Letting go of the past with Kate Emmerson Retreats in Scotland
Annabel Heseltine reviews a Cutting the Threads That Bind retreat on Iona , where she sheds unhelpful energy, breaks away from the past and discovers the thrill of wild swimming
It’s sunrise. 6.10am. April. I am standing on a beach on an Hebridean island wearing nothing but a towel and a woolly hat, dripping with water and laughing like I haven’t laughed for so, so long. A few minutes before, cheered on by my fellow warrior women, I had run naked, except for the hat to keep my head warm, squawking and squealing into very cold water to embrace my first experience of wild water swimming.
Kate Emmerson’s retreat had sounded ideal for me. Not long out of a divorce, and after difficult years guiding my aspergic son through his teens, I had left my job as a magazine editor to return to my first love, travelling and writing about conservation, but I needed to discard old fears and find new direction. Four other women spanning four decades had been called to Iona too. Over five days I was humbled by their stories as we delved into our pasts, shared memories, cried a little, laughed a lot and practised the tools which Kate gave us to shed any unhelpful energy and move forward more surely and lighter of foot.
“Kate’s unique brand of recalibrating the spiritual and emotional being so that women leave her retreat stronger, more resilient, more in tune with themselves, feeling lighter and more complete is cuddled in love and laughter with some serious foodie experiences on the side”
Kate Emmerson, a published author five times over, is an experienced retreat leader of 19 years who specialises in helping souls to ‘recapitulate’. Inspired by the warrior training of Carlos Castaneda and Taisha Abelar of the Meso-American Nagual tradition, her mission is to facilitate an easier way of understanding and practising the holding of good energy and expunging negative ties, bringing tangible results into our own lives.
Cutting the ties with her own life in South Africa she has spent the last six years location-free moving around the world, writing and running retreats on Iona and in Greece. Kate’s unique brand of recalibrating the spiritual and emotional being so that the women on her retreat leave stronger, more resilient, more in tune with themselves, feeling lighter and more complete is cuddled in love and laughter with some serious foodie experiences on the side.
She led us to the beach our first night – it gets dark late in Northern Scotland – and asked us each to draw a circle around ourselves and then to imagine ourselves in a bubble of energy where we were safe and loved, and to surround it with a shining blue light. Then we were asked to imagine a second bubble into which we placed any negative energy, persons, events or sensations, which no longer served us and she showed us how to draw back our own energy and send the negative stuff packing. Who hasn’t walked away from a situation realising that they had handed over their power too easily? I know I have. In fact, I did it on the way to Iona when on the advice of a complete stranger I almost missed the train to Oban.
It’s a long journey to Iona but we were well held by Kate, there and back; for me it involved a car, three trains, a mad run across Glasgow, two ferries, a bus and another car but it struck me as I walked across the island on the penultimate day that if they are meant to be, pilgrimages come to us, often when we are least expecting them. I had planned – pre-Covid – to walk the Camino but now here I was walking across an island made of two thousand million year old Lewisian gneiss, crystal and marble, whose healing energy is so sacred that St Columba arrived here in 563 to build the precursor to the 13th century abbey which dominates the tiny island three miles long and a mile wide.
Writers, poets and artists followed. Samuel Johnson, Wordsworth, the colourists Peploe and Cadell. Vikings attacked it but later stayed to convert to Christianity. It is the birthplace of the Book of Kells and the burial ground of ancient kings. A winter population of 150 doubles in the summer but few are born here. They are drawn.
Ailidh, a drummer in another lifetime, delivered our food daily to the Green Shed, the converted hostel where we lived overlooking the sea. We dined on dishes of kelp and mushroom lasagne, peanut and aubergine with butternut squash, roasted trout, dressed crab, baked cheesecake, macaroons and rhubarb crumble as well as something delicious for tea.
Italian-born Daniela, who can be found variously working in the fine woollen crafts shop, the heritage museum or in Aosdàna selling silver jewellery, is passionate about the green serpentine stones she finds on the beach and turns into talismans to place around our necks. Kate’s workshop tying and making books was inspired by Rachel, an internationally renowned Ionian bookbinder and the creator of The Travelling Bookbinder. We daubed them in ink. Oh, it was such fun. Our landlord John, a curator of beautiful things and passionate about the soil, considers himself blessed to be the custodian of the croft Lagandorain. Would-be tenants are vetted strictly on Iona. Everyone has their story.
Mine was unravelling by the hour. On hearing from a traveller that she had been to Iona an old Highland gardener said. “Ay, Iona is a thin place. There’s no much between Iona and the Lord.” That’s how it felt as Kate walked us through the chakras of the island pointing them out as we passed from the 8th at the north end where we were staying to St Columba’s Bay in the south. Through green fields, passing the Hill of the Angels where St Columba prayed, before finally, scrambling up a rocky track, nature’s own meditation path, the hills parted to reveal a carpet of green and the beach, a Shangri-la, where St Columba had landed escaping a pagan Ireland. Here, warmed by the sun, Kate took us through our ‘letting-go’ ceremony and here again, I sought solace in the water, its silkiness curling its way around me, washing away the fears and opening my heart to the recapitulation.
The walk was profound and emotional but it felt like everything fell into place in its own time; so that early the next morning it felt right to cycle across the island, my unruly bell singing merrily, to climb alone, Dun I, to wash my face in the well offering eternal youth to pilgrims who visit it thrice as the sun rises. Even when, after supper our last night, walking back across the island from the Argyll Hotel I noticed a candle burning late in the tiny chapel next to the Abbey, St Oran’s Chapel the oldest building on the island. I am not normally religious but had been drawn there every day. I confessed to some sadness to Kate that I hadn’t got there that day. Without missing a beat, she drew out of her Mary Poppins bag, seven nightlights. “Let’s go now. I thought we might visit it”.
A few minutes later, spontaneously, and beautifully, the youngest of our group leads seven women singing in the shadow of one candle. “You’ll take the high road, and I’ll take the low road”. When it’s your time to pilgrimage I hope that your road might lead to Iona too.
