Mindfulness retreat: Mindfulness Through Singing - 4 nights in Sharpham House

Emily Roblyn

Emily is an experienced voice teacher and performer. She has been running community choirs for over 10 years and belongs to the Natural Voice Practitioners Network. She has been exploring "embodied presence" and mindfulness through the 'Movement of Being' work in Devon for the last 5 years, and has used singing as a meditation throughout her life. She is passionate about sharing her love of music and its potential for supporting connection to ourselves and each other.

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.

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.