Mindfulness retreat: Life Changes - 5 nights in Sharpham House

Colette Power

Colette combines compassion-based approaches and enquiry in her group and one-to-one work. She is a meditation teacher, mindfulness trainer and supervisor. She trained with Bangor University (MBSR/MBCT) and Breathworks CIC in 2011, and has worked for many years with people experiencing anxiety and depression, and chronic pain and illness. She is a Certified Mindful Self Compassion teacher and supervisor. She qualified as an integrative therapist in 1995 and regularly leads retreats in the UK and Europe.

Colette began exploring Buddhist teachings in 2005. She is a Community Dharma Leader authorised by Gaia House Teacher Council and is currently a student on the Bodhi College Committed Dharma Practitioner Programme. She has been a student of the Diamond Approach for several years.

Through her work and writings, Colette utilises the dharma as a framework for understanding social, political, environmental, and economic injustices.

Jess Stein

Jess offers retreats that combine mindfulness, nature connection and creativity. She has been facilitating mindfulness spaces since 2012, initially as part of the Plum Village tradition and for the last six years at Sharpham Barn, House and Woodland. 

Reverence for nature informs all that Jess does. Initially trained as a yoga teacher all that she teaches takes its inspiration from the organic shapes of the human body and the forms and patterns of the natural world. She offers practices that awaken each person's unique capacity for awareness, creativity and connection. The spaces she holds are welcoming, intuitive and gently transformative.

Alongside retreats, Jess is a palliative care nurse and holds a degree in English Literature. Eternally curious, she has completed training in Dru Yoga, Scaravelli Inspired Yoga, Creative Writing and meditation, Embodied Anatomy, Nature Connection and Cultural Repair, Qi Gong, Adaptive Yoga, Yoga for Women’s Health and much more

Lynette Robinson

Lynette is a qualified Breathworks teacher and accredited life coach who has been practicing meditation for over 20 years. She teaches mindfulness in a diverse range of settings that include residential complexes for elder’s, prisons and residential retreats in both Devon and Yorkshire.  With a previous career in the public sector, Lynette is a mother and grandmother who lives the second half of her own life as a space to explore new possibilities, creativity, and self-discovery. She is the author of ‘Reclaimed- turning an uneventful life into an adventure’ and re-located, at 56, to live at the Barn Retreat Centre as a Co-ordinator (initially for a year) and liked Devon so much she stayed!  Lynette facilitates mindfulness retreats in Sharpham House and also a Totnes group for over 55’s – established 5 years ago, for residents to learn and practice mindfulness and meditation; as they age mindfully - a theme very close to Lynette’s own heart and practice, as she enters her 64th year.

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.

Steve Banks

Steve trained as a mindfulness teacher with Mindfulness UK. He started practising meditation in 1990 within the Buddhist tradition, and has attended retreats, mostly at Gaia House, with many different teachers. He first came to Sharpham in 1997 for a Barn retreat, and fell in love with the beautiful setting, with the Dart winding its way through the green hills. Steve is a qualified Psychosynthesis counsellor and has engaged in many forms of personal development and menswork, including co-leading transformative Rites Of Passages retreats for men. He is a musician and composer - his sacred choral work, ‘Blue Pearl: A One World Oratorio’, had its world premiere in 2022 (the film is on YouTube). He has attended the one-week Mindful Self-Compassion retreat with Chris Germer and Kristin Neff. Steve lives just down the river from Sharpham, and loves boating and swimming in the Dart, and hiking and camping in the beautiful Devon hills and coast. Steve is passionate about passing on the gifts of mindfulness, meditation, and deepening our connection with nature.

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.