Welcome.
"May you become the gracious and passionate subject of your own life."
- John O’Donohue
Welcome to
Vital Touch Therapies
What a joy to find you at this threshold. Please come in.
We are your hosts, Lisa Sutherland and Jonathan Young.
We live in the natural park of the Haut Languedoc, in Southern France. Our home is the village of Colombières-sur-Orb, nestled in the valley of the great river Orb and overlooked by the Caroux mountains.
This is beautiful, wild and nourishing place has inspired a shared vision that has become what we offer through Vital Touch Therapies.
Here we invite people to experience the felt reality of what it is to be fully alive.
We have created a variety of Retreats and Holidays that combine the best of our well-honed skills, practices, knowledge and wisdom.
Our values as hosts and facilitators are:
Communitas: welcoming you into warm circles of belonging here, as a conscious community
Soul: affirming and honouring our life experiences through beauty, meaning, ritual, creativity, gratitude and embodied practices
Restorative permaculture and Animism: coming into relationship with all living beings, and practicing systems that enrich the diversity of this land, encouraging all to thrive.
We weave these values with the elements of this beautiful space to offer you a place and time to find sanctuary.
A place to come home to yourself.
To restore a sense of trust in life, and its basic goodness.
To rest in the pleasure of your senses.
To discover new possibilities, and to return to your life enriched and ready to give generously of your gifts.
To rest, restore and open to experiences and inspirations that encourage you to move beyond survival into a life where you thrive.
In addition, Lisa, as a whole-person embodiment practitioner, offers you two further streams of encounter to explore:
Nurturing Touch that encapsulates her many years as a hands-on embodiment therapist and
CycleWise her online Mentorship platform where she provides deep listening, guidance and insights from the foundation of living cyclically with your body, your relationships, your work, your creativity and your life.
Jonathan combines the Feldenkrais Method with theatre and soul-based clown work, as well as co-holding many of our retreats.
We look forward to meeting you in person
In serene radiance and pure delight,
Lisa and Jonathan
Our Offerings
About Us
Lisa and Jonathan met in 2010, dancing a 5 Rhythms solstice celebration at the intentional community of the Findhorn Foundation, Scotland. Their partnership has been a varied, magical, soulful journey since then. Weaving a life together has been blessed with abundant miracles and the inevitable challenges that any relationship calls us to meet.
Lisa often refers to herself as an apprentice elder. She is at the stage of life where she has been shaped by the challenges, triumphs and transitions of a life well lived. As a young child, she always felt most at home in the natural world, within the mythical realms of dreamtime, poetry and story and took pleasure in her body dancing, climbing trees or swimming. She embraces all these elements in her daily life now. She has a passion for learning, savouring subjects from nutrition to mysticism, somatic therapy to animism and has an intuitive skill for weaving connection and presence in all she touches.
She has been a teacher, an organic farmer, a chef, an administrator, a communications officer and practises as a complementary therapist and a mentor offering her skills, gifts and knowledge into the growing field of cycle awareness. Her prayer for herself and all life is to rest in the way of Loving Kindness. She offers her life’s work to you through the gifts of ceremony, self enquiry, embodied action and soul activism, so that you too may tap into the roots that feed you, the inspiration to nurture you, the potency to engage with the calling of these times and the presence to forge your unique way in the world.
Jonathan has always been passionately involved with myth and poetry, soul-work and coming fully alive through embodied creativity. As a child he had a deep love of being in nature, and also a love for the French countryside and culture. He comes from a background in theatre, movement and somatic education. He ran his own theatre company for 12 years, and went on to train as a Feldenkrais Method Practitioner, sharing this practice of self-knowledge through neuro-movement with both actors and the public. For the past 15 years he has worked substantially in creative higher education, teaching movement, Feldenkrais, clown and group processes. In recent years, he has begun exploring ritual, and has been struck by how it meets a deep need in people’s psyches. He is an enthusiastic chef, hillwalker and wild swimmer, a dancer and writer, and looks forward to warmly welcoming you.
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