger... possibly other things that i've missed out.
while we sipped that we got started with the coaching. first step was to tell your story so far and what you hoped to achieve from the weekend.
for lunch we had kale and avocado salad. it was with massaged kale, which i have done before so that was not a new technique for me, but what i did learn was the squeezed avocado trick. so you cut your avocado in half and remove the stone then quite literally squeeze the flesh out of the skin, just like you would squeeze a lemon or orange. works best with really ripe avocadoes, obviously, but also makes them ready to squish into salads and so on. much nicer texture than hard chopped chunks that i usually have, so i will certainly have a go of that.
mid-afternoon, after a really long walk over and around newmarket racecourse, we had watermelon juice, which was just fabulous and made the whole place smell of summer.
we spent the afternoon doing a coaching task, getting some tihngs ready to share later on. i won't go into detail again, because this is part of karen's methodology but suffice to say it was easy to do, fun, and - it turned out later - effective.
our pre-dinner drinks were green coconuts with straws stuck in them. we didn't manage to get much coconut meat out of the five coconuts we had, but what was scavenged went towards dessert later.
in between, we shared more stories and did more work to find out what our deep, dark fears, hopes and desires were. it was very interesting to see what came up. the subconscious can be scary at times. and the common links between everyone there, too, where we'd all considered the same option, was striking.
dinner was nori rolls or lettuce wraps. we just had piles of chopped veg, some olives, sundried tomatoes and left over lunch and piled it all into either nori sheets or lettuce leaves and made roll-ups. dessert was fantabulous. take a punnet of frozen raspberries with a few other bits and bobs, whizz up in the vita-mix until smooth and spoon out into sorbet dishes, then a chocolate sauce (raw chocolate powder and agave and other stuff) drizzled over the top. i mean, it was extremely good, you certainly wouldn't think any the less of it for being raw. that doesn't sound right. i mean non-raw, foodie types would be equally blown away. the texture was just so good. boy do i need to get my blender!
sunday morning dawned blue skies and sunshine... we had papaya with more of last night's raspberry sorbet on top. a ittle decadent, perhaps, but you know, raw food can be extremely decadent. where else can you have ice cream and chocolate and not feel guilty?
karen had given us some 'homework' on saturday night, to think about what questions we wanted answering, what we needed her help with and what we wanted to achieve on the sunday. i left my thinking to stew overnight and woke up this morning knowing that there were a few words in my head that were somehow related to my next stage.
i was given a task of brainstorming around some concepts and then had a one-to-one session with karen to see how she could help.
karen said several times throughout the weekend that it's not about the food. that might seem strange, or just plain wrong, but she was right, certainly for two of us at the retreat. i had some deep-seated anxieties around my future and changing the way i live to incorporate raw foods was part of that. karen managed to dig around and find this and pull it to the surface and it startled me, as i didn't know, on a conscious level, that this was the case.
i went into the weekend not having any real demands on it. i was willing to just go with the flow and i enjoyed that lack of structure. and where there was structure i was following someone else, not having to make decisions myself. it was very peaceful. i would have liked more time to reflect, do a full hour's yoga each night and enjoy the lovely gardens there a bit more, but i did come away with an answer. i didn't even know the question at the start of the weekend, so i think that's fabulous progress.
karen is a lovely person to be around. she's very energetic and positive, but also grounded. she shares a lot of her own story to help you see where you are in your life and on your path. i found the weekend extremely helpful and i know the other attendees did too. i came away with lots of tools and once i'd sat down with boo and gone through all the stuff i was holding back i felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders. everyone is unique and needs something different but i'm sure if you need help getting or staying raw, karen will be able to help.
