Ireland is calling. And so is your voice. — SoulSpeak
I know where language lives. Not in a textbook. Not in a grammar rule. It lives in a moment — a conversation that surprises you, a landscape that opens something up, a room full of people where you finally feel safe enough to speak.
That’s what I build my retreats around. Embodied English. English that lives in the body and is awakened through retreats. And for this one, I chose Ireland.
Not by accident. Ireland has been in my mind for a long time — the green of it, the wildness, the way the land itself seems to hold a kind of invitation, magic and spirituality. When I started shaping SoulSpeak, it was the only place that felt right.
The Land of Spoken Words
Language didn’t just happen to Ireland. It grew there — out of the soil, out of centuries of storytelling, out of a culture that has always known, somewhere in its bones, that words are sacred.
The Irish oral tradition is one of the oldest and richest in Europe. Long before books, there were seanachies — the keeper-storytellers who held the memory of a community in the living breath of their voice. Stories weren’t written down because they weren’t meant to be frozen. They were meant to be spoken, again and again, changed a little each time by the teller, shaped by the listening of the room.
I find something quietly revolutionary in that. In a world that has turned language into a product — a level, a certificate, a score — Ireland reminds us that it was never supposed to be any of those things. It was supposed to connect us. To carry us somewhere we couldn’t get to alone.
This is part of why I chose Ireland for SoulSpeak.
Anam Cara
There is a Celtic concept I keep returning to, one that I’ve woven into the heart of this retreat: Anam Cara.
In Irish, it means soul friend. Not a friend in the ordinary sense — someone you happen to know, someone you see at the weekend. An Anam Cara is someone in whose presence you can be fully yourself. Someone who knows you beneath your roles, your achievements, your careful presentations of who you are. Someone who sees the part of you that you often keep quiet.
John O’Donohue — the Irish poet and philosopher whose work I love deeply — wrote about Anam Cara as one of the most important and most neglected needs of modern life. We have so many connections now. And yet so many people feel profoundly unseen, isolated and alone.
What does this have to do with learning English?
Everything, actually.
One of the most common things I hear from the people who come to my retreats is this: in English, I feel like a different person. Less funny. Less nuanced. Less myself. And that gap — between who you are and who you can be in another language — is one of the loneliest feelings there is.
SoulSpeak is an attempt to close that gap. Not by drilling vocabulary or correcting grammar, but by creating the conditions in which your real self can begin to find its way into the language. By giving you the experience of being seen — as yourself, in English — and discovering that the two aren’t as far apart as you thought.
What a Week in Wicklow Looks Like
I want to give you a sense of what SoulSpeak actually feels like from the inside, because I think sometimes retreat programmes can look very beautiful on a page and still leave you wondering: but what will it actually be like to be there?
It begins gently. You arrive on a Monday afternoon, settle into the house, breathe the Wicklow air. The first evening is a welcome circle — introductions, intentions, the Anam Cara blessing. A shared dinner. That particular quality of atmosphere that forms when a small group of people arrive in a new place together, not quite knowing yet what the week will bring.
From there, the week opens slowly, like something unfurling.
There is a morning in the Wicklow hills — a hike with outdoor yoga and a breakfast picnic at the viewpoint. There is a full day at Glendalough, Ireland’s ancient monastic valley, where monks built a community of learning and prayer on the edge of a glacial lake in the sixth century. We’ll walk the upper lake, picnic at the water’s edge, and simply be in one of the most quietly powerful landscapes I’ve ever stood in. I genuinely cannot wait to share it with you.
There is a morning with a guest facilitator rooted in the Irish oral tradition — Celtic storytelling and mythology in English, with no grammar and no study notes. Just story, the oldest teacher there is.
There is a day on the Wicklow coast — swimming, walking, a picnic on the beach. English flows differently when you stop trying.
And woven through all of it: daily yoga, Yoga Nidra, poetry, journalling, painting, language sessions grounded in the body rather than the textbook. An evening of writing a letter to your future English-speaking self. A closing ceremony on Sunday morning — guided meditation, a collaborative mandala, the Anam Cara blessing again, now carrying a week’s weight of meaning.
Seven days. A clear emotional arc. And the particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from stress, but from having been truly, fully present.
Who This Is For
SoulSpeak is for you if you already have a foundation in English but freeze when it’s time to speak. If you overthink every sentence. If you want to express your real personality — your humour, your depth, your history — in another language, and you haven’t quite found the way to do that yet.
It is not a course with a retreat backdrop. It is an immersive experience in which every shared meal, every hike, every moment of stillness is part of the learning. You don’t have to perform. You don’t have to get anything right. You just have to show up.
And the landscape will do a great deal of the rest.
A Note from Me
I’ve been thinking about SoulSpeak for a long time. Long before I had a name for it, I had a feeling — the feeling that there was a particular kind of week I wanted to offer, in a particular kind of place, for people who were ready to meet their English in a completely different way.
Ireland was always in that image. The green of it, the wildness, the particular quality of its light and its silence and its welcome. And the stories — always the stories.
What I offer in that week is everything I know — as a language teacher, as a yoga instructor, as a body psychotherapist, and as someone who has crossed the gap herself between who she was and who she could be in another language. I design these retreats so that nothing is wasted. Every hike, every shared meal, every quiet moment by the water is doing something. You may not feel it at the time. You will feel it later.
If something here has spoken to you, I’d love to hear from you. Places are limited — SoulSpeak is an intimate retreat, small enough for real connection, deep enough to matter.
SoulSpeak takes place 24–30 August 2026 in County Wicklow, Ireland.