From Protection to Connection

Valentine’s Day can bring up many things — longing, frustration, hope, grief, curiosity.
This one-day workshop offers a different way of meeting it.

Rather than focusing on finding love, we’ll explore what may be quietly protecting you from intimacy and connection — and why those patterns once made sense.

This is a compassionate, embodied day for single people who want to understand their relationship patterns more deeply, soften old defences, and reconnect with their capacity for closeness — with themselves and others.

Throughout the day, we’ll gently uncover the different ways protective patterns may be operating, including:

● Fear of loss or abandonment
How early experiences and unmet grief can make closeness feel risky.
● Family system influences
Unconscious loyalties, inherited beliefs, and relational patterns that don’t belong to you alone.
● Armouring and control
Including using “working on ourselves” as a way to stay defended and avoid vulnerability.
● Living in the head, disconnected from the body
How disembodiment limits intimacy — and how reconnecting with the body restores choice and presence.
● Fear of being seen
Shame, unworthiness, and the quiet belief of “I’m too much” or “not enough”.
● Capacity to receive
Learning to let care, presence and love land — and recognising how others can reflect our own hearts back to us.

This is an experiential, embodied day. You will not be asked to share more than feels right for you.

We will be weaving together:

● Family Constellations : A beautiful way of exploring how your family history and early experiences may still be influencing your relationships today — often without you realising it. This work helps bring clarity to patterns around closeness, distance and intimacy that don’t come from you alone.

● Somatic Work (Body-Based Awareness) : Simple, guided practices to help you tune back into your body. This supports your nervous system to settle and helps you notice where you hold tension or protection — and what helps you feel safer and more open.

● Breathwork: Using the breath to calm the system and create a sense of safety, alongside an embodied, guided breathwork journey to help emotions and insights move through, rather than staying stuck. This supports release, understanding and integration.

Together, these approaches allow understanding to move beyond insight — into lived, embodied change.

Places are limited to 12 attendees.

This in-person gathering will take place at The Guildford Institute, in the centre of historic Guildford, Surrey (40 mins by train from Waterloo).

Doors 10am for a prompt 10.30am start. Teas, Coffee and snacks available throughout the day.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher Oliver Baum BA, MTheol, MBACP