Burnout retreat in Sharpham House: sustain yourself through mindfulness

Dene Donalds

Dene is a lay Ordained Dharma Teacher in the Zen Buddhist Tradition of Zen Master and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh.

Dene offers Buddhist and mindfulness retreats across the UK and Europe, with a focus on engaged Buddhism and social action.  He has been a student of Zen Buddhism since the mid-nineties and joined The Order of Interbeing in 2007.

He is based in the North of England where his work includes offering Buddhist chaplaincy within Prisons and Mental Health Hospitals.

Kanada Elizabeth Gorla

Kanada is a leadership & transformational change coach, mentor and facilitator.

With more than 20 years' experience facilitating individuals and groups, Kanada is a long-time meditator and mindfulness practitioner. As a self-employed, single working mum, Kanada has walked the path toward ‘sustaining herself’ as a daily practice.

With her own social business Shine, she helps individuals, teams and organisations to flourish, building personal and collective resilience, well-being, self-leadership and engaged citizenship. Her work as an activist includes launching the Pachamama Alliance Be the Change Symposium in Canada and assisting in training the first group of Be the Change UK.

Kanada is a Senior Associate with Embercombe, a leadership centre where she co-leads The Journey, Catalyst and Speaking out; an Associate with Common Purpose American Express Leadership Academy for emerging leaders in the 3rd sector; and course leader on bi-annual residential programmes with cohorts from On Purpose and Executive On Purpose.

Lindsay Alderton

Lindsay has been practising meditation since 2003, studying with teachers from the Tibetan and Insight Meditation traditions.

She lived and worked at the Ecodharma centre in the Spanish Pyrenees, and helped launch the Ulex Project in 2016, a European training programme which supports activists to navigate burnout and build impact across social movements. Prior to this she was involved in full-time climate activism.

Trained in Mindfulness-Based Compassionate Living, Lindsay is passionate about how meditation can open up views of identity to support greater intimacy with all life, and how compassion can be a vital resource for navigating ecological anxiety and grief.

Currently completing her clinical placement hours as an integrative counsellor, since 2021 Lindsay has been a part of the Barn Retreat team, helping design, develop and deliver their LGBTQIA+ strand of retreats. What motivates her is a deep commitment to a culture of awakening and care for all beings.

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.

Uz Afzal

Uz is a mindfulness teacher, trainer and author. She is known for her enthusiastic and welcoming approach and has enjoyed leading a range of mindfulness courses including retreats, eight-week MBSR courses, sessions at the Women of the World Festival and popular walking meditations at the V&A Museum. 

She first discovered the transformative powers of meditation while at university in the1990s and has been practising mindfulness and meditation in one form or another ever since.

She is a lead trainer at the national mental health charity, Mind, where she was part of a team that developed a ground-breaking Radical Self-Care course. She is particularly interested in welcoming all the intersecting aspects of people’s identities into mindfulness courses.