Reflections from the Retreat April 2026

This house used to be owned by American missionaries who called it the ‘Mission House.’ Each of the carpeted bedrooms were set up as dormitories with bunkbeds so that the house could hold up to forty people. Often these were young people coming for short mission trips from the States – leading children’s holiday clubs, church services and mission events. It was a house full of noise and busyness as well as times of worship and teaching.

Since we bought the house, it has been having a gradual makeover, and this is not just in its appearance but also in its atmosphere and purpose. It is now a house of stillness and reflection – a space for up to eight people to stay for retreats. The shared bathrooms have become ensuites for the spacious bedrooms and two of the bedrooms have become the library and the Soul Space room.

I have also been on my own transformational journey, which is still ongoing. When we first bought the house, I was, as well as a wife and mother, working full time as a psychology lead in a busy North London mental health trust. I was also writing two books and preparing for our big move to Grenada. Life was all go and I had little time to sit back and reflect. How life has changed! I needed to learn how to slow down and be still, not just to create the retreat house but to create the lifestyle that matches the house and to be able to find my own way of being contemplative and creative.

However, these changes don’t just happen instantly – there must be a dismantling process of what was, to create the new. As the process of change happens there can be unforeseen challenges that can challenge our optimism and delay the progress. For example, when we pulled back the carpets, we discovered hardened glue that required painstaking work to chip away from the cement floor, before tiles could be laid. As we replaced windows, knocked through walls, installed new bathrooms and created new kitchens, we first had to break up the old and create a lot of mess.

This is how change is – it is messy and sometimes it can feel like we are going backwards. We start dismantling things that were working and this can feel a shaky time of unknowing and vulnerability. As a therapist I have seen this over and over again. People wanting to let go of habits and behaviours that they know are not helpful, but they are familiar and to some extent they work – having a drink to steady the nerves, not socialising so that you don’t have to deal with the social anxiety or staying in bed to avoid the pressures of the day. There are patterns that we’re comfortable with, but in order to change we have to walk through that uncomfortable stage. We need to push ourselves to do what initially feels unnatural – ‘to face the fear and do it anyway’ as the title of a popular book encourages us. It’s like an acrobat who is leaping from one trapeze to another – there is a point where you must let go of the old bar to catch the next one, otherwise you will just be left hanging. This means that there can be a moment when you are left in mid-air. Change can feel like that at times, with nothing to hold onto and the fear of falling.

At the beginning of this month was Easter and this too is a story of significant change. Richard Rohr talks about the Easter story being a template for all of transformation – the recurring pattern of death and resurrection, of the old needing to die to make space for the new. He offers a helpful summary of this change process consisting of three steps – ‘order, disorder and reorder’. The disciples of Jesus had a level of order in their lives- they thought they knew what was happening and then their teacher was killed and their lives fell apart. We often jump from Good Friday to Easter Sunday because for many of us, it’s a familiar story. But we mustn’t forget the Easter Saturday and to sit with the disorder that is an important part of this story. There has to be a letting go of what we thought was the plan, for the old to be dismantled in order to receive the new life. To live with the not knowing and the grief of Easter Saturday in order to experience the joy of Easter Sunday. To live with the mess of building work before there is a new house, a dying to self before the transformation.

Nature teaches us this cycle of life and encourages us that death is a necessary part of life. The cells in our bodies are continually dying and making space for the new cells to grow. Interestingly it is the cells that are resistant to this natural dying process that can then become cancerous and threaten the whole body.

When we think of transformation, another common image from nature is the butterfly. Nature offers us so much wisdom, if we just take time to reflect on it and I love the way transformation is expressed in the butterfly’s life. The caterpillar goes through various changes of shedding its skin and growing bigger. I’m guessing that the caterpillar thinks that this is life and that there’s nothing more than these changes in which it grows but keeps the same identity. Little does it know what is to come!

It then goes through the major metamorphosis, within the chrysalis, to come out as a butterfly. The caterpillar literally dissolves into a mushy soup – I hope for their sakes that this is not a conscious process and that it just feels like going to sleep and waking up to find that you can fly!

Throughout the caterpillar’s life it carries within itself imaginal cells. These dormant cells help to assemble the new wings and legs and other structures that would be unthinkable for the crawling young caterpillar. The imaginal cells are the blueprint of its future existence – the seeds of its potential locked away until the right time. Imagine if you told a caterpillar that one day it would be able to fly – it would seem impossible. How many of us look back and think if you told me, as a child, what I would be doing or how my life would turn out, I never would have believed it – that’s certainly true for me.

As a therapist, one of the reasons I love this sort of work is because at times I get to see glimpses of ‘imaginal cells’ in people. There are moments people see what potential they have within them, to dare to dream and to trust the chrysalis process – allowing the  ‘disorder’ of letting go of the familiar and the routine, to ‘reorder’ their lives in new ways.

With the end of the building work and the plans to open in October, there is another process of dismantling going on. We are preparing a new website to replace this one, using the same website address. For this reason, there will be no May blog, and we hope that in the next few months this website address will change to the new website. This new site will allow people to book online for those wishing to come and stay. We are also working on a second website for our non-profit organisation, Hummingbird HOPE. This is the charity which is running the retreat house, and we hope to share about other community projects and activities as these develop. The blogs will continue on the Hummingbird HOPE website. So again, there is the pattern of the dismantling and the not knowing as the new is being developed. Don’t worry, though, because there will be a link to the blogs from the new website so hopefully you will find your way there in June, in time for the next blog.

So over the last few years, this house has been having its own Easter journey towards resurrection and here are a few photos celebrating that new life, from Mission House to Hummingbird Retreat.

Order Disorder Reorder