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Kerri Martinaglia is the manager of The Waterfall Retreat and Environmental Centre. She is a student of the late Choje Akong Tulku Rinpoche and has trained within the Karma Kagyu Lineage and participated in several meditation retreats over the past 19 years, including a 6 month closed retreat at the Tara Rokpa Centre Retreat Valley in Groot Marico. In 2009 she was invited to join the Mindfulness Africa Organisation. She is the Mindfulness Africa Coordinator for Kwa Zulu Natal and has certification in hatha yoga and  qigong disciplines. Her special interests are how the combined practices of gentle movement, mindfulness and compassion can potentially help to restore our balance.

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Chrissi Preuss has an Honours degree in Psychology from Rhodes University, specialising in trauma and neuropsychology. After completing a Mindfulness Association 8-week course through The Waterfall Retreat  And  Environmental Centre, she set her heart on teaching yoga and has since completed an intensive 2-year yoga teacher training program. She approaches every class she teaches with kindness accommodating students of all ability levels.

The Poetry In Mindfulness

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Teacher: Linda Kaoma

Cost: 3 days accommodation + R350 surcharge

Dates: Sunday 12 June 2022 - Wednesday 15 June 2022

Linda Kaoma’s poetry workshops are spaces for mindfulness, reflection, and self-care. She fuses poetry writing with meditation, yoga, breathwork, and meditative movement. Poetry’s emotive quality lends us the space to explore our feelings and experience deep moments of reflection. It also allows us to take ordinary realities or stories and adorn them with figures of speech and other jewels, thus allowing us to rethink, relook and refeel our current lived stories and narratives. This poetry workshop will include time for play to indulge our inner children, and will include more than just literary exercises - it will also include drawing and visualisations. We need to play in order to learn, thus playing during a poetry workshop will help us learn more about ourselves.

Linda Kaoma is a poet and literary curator who has performed and curated events in numerous countries in Africa and Europe. She is passionate about exploring new places to house literature and new ways of exploring literature. This passion led her to explore the importance of poetry in African cultures especially as a facilitator for health in her dissertation for her Health Humanities Master’s degree at the University College of London in 2020. Her current interest is fusing her poetry with other healing modalities such as meditation, yoga, and African spiritual cosmology. For the past three years, she has been a part of and a facilitator for the Life Righting Collective which believes in the healing power of writing. As a facilitator for poetic life writing, she is interested in discovering the metaphors and the rhyme of one’s life.

Cultivating Mind-Heart Resonance Through Emotional Intelligence And Mindfulness

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Teacher: Shanil Haricharan

Cost: 2 days accommodation + R350 surcharge

Dates: Friday 17 June 2022 - Sunday 19 June 2022

The past two years have highlighted the volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous and unequal world we live in. To understand this world and resolve its problems, we must understand ourselves and our relationships; after all, the world is a projection of ourselves. The Buddha, Aristotle, Krishnamurti, among other great thinkers, have claimed that understanding ourselves is the beginning of wisdom. Over this weekend, you are invited on a journey of really getting to know thyself, starting with confronting your conditioning which has created who you are today. As Jungian psychologist  and author, James Hollis, observes: “What we have become is frequently the chief obstacle to our journey - an assemblage of defense mechanisms and anxiety management systems” or as Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet, wisely counselled: “You are the unconditioned Spirit trapped in conditions. You fill it with yourself, or it dies”. In this journey we will probe the state of our mind, heart, body and spirit (as indigenous cultures have done for thousands of years) towards finding balance and harmony, particularly, in understanding the dominance of the mind over the other three domains of the Self. Our interactive exploration will be supported by a range of Eastern and Western theory and practice in cultivating mind-heart resonance, specifically through understanding emotional intelligence and mindfulness, and applying these in our personal development journey in navigating our rapidly evolving world. May this weekend deepen ways of living in full consciousness of self, others, nature, and society through supporting wholeness, oneness, integration, resonance, and renewal.

Shanil Haricharan is an academic, activist, advisor, writer, and coach. He has a diverse professional and academic career in the public and NGO sector, having served as a senior advisor on public management, leadership and organisational culture at the National Treasury for 13 years. Currently, he is the academic director UCT’s Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, where he teaches and researches emotional intelligence, leadership, mindfulness, and organisational culture. He received a BSc (Medical/Life Sciences, Wits), an Advanced University Diploma in Adult Education (Natal), a MBA (UCT), and a PhD (Stellenbosch). His doctoral research focused on emotional intelligence, public leadership and organisational culture. He also completed the Gestalt International Organisation and Human Systems Development Programme at the Gestalt International Study Centre, Cleveland, USA.