Deep Rest Mindfulness Compassion Retreat
Friday 31st May - Sunday 2nd June 2024
Continental House, Hepburn Springs, Vic
With Maggie O'Shea
The Openground Deep Rest Mindfulness & Compassion Retreat is hosted at the lovingly restored 1920s Continental Guesthouse in the beautiful bush setting of Hepburn Springs, an area considered by traditional Dja Dja Wurrung custodians to have special healing properties. Gentle yoga, mindfulness meditation, bushwalking, loving-kindness, Nidra and compassion practices, combined with optional extras such as on-site massage or steam treatment to allow the body to rest fully, and from this rested place open to our ‘already here’ awareness and wisdom. To support this process, we drop into a “warm silence” together at the conclusion of the first evening session, and continue this until our closing circle on Sunday (your teacher, Maggie O’Shea, will still guide the practices throughout).
You are strongly encouraged to take the day off work on Friday to make this a three-day retreat. Enjoy lunch and exploring in Daylesford or Hepburn, before checking in from 3pm. Depending on interest, there may be the opportunity for an on-site Turkish Hammam experience, or if preferred take yourself off for a bush-walk, enjoy a massage, or settle in with a book near one of the log fires. An optional restorative yoga session will be offered around 5:15pm. Continental House is the perfect winter venue with cosy spaces, log fires, and hydronic heating (plus own ensuite) in each bedroom.
This retreat is suitable for any mindfulness practitioner who has completed the eight-week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction or Mindful Self Compassion trainings or a previous retreat. You do not need any prior yoga experience. If you don’t have any previous meditation experience, please contact Openground to discuss before enrolling.
While we encourage an afternoon check-in, our official starting time on Friday is 6:30pm for a delicious Welcome Dinner, followed by our first practice session. The retreat will conclude by 2pm Sunday. Please ensure you are able to be present for the beginning and end of the retreat.
Maggie is a mental health social worker, couple therapist, and mother, and brings to teaching mindfulness a deep sensitivity and warmth. After twenty years of social work in health settings, she moved into private practice, specialising in loss, grief and trauma, before more recently focusing on couples. Health issues nudged her into yoga and her first 10-day meditation retreat in 1994, however combining daily meditation with motherhood proved elusive until discovering MBSR & what she experiences as the more practical and integrated, mind-body approach of Jon Kabat Zinn.