Silent retreat: The Peace of Wild Things - 5 nights at The Coach House

Martyna Raczka

Martyna is a qualified MBSR, MBCT-L and Finding Peace in a Frantic World teacher. She has delivered online and live courses and retreats to adults and children. Martyna spent a year at the Coach House as a volunteer mindfulness and nature connection retreat leader.

Martyna is passionate about supporting participants as they begin to make conscious steps towards transformation and discovering their full potential. She has a genuine compassion and empathy for the challenges that bring people to mindfulness. She is an advocate of openness and awareness as the first steps towards realising one’s full potential as we begin, without judging ourselves, to recognise how the consequences of long-held habits might hold us back. 

Mary-Rose Finnegan Clarke

Mary-Rose is a mindfulness practitioner, psychotherapist and group facilitator based in Bristol. She has spent over a decade supporting people as a BACP-accredited psychotherapist and EMDR therapist, and feels deeply nourished by holding meditation spaces and sharing mindfulness practices in community. In 2019, she co-founded Wake Up Bristol, a young people’s mindfulness community in the Plum Village tradition. She has also trained with Processwork UK, facilitating awareness at individual, relationship and collective levels. Mary-Rose brings a warm, gentle and playful presence to retreat spaces. 

Nicky Mason

Nicky has over 20 years’ experience of practicing meditation, initially influenced by Mahayana Buddhism. She is a qualified mindfulness and compassion practitioner and integrates this with her work as a counsellor. She is also a nature connection facilitator.

Nicky spent 18 months living at Sharpham as a volunteer coordinator, facilitating mindfulness and nature connection retreats at the Coach House. In her free time, Nicky loves travelling, yoga and spending time with animals and in nature.

Philip Anderson

Philip has been meditating since travelling in India and spending time in the Tibetan community in Dharamshala. He also has an interest in insight meditation Zen and the Thai forest tradition. Philip has trained to teach the MBSR 8-week course through Bangor University and has also taught mindfulness in schools via the dotB and PawsB programs. More recently Philip’s meditation practice has been leaning on the influence of nature and the idea of interbeing.

Ruth Breznay

Ruth has been leading retreats at our Coach House retreat centre since it opened in 2022. Her professional background is in supporting vulnerable adults.

Reconnecting with nature at a retreat at The Barn in 2004 led her to a profound and life-changing experience which, in turn, led to her facilitating retreats there.

Her main mindfulness practice is nature-based. “I find sitting outdoors, allowing all my senses to be fully present with the natural world around me and feeling part of the web of life, a very profound and joyful experience,” she says.

She is passionate about rewilding our Earth and our hearts and empowering others to rediscover their place in nature and become more compassionate towards themselves and all life on Earth.

Ruth has practised Hatha Yoga for over 30 years, and completed 300h & 500h teacher-training courses in Rishikesh, India, in 2014, seeing her yoga asana practice as a mindfulness practice, that emphasises mindful movement and still awareness.

The success of yoga does not lie in the ability to perform postures. but in how it positively changes the way we live our lives and our relationships

- T.K.V. Desichankar

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 the 1990s 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.