Continuum Flow Retreats Programme and Mentorship

Cherionna Menzam-Sills and Jane Okondo, both Continuum teachers in the UK, are excited to announce their new Continuum Flow Retreats programme and mentoring opportunity.

Continuum is a subtle practice involving specific breaths, sounding, mindful awareness and gentle fluid movement. We slow down, relax and dissolve restrictive patterns in our tissues and nervous systems opening to new, more creative resilience and potential.

To support those drawn to deepen in this fluid practice, to experience the mysterious nuances and their healing effects, and possibly to become teachers, we are offering these 5-day retreats. Those on the journey towards teaching will also receive individual mentoring sessions with Jane Okondo and/or Cherionna Menzam-Sills and attend special workshops/retreats for gathering practice teaching experience with feedback.

We are offering a series of five-day retreats occurring twice each year. If you have at least five days prior experience with a Continuum teacher, you can apply to join us. Pre-booking for four over two years entitles you to a significant discount. (Please see details below.) We will also be available for individual mentoring sessions online or in person between retreats.

The importance of these longer retreats is that they enable us to spend extended periods of time in silent enquiry, where we can deepen under more habits and patterning, including that of time.

“If a system was not bound in time, would it be susceptible to the impact of the environment?” – Emilie Conrad

This question is an important aspect of our enquiry in Continuum. The effects of time patterning begin as early as our birth, or even before. How do we listen to our own impulses, discover our own rhythms, when we need to rise to an alarm in the morning, eat at certain times, sleep at certain times, etc. Within the extended field of an “all nighter,” an extended silent dive, we can begin to explore what is beyond the constraints of time.

The retreats will include 2-3 days in silence, beginning once the group is adequately settled and the sequences taught have been established.

These retreats are open to anyone who has had at least 5 days experience with Continuum teachers, and is ready to dive deeper.

Experience with Continuum is required to prepare you to dive deeply in silence in a Continuum way. While other kinds of meditation, somatic practices and silent retreat experience can be helpful background, Continuum is a very specific approach which teaches you particular ways of orienting your awareness.  If you are drawn to join us but don't yet have 5 days experience, please view our schedules and come to some more classes or workshops!

 If you are interested in eventually teaching Continuum, these retreats will provide some of the experience to support you in this process. Our mentoring will also include further group and individual mentoring sessions with Jane and Cherionna, either online or in person.

“If we really want to understand fluid systems, water’s legacy, and the gifts it has to bring, we must merge our consciousness with it. No one really knows the immensity of the fluid that pulsates within. What we can do is fully enter, sensually and with love, the beckoning pool, wet our knees, our throat, until at last disappearing into the welcoming aquese, we sink far, drown well, lose our mind, and become the fluid, utterly and completely. You must love madly, utter its name at night, sing its praises in the morning. Its secrets will whisper in your heart. Enchantment awaits.”

– Emilie Conrad, Life on Land

Since Emilie passed away in 2014, there has been ongoing enquiry amongst Continuum teachers as to how interested, committed movers might become teachers of this profound, beautiful work. In the past, all teachers were authorized by Emilie after an extensive period of Continuum exploration under her guidance, including participating in numerous longer workshops.

Continuum teachers from all over the world have come together since 2014 to create a new Continuum Teachers Association (CTA), which will accept new teachers. Our programme is designed in alignment with CTA guidelines.

If you are moving towards teaching Continuum, your mentorship will include the following:

1. in depth Continuum experience (at least 500 hours) with Continuum teachers (please keep a log of all classes you attend, including mentoring and webinars online). Each 5-day retreat is usually 35 hours. Your experience includes all the Continuum classes/workshops/webinars you have participated in prior to, as well as during your mentorship journey.

2. arrange and participate in individual mentoring sessions in person or online with Jane and/or Cherionna, at least once between Continuum Flow retreats, or more as determined with your mentor (Jane and/or Cherionna)

3. include classes/workshops/retreats with at least 2 other Continuum teachers besides Jane Okondo and Cherionna Menzam-Sills

4. attend teacher track workshops/retreats where, as you become ready, you practice teach increasingly longer pieces, receive feedback from peers and mentors, as well as giving feedback to peers for their practice teaching

5. demonstrate in teacher track workshop(s) that you understand and can communicate the principles of Continuum, have experience in group facilitation, and can transmit the work in a demonstration

We have set up this retreat programme and mentoring process inspired by how we received the work from its founder, Emilie Conrad. The most important aspect of deepening in Continuum and in becoming a Continuum teacher is to practice!

Emilie emphasised the value of diving deeply in silence within a group field of a Continuum retreat. Emilie felt this can take us to experiences akin to those of healers within the Aschlepion temples of ancient Greece. She spoke of the importance of becoming "hibernative," being able to slow down like a bear in hibernation, but with awareness.

In periods of extended silence, we are able to listen to subtle sensations and cues within our own bodies telling us when it is our time to eat, to sleep, to do a Continuum sequence, to go for a walk, draw a picture, write in our journal, or ???

Within the silence of these retreats, we find our way beyond the external influences even of time, dissolving old patterns and tendencies, and eventually emerging renewed.

By participating in a series of retreats, you can develop your agility with diving into these depths, healing at profound levels, and uncover your original potential.

In the process, you may meet old traumas or other personal history which has its hold on you and creates density in your tissues and perception. With practice, you learn to meet these with a holistic perspective, asking "What else?", meaning "What else might be possible here?", orienting to the potential hidden under the story, accessing deeper and deeper layers of health, resource, fluid resilience and creativity.

Your health, body, creativity, relationships and life in general can all be enriched by this process.

If you intend to teach Continuum, you will over time come to embody this practice fully enough to communicate effectively it to your students, from one fluid body to another.

Continuum is passed on in part through direct transmission. Teaching Continuum also requires understanding the underlying conceptual framework, and being able to articulate what you have to offer in ways that can be received by your students.

If you are on the teaching track, you will be invited to participate in smaller workshops, where you will be able to practice teaching your peers and receiving feedback from them and from Jane and Cherionna. You can begin practice teaching once your mentors, Jane and Cherionna, and you agree you are ready.

As part of preparing to become a teacher, you will be expected to engage in individual mentoring sessions (online or in person) with Jane and/or Cherionna. Online group mentoring sessions will also be available. Please let us know if you are interested in this. You can also do mentoring with us in this way if you are not intending to teach but just want to deepen in your practice.

If your intention is just to continue deepening and healing, you are welcome to join as many of the retreats as you feel attracted to!