Okavango Wellness Centre Concept
Who is it for?
- Have you lost your joie de vivre? Are you feeling exhausted, depressed or just plain soul-weary?
- Are you stressed out by a lifestyle in overdrive?
- Is your relationship with yourself and your body one of delight?
- Are you happy in your relationship with others?
- Are you looking for deeper meaning and purpose in life?
Our vision for Wellness
The Wellness Centre is a part of the natural landscape of the Okavango. The consciousness of this land that is still innately well and unscarred by human interference informs the healing of all who come here. When life is simple, healing becomes simple; our bodies are engineered to come back into homeostasis when we release the stress and tension that is an underlying factor of disease. By connecting to the land and coming back into harmony with Mother Earth, we remember the sacredness of life and we realign with our pure soul purpose.
The wellness centre is based on the vision that true healing occurs when we feel loved and trusting enough of ourselves and others that we can live in integrity or ‘wholeness’. True integrity includes a harmonious resonance with the multidimensional layers of liminal mystery that underpin the particular experience each of us is having on earth.
The vision for the wellness centre is to create a supportive experience for clients to feel safe enough to explore the psycho-spiritual, transpersonal territory of their inner worlds.
Ultimately this is a vision of leading people home to their deepest soul truth.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Mary Oliver. Wild Geese
Our Philosophy and Mission
Home is a place inside this body. It feels rock solid, settled, sure.
When we turn our attention away from home because we’re called into the world of expectations, worldly responsibilities or what other people think, the solidity gets shaky, it loses its reassuring presence.
But home never loses itself, it is our heads that lead us astray, filling the home space with anxiety, business, boredom or cold anger.
When we return to a more natural environment, breathe fresh air and slow down to the relaxed pace of the animals and plants that live here, our minds naturally come into alignment with our hearts.
It takes less than a second to return home, all it requires is a shift in focus. If we are ever to wonder what grace is, this is it. The mind is there; a willing servant of a rock-solid heart that knows how to navigate life with ease, joy, compassion, integrity, truthfulness and trust.
Nature as a co-creator of your healing programme
The purpose of the centre is to redefine ‘Wellness’ as a state of being that is filled with love, joie de vivre, authenticity and gratitude for life. This is easier to achieve when we are existing in harmony and balance with the earth and our environment. When we find an alignment with our individual soul knowing through breathing in rhythm with Mother Earth and aligning with our inner wisdom, we can embrace our individual challenges. Our healing crises are recognised as transformational encounters. Through changing ourselves we change the world.
What will
our children do in the morning?
Will they wake with their hearts wanting to play,
the way wings
should?
Will they have dreamed the needed flights and gathered
the strength from the planets that all
men and women need to balance
the wonderful charms of
the earth
so that her power and beauty does not make us forget our own?
I know all about the ways of the heart – how it wants to be alive.
Love so needs to love
that it will endure almost anything, even abuse,
just to flicker for a moment. But the sky’s mouth is kind,
its song will never hurt you, for I sing those words.
What will our children do in the morning
if they do not see us
fly?
Rumi
The ancient wisdom of Africa
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A temple for Mother Earth - the architecture and the simplicity of design
The architecture and design of the centre nurtures a sense of trust within a setting that is majestic and wild. The buildings are in harmony with the natural world, yet because they are artistically creative they foster inner exploration.
The centre is luxurious; clients feel pampered enough to come back to wellness through rejuvenation and rest.
Being immersed in an environment that is wild, natural and unspoilt, supports clients’ individual’s lifestyle choices to come into healthy alignment with their soul longing, their physical well-being and their emotional health.
The buildings carry poems and prayers written into the layers of ‘brick’ work. Shamans and sangomas bless the buildings at every stage of development. The sacred is written into the fabric of every structure.
Natural, wild, earthy, yet contained by the wooden walkways that connect the individual pods, healing centre, sanctuary, spa, game hides and luxurious living areas, the sacred geometry in the design mirrors sacred geometric forms in nature.
Every element of the space is holy (the root of the word ‘Holy’ is ‘whole’); The kitchens are clean, spacious, Zen-like – a sacred space for the preparation of food. The living space is open, the outdoors spilling inside, the beauty of nature is up close and personal. Sleeping areas have glass ceilings so that the magnificent Botswana stars fall into night time dreams. The centre has a Zen-like simplicity with attention to elegant forms and pristine details.
Harmonious health through the exploration of the sacred nature of life
Meditation and meditation courses are available as a nurturing practice for developing lightness of heart. And although it isn’t overt, an awareness of the sacred nature of existence is a foundational concept at the centre.
Care is taken in all the finest details, from healing foods and natural supplements, to healing spa treatments.
Would you complain because a beautiful sunset doesn’t have a future or a shooting star a payoff? And why should romance ‘lead anywhere’? Passion isn’t a path through the woods. Passion is the woods.
-Tom Robbins
The food and food gardens nourish well-being
The delicious organic food is prepared with love, the water is pure and natural. Beautifully prepared food nourishes creativity and holistic self healing
The staff at the Centre
All the staff including cleaners, receptionists, admin staff, cooks, management, security animal communicators and wilderness guides are involved in a programme of ongoing wellness training. This includes deep listening and an appreciation of themselves and their clients. The individual soul exploration undertaken by all members of staff imbues their lives with meaning. A fundamental principle of the Wellness Centre is that the people and animals who live in an area create the atmosphere that is absorbed by those who come to visit.
There is an educational centre for staff children and community upliftment programmes for the surrounding villages
The healing modalities
We design individually crafted programmes to guide you home to your own soul longing and love of life.
Highly trained therapists are chosen for their integrity and their ability to be present in a light-hearted, easy-going, spacious manner. They offer various modalities, courses and therapies each of which can be incorporated into a general wellness programme specifically crafted to suit individual choices.
Walking with elephants
Meditation Retreats
Receiving the Soul Self into the cells of our bodies, constantly and consciously, cracks us open; we drop through the discomfort of our constricted patterns of behaviour into a harmonious alignment with higher dimensions of consciousness. In Buddhist terms our felt experience of this is described as entering the Divine Abodes, otherwise known as the Brahma Viharas, or the Four Faces of Love. These are; loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity (or serenity).
Soul Integration sessions
Better than anyone else in the world, we each know deep down how to remedy the problems in our own lives.
Soul Integration sessions simplify our complex, hectic Twenty First Century lives by putting them back into perspective and guiding us back to that which is real and meaningful to each of us individually. They create profound shifts at a deep level of our consciousness where outworn patterns of behaviour are released to allow for a centered and balanced sense of a fully integrated self. They are guided by the Higher Self using a process of Active Imagination.
By harnessing the energy of the soul self through Soul Integration sessions, we transform not only ourselves, but also the people around us and our environment. As we work on deeper levels of our own consciousness, we impact the collective unconscious, and through changing ourselves, perhaps we even change the world.
Imagination connects us with the web of power and the spirit in all things.
Jose Stevens and Lena Stevens
Breathwork journeys
You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.
Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.
Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
English version by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
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Birth preparation on a soul level
Sangoma divination and healing
Readings and healing advice from African traditional healers, including divination, herbal medicine and advice from the ancestors
Animal Tracking
Animal Communication
Animals are profound teachers . They mirror our inconsistencies in order to bring us back into alignment with our soul purpose. They give us synchronistic messages when we are already in alignment with our truth. The teach us about integrity, the purest peacefulness and love as an unstressed way of being fully present. They teach us to play, they foster light-heartedness and they can heal us at the core of our being.
Animal communication is a path of listening and ‘speaking’ non-verbally through a process of active imagination. Animals are adept at conversing in pre-verbal language, which we have largely forgotten as adult humans. Relearning telepathic communication brings us back home to truthfulness since we bypass the rational mind. The body doesn’t lie, and it is only since the advent of language that humans have learnt about deception. Animals teach us to come back to the truth of our soul purpose.
Story-telling as a healing journey
Fire-Walking Ceremony
The theory behind fire-walking is that when we project as much prana-power out through the base of our feet as the burning coals radiate towards us, we deflect the heat of the fire. It is the ultimate process of empowerment, the experience is as invigorating as taking on the world.
Some magic we just can’t explain, not even to ourselves.
Cranio-sacral therapy
Craniosacral therapy is a gentle, non-invasive hands-on therapy that benefits whole body health, treats a multitude of conditions and is effective for infants, children and adults. It offers a gentle approach to relieving restrictions in the body and increasing our nervous system’s capacity for health, harmony and well-being.
The body naturally seeks homeostasis—and craniosacral therapy facilitates this balancing. When one experiences restriction or trauma, whether through a challenging birth or an injury or emotional shock to the nervous system, the body alters its priority from health to survival mode.
Process Work
Processwork or Process Oriented Psychotherapy is a therapeutic modality developed by Arnold Mindell, working with dreams and unconscious signals towards the wholeness we seek.
Art as healing
Aimless Love
This morning as I walked along the lakeshore, I fell in love with a wren and later in the day with a mouse the cat had dropped under the dining room table.
In the shadows of an autumn evening, I fell for a seamstress still at her machine in the tailor’s window, and later for a bowl of broth, steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.
This is the best kind of love, I thought, without recompense, without gifts, or unkind words, without suspicion, or silence on the telephone.
The love of the chestnut, the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.
No lust, no slam of the door – the love of the miniature orange tree, the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower, the highway that cuts across Florida.
No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor – just a twinge every now and then
for the wren who had built her nest on a low branch overhanging the water and for the dead mouse, still dressed in its light brown suit.
But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.
After I carried the mouse by the tail to a pile of leaves in the woods, I found myself standing at the bathroom sink gazing down affectionately at the soap,
so patient and soluble, so at home in its pale green soap dish. I could feel myself falling again as I felt its turning in my wet hands and caught the scent of lavender and stone.
Billy Collins
Daily Offerings
Hot air Ballooning
A stately hot-air balloon floating serenely over South Africa’s expansive and dramatic landscapes is a match made in heaven. There has always been an aura of magic, romance, and otherworldliness attached to hot air ballooning. It’s as if the balloon lifts you up out of the mundane and ordinary into a world of new possibilities
Game Drives
Professional guides take clients deep into the bushveld of the Okavango and Moremi. Encountering leopard, lions, buffaloes, cheetahs, suricats, aardvarks and wild animals in abundance is an unforgettable experience that is deeply humbling. Coming face to face with an elephant shifts our perception of ourselves as the alpha species on the planet. When we recognise our place as an interconnected part of the eco-system that is one living organism we are filled with a sense of awe and gratitude for the Earth herself. If we are to heal our planet in crisis, we first need to heal our relationship with ourselves and our relationship to it.
Mekoro trips
The slow, deeply soothing experience of being poled through the waterways of the Okavango, whilst listening to the cries of Fish-Eagles and watching African Jacana birds hop from lily pad to lily pad in search of food, is soul food. It induces belly breathing, relaxation and a love for the scent of African soil that settles itself into the psyche and feels like home-coming.
Yoga
Spa Treatments: Massage – Kahuna, Swedish, Hot Stone. Shiatsu, Reflexology, Reiki
Ayurvedic treatments, diets and wellness consultations - panchakarma
Gym and pilates
Daily meditations
Join us on a journey of exploration to come home to your Soul Self
This is an Invitation to Come Home to Your Soul Self
Our hearts yearn towards arriving home into the cells of our bodies, constantly and consciously. It cracks us open; we drop through the discomfort of our constricted patterns of behaviour into a harmonious alignment with higher dimensions of consciousness. Our felt experience of this is one of loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy and serenity.
When we drop into being fully present in every cell of our bodies, there is an explosion, perhaps like a Big Bang or perhaps it is the tiniest silent reverberation that happens in the heart of the collective. It causes the consciousness of the world to shift into greater harmony and alignment. When we surrender into living in this presence, and trust that it is a life-raft in the sea of chaos we are all swimming in at the moment, a portal of light is created in the collective. It is no small thing.
This return journey Homeward, is one that we each take on our own, but it is possible to share the insights and the struggles we encounter with one another. These are like explorers’ road maps – ‘there be fire-breathing dragons and there you may find cool water to quench your thirst’.