Mindfulness retreat: Mindfulness for Burnout - 4 nights in Sharpham House

Kanada Gorla

Kanada Gorla is a facilitator, guide, mentor and executive coach of 25+ years’ experience, a long time meditator and an embodiment practitioner. Through her purpose-led consultancy shine, Kanada facilitates transformative change; builds collective resilience; deepens connection with self, place and the natural world; and contributes wherever she can to the creation of human cultures worth coming home to. Kanada is adept at working in many different cultures, countries and contexts, and with people from a wide range of backgrounds and life experience - from seasoned leadership teams to students, from grassroots community workers to the most privileged in society.

In 2015 Sharpham Trust commissioned Kanada to co-create a retreat for people at risk of, or recovering from burnout. In the midst of the polycrises we are facing – climate disruption, biodiversity loss, mental health, cost of living and the ongoing impact of a dominant business culture that requires people to be available 24/7 – sustaining ourselves becomes an ever more important practice.

Recent and current projects include guiding Riverford Organic Farmers on a leadership & culture transformation to align with their transition to 100% Employee Ownership; Hardwick Estate, South Oxfordshire, mentoring the aristocratic family, operations team & community as they transition the 900-acre Estate from private ownership to become the first community led charity in England; Kin Hill CIC, Cumbria, facilitating & coaching this small but potent community in their endeavour to ‘live into our interdependence with all beings remembering that we are a beneficial species growing with the land’; with Bore Place, Kent, Kanada is working closely with the CEO co-designing & facilitating a collaborative design process to develop a long-term Estate Strategy in the context of climate disruption and biodiversity loss; and with Common Purpose Charitable Trust, Kanada is an executive coach working with both emerging and experienced leaders in the nature recovery and new economy sectors. Kanada co-founded Connect Kin CIC to mentor and skill up community workers and place makers who do so much to lift up the communities they support. 

Kerstin Deibert

Kerstin Deibert has been practicing within the insight meditation tradition for more than 20 years, leading retreats since 2021. Nature-based practices and retreats in the wild are particularly close to her heart and she finds deep fulfillment in supporting individuals in exploring their belonging to the larger web of life.

Her teaching is interwoven with a life dedicated to political engagement, and she has supported NGOs and activist groups around the world as a social justice advocate, conflict mediator, peace activist and trainer for nonviolence for most of her adult life. Kerstin is also a mentor in Jack Kornfield’s and Tara Brach’s Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program and a trained MBSR teacher. A central question for her is how to apply the teachings of the Buddha to the challenges of our times in a way that cultivates joy and resilience of the heart, living into our shared purpose of reverential stewardship of the Earth.

Nadia Abdel-Karim

Nadia Abdel-Karim has practised mindfulness and meditation since 2015, influenced primarily by Insight Meditation and Mahayana Buddhist traditions.

As a freelance mental health worker, she spent several years facilitating support groups and offering one-to-one crisis support across London for the mental health charity Mind.

After training as a Mindfulness Practitioner in 2019, she began co-facilitating 8-week Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction courses specifically for people experiencing depression and anxiety.

Nadia relocated to Devon to live at The Barn Retreat Centre, where she spent almost two years co-leading meditation retreats. Alongside leading retreats for Sharpham, she works as a Focusing Practitioner and facilitates spaces for people to connect with their grief.

Her journey continues to be guided by her love for exploring and understanding spiritual traditions and practices.

Rupert Marques

Rupert has practiced in the insight meditation tradition for nearly 25 years in Europe, America and Asia. His primary teachers have been Christina Feldman and Joseph Goldstein. The work of Toni Packer and John Tarrant have also been influential in his practice and teaching. He teaches at various retreat centres in Europe and beyond. For the past 4 years Rupert has lived and worked at Ecodharma, a contemplative retreat community in the Spanish Pyrenees dedicated to exploring the role of the Dharma in the movements for social justice and ecological sustainability. At Ecodharma he directed the Nature based Practice strand of their work that marries contemplative practice with a range of approaches within the field of experiential ecopsychology in a wilderness setting.

Sophy Banks

Sophy has an eclectic background in many aspects of creating healthy culture for individuals, groups and communities. She teaches at Schumacher college, runs workshops, and offers organisational development and conflict facilitation. Originally trained as an engineer, she has worked as computer systems designer and trainer, psychotherapist, and family constellations practitioner.

In 2005 she moved to Devon and helped to set up Transition Town Totnes (TTT), one of the foremost projects in a movement for positive visioning and action in communities, that has spread to over 40 countries and been tried in thousands of communities in some form. Sophy set up the Heart and Soul group of  TTT, and spent 10 years bringing insights from her many inner practices (including meditation, grief tending, mindfulness and nature connection) to the Transition Towns movement. During her time working for Transition she saw many highly skilled people reaching a place of burnout, and has been on that edge herself. It became a central part of her enquiry into how we can create life enhancing, positive culture together – and the reasons we sometimes don’t.  She sees that mindfulness is an essential tool for healthy systems, not only for individuals but also in groups and communities.

Sophy was a keen footballer in east London for many years – too old to slide tackle any more she enjoys growing as much food as she can, and still just about gets up the Devon hills on her bike.

Toni Spencer

Toni Spencer works in retreat, training, and community-building settings where cultivating presence, and “the power of pausing” are central to her approach. Her practice of embodied awareness is shaped by Buddhist, somatic, and mindfulness teachings, and by 18 years of sitting, being, and training with Fanny Behrens and Colin Harrison (Movement of Being).

Woven through all her work is an invitation to reconnect with - and remember ourselves as - nature, recognising how deeply resourcing this can be, and how essential it is to healthy culture. A long-time facilitator of Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects, Toni brings a sense of compassion, welcome, curiosity, and grounded inquiry to all she offers.

She is also a consultant, curriculum designer, participatory artist, forager, cook, and poet. All her work is as a response to the suffering, the mystery and the beauty of the world, exploring how we might - particularly as Westerners - cultivate the ground of collective change with more heart, equity, diversity, and imagination.

Toni has lectured, trained, and mentored for Schumacher College, Goldsmiths College, Wildwise, Ulex, and St Ethelburga’s, and has curated projects with The Emergence Network, Encounters Arts, and Transition Town Totnes, amongst others.