READING THE BODY - A RETREAT IN UMBRIA

SALON DETAILS

The retreat will provide space and material for thought and play towards greater connection to the world we inhabit through expansion of the mind and body. Each day will include two sessions of yoga and one or two sessions of literature study. This will leave hours across the day for down time: exploring the local area, rest and recreation, reading, swimming, hiking, stretching.

• Retreat facilitated by Toby Brothers, Alison Cable and Jackie Seigler
• 3-10 June 2023, programme will run approximately four to five hours per day, with one day left open, leaving time for other activities
• The books we will study are F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
• Alison Cable will offer complementary creative writing opportunities
• Recommended editions:
  The Great Gatsby, Scribner, 2004 reissue edition, ISBN 9780743273565
  Their Eyes Were Watching God, Virago, ISBN 9780860685241

Jackie and Toby have both developed approaches to understanding the self in the world. Jackie’s work uses the body as a space of exploration and understanding, while Toby employs literature as a platform for discovery.

Opening notes will be sent after registration.

FEES

Fees quoted below include all yoga and salon study, accommodation, three meals a day and tea, biscuits and fruit provided during breaks.

• Single room £1,475.00
• Shared double room £1,220.00
• Triple shared room £750.00
• Non-participating partners are welcome at £1,075.00

TRAVEL

PLEASE NOTE that flights, travel and insurance are NOT included. We will however organize transport to Castel Giorgio for those arriving at Rome Fiumcino airport at or around 14:20 on 3 June.

To enquire about this study or to reserve a place please email: jackie@seigler.co.uk (N.B. this study is not booked via this website).

THE PLACE

Near the town of Castel Giorgio, in the heart of verdant Umbria, only hills and nature surround the Locanda della Quercia Calante, an old farmhouse, renovated according to natural architectural principles. Eighteen kilometres from Orvieto in the province of Terni, it is the ideal spot for those who want a fully natural vacation in an environmentally friendly atmosphere. Enjoy the energizing water pool, holistic spa centre with yoga room, restaurant with local and vegetarian cuisine, fourteen rooms without electromagnetic fields . . .

• Full board in single or double/twin rooms /triple rooms/ quadruple (family)rooms with services and private veranda.
• Two breaks for coffee, tea, herbal teas and fruit each day.
• Use of one of the large yoga studios.
• Free use of the large complex of two swimming pools (300 m2) and one large spa in the park. Salt filtering systems without chlorine.
• Delicious fresh food, mostly organic with vegetarian and vegan options.
• All rooms are heated in winter and cooled during summer.
• Opportunities to visit the beautiful local surroundings, Etruscan and medieval sites, Orvieto, Siena, Todi, Bolsena Lake and thermal springs. If there is interest, we may also arrange a visit to Assisi.

THE YOGA WILL BE LED BY JACKIE SEIGLER

Jackie’s teaching style is drawn from Hatha yoga. Her practice is continually evolving; she describes her style of yoga as modern postural yoga with an emphasis on core stability as well as flexibility. Her goal in teaching is for students across all ages and body types to establish a more regular and fulfilling practice.

Jackie continually reviews, investigates and modifies her self-practice to make her teaching practice more accessible to everyone.

“When one becomes a yoga practitioner you become an eternal student.”

The idea of our retreat together is ‘Reading The Body’ and our yoga and meditation practice in the morning will be a great place to begin that work.

The afternoon class will be a combination of Restorative Yoga, Yoga Nidra and technical alignment-based sessions so we can work and build on a specific pose.

Restorative Yoga is all about slowing down and opening your body through passive stretching, the centring of your breath and body, and aligning the physical and mental by practising stillness or gentle movement for extended periods of time. The props assist in helping you to hold poses longer. During the long holds of restorative yoga your muscles can relax deeply. It’s a unique feeling because props, rather than your muscles, are used to support your body. Restorative classes are very mellow, making them a good complement to more active practices and an excellent antidote to stress.

Yoga Nidra, a state of conscious deep sleep, is a simple yet profound technique that unwinds the nervous system and induces complete physical and mental relaxation with inner awareness.

THE LITERARY SALON WILL BE LED BY TOBY BROTHERS, LONDON LITERARY SALON FOUNDING DIRECTOR

The London Literary Salon builds community around the study of great literature. The Salon offers unique and inclusive discussion-based studies of literature – weaving the ideas of participants with questions the books raise about what it is to be human. Carefully facilitated, each study is dynamic and expansive in scope.

Drawing on the success of the LLS, we are expanding the studies by offering retreats that place participants in locales that allow us to open up the literature. The LLS retreat offers a more intensive immersion in books in surroundings that open the mind to the beauty of language.

I have selected two books for our study, The Great Gatsby  by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. These works were written in a similar time and country — the USA in the 1920s-30s — but the different worlds they portray may become even sharper in juxtaposition. Both books offer exuberance, romance, cataclysm and vitality, but they explore realms of extreme contrast in geography, racial perspective, gender viewpoint and economic class experience. Both are truly modernist in the probing of the interior realms and the writing that explores moral codes without didactic teaching.

I believe these two works studied together will give us lots to discuss around identities formed as a function of cultural time and place. The works are also simply exquisite. In the many times I have studied and taught them, I always find more in the beauty of the language and the complexity of the exploration. 

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Why this book?

Dismissed by many critics on first publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby went on to become the defining novel of jazz-age America. Almost a century later, the book continues to sell millions of copies each year and is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest novels ever published in the English language.

The story

No one knows who Gatsby really is, his background and the source of his wealth is a mystery that inspires gossip, speculation and suspicion. But almost everyone is willing to enjoy the fabulous hospitality he offers at his Long Island mansion. Told in less than 50,000 words, this is a story of obsession, enchantment and, ultimately, disappointment and destruction.

The writing

Whether you are reading The Great Gatsby for the first or the umpteenth time, the book offers a delicious immersion in a shimmering world of beauty, wealth and excitement. But there is corruption beneath the glamorous surface and even our honest – non-judgemental? – narrator discovers anew how dangerously seductive beautiful people can be.

To read this work deeply we must sit close enough to the narrator to be in his world while allowing ourselves the space necessary to gauge the critical perception of the writer. To me, as an American, there is something really key here. Fitzgerald uses the close proximity of the narrator – how Nick is seduced by Gatsby – to reflect how so many of us can be seduced by wealth, high-style romance and all that glitters. While Nick wants to condemn Gatsby, he is at the same time enamoured of him – his money, his power, his single-minded pursuit. I propose that this continues to be a deeply American conflict: the awe of high society, alongside the recognition of the cost and conflict that accumulation of wealth requires. We are a country of dreamers.

This book has a particular poetic language that feeds the pleasure of the reader, even as it exposes the tawdriness of what is described and, eventually, the death of hopes and dreams.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing  until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

“Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Why this book?

In her introduction to Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zadie Smith describes the book as ‘One of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century’. She goes on to say ‘It is so lyrical it should be sentimental; it is so passionate it should be overwrought; but it is instead a rigorous, convincing and dazzling piece of prose, as emotionally satisfying as it is impressive. There is no novel I love more.’

This overview from the US National Endowment for the Arts echoes my own thoughts about the book: ‘To call Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God an “African American feminist classic” may be an accurate statement – it is certainly a frequent statement – but it is a misleadingly narrow and rather dull way to introduce a vibrant and achingly human novel. The syncopated beauty of Hurston’s prose, her remarkable gift for comedy, the sheer visceral terror of the book’s climax, all transcend any label that critics have tried to put on this remarkable work. First published amid controversy in 1937, then rescued from obscurity four decades later, the novel narrates Janie Crawford’s ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny. Although Hurston wrote the novel in only seven weeks, Their Eyes Were Watching God breathes and bleeds a whole life’s worth of urgent experience.’

“The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time…. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

COMPLEMENTARY WRITING OPPORTUNITIES WILL BE LED BY ALISON CABLE

There will be opportunities to draw on the chosen books and our location for inspiration in writing about our own experiences and responses to the text. We will provide a supportive, confidential space in which you may choose to share your writing with others or not. The writing will be intuitive, dynamic, collaborative at times, and without critique. No prior experience is required and participation is entirely optional. 

If you have any questions about this study, please contact jackie@seigler.co.uk.