Writing As Medicine Retreat
26 August–1 Sept 2026
Greece
with Rom Soul Escapes
Healing doesn’t have to happen in sadness and misery. Learning to love ourselves and letting go of our traumas actually happen more organically in the right company, in a safe community with lots of laughter, storytelling, creativity, dancing and heart-to-hearts. In a world increasingly shaped by fracture – culture wars, fear-driven narratives and displacement – the question of how we live, how we make meaning, and how we tell our stories has never been more urgent. We are surrounded by forces that push us into passivity, that strip complexity from our lives and reduce human experience to slogans, enemies, or silence.
Writing as Medicine begins from the understanding that when we cannot tell our own stories, we lose agency. Our experiences are overwritten by dominant narratives, shame, or trauma. Writing – practiced with care, honesty, and support – becomes a way to reclaim authorship. Bella Figura – my adapted Italian philosophy of living well, with dignity, presence, and care – extends this work beyond the page. In a time of acceleration and abstraction, Bella Figura insists on slowness, beauty, mindful meeting and attention as ethical acts.
Bringing these practices together in Greece – a landscape steeped in myth, story, and collective memory – creates a retreat that is both deeply personal and quietly radical. In community, through writing, conversation, delicious meals and shared presence, participants step out of isolation and into connection. Stories are not consumed or judged, but witnessed. Grief, rage, love, and hope are given space to breathe. As is joy, laughter, dancing, swimming and making lifelong friends.
Throughout human history, storytelling has always been a form of resistance and survival. This retreat honours that lineage. By gathering, by writing, by living together with intention, we begin to repair what has been fractured – in ourselves and between us – and to imagine, together, the world we still want to make.
