It was just a small thing. But it stayed with me.
During a podcast, Suzanne Leclaire* was talking with Thomas about her IFS experience at Lescure. At one point she said: “Being here is a healing experience in itself.” The words stopped me. They gave voice to something I had felt for a long time, but had never quite dared to say myself.
They were talking about IFS therapy, and Thomas’s work. But when Suzanne spoke about Lescure too, I was smiling. She was talking about the house, the land and the trees around it. And the love and care I put into it. People notice, I think. The way you walk through a place and feel something is just right.
Suzanne describes how the retreat had been about more than the sessions with Thomas. That daily work brought movement and something shifted. But it was everything around it that let it settle. Quiet walks through the forest. Meals, taken together. A bath, and nowhere else to be. Making the SoulCollage® cards. Following her own rhythm, whatever that meant for her, on any given day.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF ATTENTION
When I first came here, I thought I was restoring an old French house. Making a place for retreats, that was the idea. But over time I understood something else was happening too. The house was shaping me. The stone walls. The way the light changed through the day. The long silences. The seasons, turning. All of it asked a different kind of attention from me. The house became a creative companion to whatever it is I make here. That attention finds its way into my SoulCollage® cards sometimes. Just the other day I made one for the dream interpreter I am training to become.
Perhaps every place has a soul, a spirit of its own. Most of the time we are simply moving too fast to notice.
When guests like Suzanne tell me what they have felt here, I listen. Thomas and I joke, sometimes, that the house and the land are part of the retreat team. We laugh when we say it. But after all these years, after hearing so many guests speak of that same quiet presence, it does not feel entirely like a joke anymore.
The house keeps inviting us to slow down. To look again. To listen. And every now and then, something quietly reveals itself.
*Suzanne Leclaire is an executive coach, a guide for leaders navigating complexity. On her podcast, The Cure of Curiosity, she explores what becomes possible when curiosity enters the room, how it can become a healing force, through honest conversation with people working in care, in leadership, in wellbeing. For those who understand Dutch: you can hear Suzanne's conversation with Thomas on Pocket Casts, Spotify, or Apple.Huge thanks to Suzanne, for putting words to something I had quietly recognized for years.