Elsebråne Retreat Center in Elsebråne, Asarum, Blekinge, Sweden! – Holistic hospital and organic orchard in one!
We live in a maybe 400 years old farm near in Blekinge: Today there are six buildings with 22 rooms. The main building is a log cabin, seven meters high, painted yellow, in oak planks, built in 1844. The guest house has 5 bedrooms and 4 old stoves and are from about 1870. The farm and guest house has room for up to 30 people. The farm has 52 000 m2 of land, two hectares are forest and three hectares is therapy garden / orchard and organic garden. The farm has a small car, a sailing boat (catamaran – Hobie 16), an old tractor, a kayak and mountain bikes …
Nature is a great healing power and a marvelous natural reserve Langasjönäs is our neighbor! We live in the middle of the woods, in an absolutely wonderful nature, near a 550-meter bathing lake, where the water in summer is 22-27 degrees. The climate on the farm is Russian continental climate, with icy winters and wonderfully warm summers. There is a public sauna in the middle of the nature reserve. We often walk the marked routes – and tour the ski slope on cross-country skis in the winter, which almost always gives a lot of snow.
The staff at the farm is divided into two groups. Niesel, our enthusiastic and hard working leader, is organising the work on the farm.
Soren Ventegodt and Pavlína Kordová leads the therapy. Soren is responsible for the psychotherapy and Pavlína for the holistic body work. Both are leading the daily therapy group that lasts between one and two hours and includes all patients.
In addition, there are about 10 volunteers. Patients also helps.
Thanks to a great partnership with Boi Jensen and “De gamle Sorter”, and the National Fruit Collection in UK, the farm has more than 200 different varieties of fruit.
What happens at the retreat center? There are two groups of people who come here with two different purposes. One group is mostly young people who wants to be close to nature and learn about organic farming. The other group is people who wants to heal their life and develop as persons.
Those who cultivate the land share the work with patients who need something meaningful to do. The voluntary workers can also participate in the therapy if they have interests and needs.
The patients are working with themselves; they may help and work also but only when they need it. Mostly they do nothing as their main exercise is to learn to be present, to themselves, and feel happy and alive.
The therapy
The therapy consists of courses, individual therapy and group therapy: The courses in personal development are about finding your true self and understanding life. Individual therapy focuses on self-exploration/self-inquiry to find out who we truly are and what is preventing us from being ourselves fully.
In the group therapy we learn from each other because all people are basically built the same way – and because it is much easier to see and understand others than to see and understand one self. — The therapy is holistic mind-body medicine. It is based on extensive research in holistic medicine (search “Clinical holistic medicine”on www.pubmed.gov) and on Joav Merrick and Søren Ventegodt textbook series on Evidence based holistic mind-body medicine in six volumes:
1 Ventegodt S, Merrick J. Textbook on Evidence-Based Holistic Mind-Body Medicine: Basic Philosophy and Ethics of TraditionalHippocratic Medicine. New York: Nova Science, 2012. 2 Ventegodt S, Merrick J. Textbook on Evidence-Based Holistic Mind-Body Medicine: Basic Principles of Healing in TraditionalHippocratic Medicine. New York: Nova Science, 2012. 3 Ventegodt S, Merrick J. Textbook on Evidence-Based Holistic Mind-Body Medicine: Healing the mind in TraditionalHippocratic Medicine. New York: Nova Science, 2012. 4 Ventegodt S, Merrick J. Textbook on Evidence-Based Holistic Mind-Body Medicine: Holistic Practice of TraditionalHippocratic Medicine. New York: Nova Science, 2013. 5 Ventegodt S, Merrick J. Textbook on Evidence-Based Holistic Mind-Body Medicine: Research, Philosophy, Economy andPolitics of Traditional Hippocratic Medicine. New York: Nova Science, 2013. 6 Ventegodt S, Merrick J. Textbook on Evidence-Based Holistic Mind-Body Medicine: Sexology and Traditional HippocraticMedicine. New York: Nova Science, 2013. Legal are handled by the firm Quality of Life ApS, based in Copenhagen. All patients are first patients at the clinic in Copenhagen, after which they may be patients at retreat center.
