Mindfulness for Beginners: 3-night Sharpham House Retreat

Emma Thom

Emma has worked in mental health for over 20 years. She has a Post Graduate Diploma in Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (University of Exeter). She works at the AccEPT clinic in Exeter teaching mindfulness courses to adults with depression and health and social care staff. She also teaches mindfulness to adoptive parents, teenagers, and families with learning difficulties. Emma’s life has benefitted in many ways from mindfulness. She first discovered mindfulness during an extensive period of ill-health and has no doubt that mindfulness gave her what she needed to recover.  Emma loves sharing what she has learned with others and is particularly interested in the ways that mindfulness supports wellbeing and flourishing along with increasing capacity to manage stress and ill-health.  Emma especially enjoys practicing mindfulness in movement, through yoga and walking.

Ethan Pollock

Ethan has been facilitating mindfulness groups and retreats for over a decade.

He spent five years training at Plum Village with the internationally-recognised mindfulness teacher & Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh.

He is a qualified Mindful Self-Compassion teacher. He facilitates and teaches around the UK, including at the Sharpham Trust, Schumacher College, The Royal Drawing School and local meditation groups.

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

Jo Gosling

Jo has over 30 years’ experience in the NHS, initially as a Macmillan nurse in cancer care then, after gaining a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology in 1996, as a Clinical Health Psychologist. She has a longstanding mindfulness practice and has undergone extensive training with teachers from Bangor and Exeter Universities.

She has regular mentoring and attends silent meditation retreats to deepen her practice. As a freelance mindfulness teacher she has delivered numerous MBCT groups for people with recurrent depression at the Mood Disorders Centre, University of Exeter and been supervisor to trainee mindfulness teachers. A personal health crisis, combined with training to teach Mindful Self-Compassion (with Chris Germer and Kristin Neff) led to a change of direction in life and she is now at Plymouth College of Art studying an MA in Fine Art. A natural follow-on has been to combine the two areas of mindfulness and creativity, in the form of retreats and workshops: ‘Mindfulness and Creativity-Working from the Heart.’

Lindsay Alderton

Lindsay has been practicing 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.

Lucy Chan

Lynette Robinson

Lynette Robinson is a qualified Breathworks mindfulness teacher and accredited life coach. She teaches mindfulness to a diverse range of groups, such as seniors living in residential complexes, men in prison and women’s groups.  During 2020 lockdowns this diversity expanded to teaching online mindful-working courses for home-workers. Her freely given Zoom group ‘Stop The Week & Rest to Calm' supported the mental and emotional well-being of attendees from four different countries.  Author of the book 'Reclaimed', and' Mindfulness Mediations for Modern Day Women' CD, Lynette lives life with passion, following the energies of creativity and contribution. In 2016 she volunteered as Retreat Coordinator for three summers, at The Barn.

In recent years elder-hood has become a growing focus of Lynette’s mindful offerings.  She facilitates a local elders group called  ‘Living Well, Ageing Mindfully’  and feels this theme offers fertile soil for practice, in her own life as she enters her 60th 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.

Ollie Frame

Ollie Frame works as an integrative therapist, mindfulness teacher and retreat leader. He is a co-leader on the Mindful in Nature programme at Sharpham, for which he has produced a large range of meditations and resources. He teaches the eight-week course in various settings, including to the general public, to teachers and students in schools and colleges, and to various other client groups on behalf of Devon County Council. Also trained to teach the Mindfulness-Based Compassionate Living (MBCL) course, he is especially enthusiastic about self-compassion, Metta meditation and other heart-based approaches within the world of mindfulness. As an integrative therapist, Ollie has a particular interest in Psychosynthesis, depth psychology, inner journeying and the therapeutic use of meditation and the imagination. 

Ramiro Ortega

Ramiro is a mindfulness teacher and a retreat leader who trained to teach mindfulness with the University of Bangor and the University of Exeter.

He has practised mindfulness and Buddhist meditation since 2005 and completed the Bodhi College Teacher Training Programme in 2022.

Ramiro has a background in philosophy and is also a philosophical counsellor.

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.

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. Steve is a qualified Psychosynthesis counsellor and has engaged in many forms of personal development and menswork over three decades, including co-leading transformative Rites Of Passages retreats for men. He leads workshops on Ken Wilber’s ‘Integral’ model and is a musician and composer. ‘Blue Pearl: A One World Oratorio’, Steve’s ground-breaking sacred choral work, had its world premiere in 2022; the film of the concert is on YouTube. Steve has presented seminars on sacred music, ‘The Power Of Music’, at many events, including the Integral European Conference, the foremost global gathering of Integral thinkers and practitioners. He has attended the one-week Mindful Self-Compassion retreat with Chris Germer and Kristin Neff. He is passionate about passing on the gifts of mindfulness, meditation, and deepening our connection with nature.

Will Evans

Will has been meditating in various Buddhist and Non-Dual traditions for a decade, guided by a spirit of exploration and experimentation and a sense of wonder and possibility. He mostly finds his home in the Insight Meditation tradition. In 2019 he trained as a mindfulness teacher with the Mindfulness Training Institute under Martin Aylward and Mark Coleman, and in 2020 he joined the team at the Barn Retreat, where he spent over a year facilitating both online and in-person retreats. He has a passion for helping people find approaches and relationships to meditation that work for them, with the view that meditation practice is not a fixed path but a vast landscape to explore.