Simone Weil drew a powerful distinction between will and attention.
The will is oriented toward doing. It’s concerned with movement, achievement, and progress. In this sense, the will sits at the heart of self-help, with its endless advice on how to change yourself, improve yourself, overcome yourself.
Attention, by contrast, involves a disciplined stillness. For Weil, attention names a sustained and courageous form of observation that resists the urge to intervene, correct, or resolve.
Spark is a retreat designed to cultivate this kind of attention.
Rather than intensifying effort or offering techniques for self-mastery, Spark creates the conditions for a sustained reflection on what already structures your life. Rather than focusing on who you want to be, Spark asks how you are already caught up in habits, fantasies, beliefs, and symptoms that both sustain and undermine you. An approach that encourages the possibility of a shift to occur in how you inhabit what you already are.
Over five days, participants are invited to develop a curiosity toward their unconscious: noticing the patterns, repetitions, beliefs, and desires that quietly organise their lives. Through the practices of Pyrotheology, Spark offers a concrete experience of grace; with its power to silence the demand to change long enough for a real shift to happen.
But perhaps more significant than any of this, Spark is an immersive experiment in a different kind of social relation. Not a bond found in community (with its shared beliefs, practices, values, obstacles and enemies), but something forged through communion: a relation that emerges from the mutual recognition of a fundamental lack that we all share.
Through a cocktail of teaching, group work, art, music, and reflection, Spark enacts a destabilising liturgy. One that does not resolve the tension of being, but that invites us to live with that tension in a more honest, enjoyable, and ultimately emancipatory way.
Where does it take place?
Spark takes place at The Old Inn, a centuries-old luxury hotel set at the edge of forest and sea, just outside Belfast. The inn sits within an area of rare natural beauty with stunning woodlands and coastline.
The Old Inn also carries a quiet intellectual and imaginative history. As a young man, C.S. Lewis stayed here often, walking the surrounding landscape that would later inform his vision of Narnia. He returned throughout his life and, in 1958, he honeymooned here with Joy Davidman, shortly before her death. Dating back to the reign of Elizabeth I, the inn has hosted figures ranging from Jonathan Swift and Charles Dickens to Peter the Great.
What’s included?
This is an all-inclusive event. Your ticket covers:
Accommodation
Minibar
Treetop Spa
Full breakfast, lunch and three course dinners.
The non-resident ticket excludes accommodation and breakfast.
TreeTop Spa
The stunning outdoor spa includes a large open-air hydrotherapy pool, hot tub, sauna, steam room, and relaxation area.