The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
A life-changing way to heal your aching heart
Laugh, weep and love over six daunting yet rejuvenating days at the Bridge Retreat, Somerset
Everyone should be made to go to the Bridge Retreat. It should be a statutory requirement, a sort of modern day version of National Service – before you are allowed to leave school, you must be packed off for a week to the Bridge, where you will experience the mental health equivalent of earning a Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award. The stuff you do here is that good, that mindblowing, and yes, that life-changing. But life-changing in a practical way.
I was sceptical before I arrived. I am a cynical old hack who has been taught to question everything. I had first heard about the Bridge Retreat last summer, after I burst into tears on a magazine editor when she asked me how I was. “I’m… fine,” I wept, but of course I wasn’t. I was having another one of my depressions, one so furious that on several occasions I contemplated suicide over getting up.
This isn’t me making a joke – as a mental health campaigner, I am not the kind of person to make jokes about suicide. It was awful. Today, I am astonished that it even happened. It seems barely possible that any of it was real. But it was. And it had bedded edded in so absolutely that on this particular day, I had absolutely no idea how I had managed to get out ut of the house.
I am thankful I did. The magazine editor, seeing my tears, told me about the Bridge. She had ad been on it a year before, and it had changed her life. Magazine editors are always saying things have changed ged their lives, but there was something ing about the way she looked into me e that told me she meant it. So I got in n touch with the Bridge, to find out t what it was.
In a nutshell: it is a six-day retreat in the middle of nowhere owhere in Somerset, where you are stripped of all gadgets and made to do a hell of a lot of work k on yourself. My magazine editor or friend wouldn’t tell me what this entailed, and in every very review I read about it, the e details were similarly sketchy. tchy. I now know why. Taken aken out of context, some of this his stuff would terrify even n the most enlightened person. on. So I won’t go into the specifics here: I really wouldn’t ldn’t want to scare you off, or r – more importantly – send d you in there with any preconceptions. It t is important to have as few as possible.
The Bridge describes cribes itself as “an exceptional tional healing experience”. e”. You are told that you will be doing a lot of “grief ef work”, and I wondered if I would fit in given I was fortunate ortunate enough to not have ve experienced any major losses in my life. But Donna Lancaster, the marvellous, magnificently ificently funny, magical woman oman who set up the Bridge, idge, told me that losses s did not have to involve e death. Our hearts did not break purely because of romantic relationships. onships. It was a place for anyone feeling at odds with th their life – and just over a ye year after getting sober, that seemed to be me. And I didn’t want to keep feel feeling like this – the sense of utter con confusion at the crashing depress depressions I get every year for at least a mon month or two. I had done so much to try an and banish them – going to rehab, and an regular therapy. What was missing? missin What was I not getting?
I arrived at the Bridge feeling scared, and angry that my phone and laptop were going to be taken away. They had given u us an emergency number for our families fa should they need to get hold o of us, but that didn’t do much to relax me, addicted as I am to social media an and scrolling. Still, I was there now, there being a place called 42 Acre Acres, a space that has been specia specially – and lovingly – created to host healing retreats retreats. The house is beauti beautifully designed, every everything created with sust sustainability in mind, fro from the interiors th through to the organic s soaps and shampoos m made by a local co company.
T There were 13 of us on th the retreat, covering a range of ages, professions and exp experiences, though mostly fe female (only three were men men). The bedrooms were beaut beautiful and calming, my bed exceptio exceptionally comfortable, and I replaced my addiction to social media with an ad addiction to salt lamps, which were place placed in each room, calming us as we got to grips with nights without ph phones or books. The food was incredib incredible, plentiful, and mostly sourced lo locally. Donna wants guests to feel as s safe as possible – and for six days, I felt as if I was in a womb. It was incredible how quickly I stopped worrying about the outside world. I threw myself my into the retreat, helped massively by the amazing people I was shar sharing it with. We were all there for different differ reasons, but we were all after the same thing – that elusive sense of p peace. It was clear that if we wanted to get anywhere near it, we were g going to have to be
You will find tools to help you deal with life and understand why you feel the way you do
talk about feeling as if a piece of their puzzle is missing. What the Bridge does is give you the faith and the patience to find that missing piece. It lets you know if you lose it once more, you can find it again. I loved the Bridge Retreat with every bit of my broken, bruised heart – a heart I would now not swap for anything. And that is something. In fact, it is everything.
Places on the Bridge Retreat (thebridgeretreat.com) cost from £2,750 per person.