Mairela Healing Retreat Finland
Holistic Healing Holidays to Cleanse & Detox your Body, Mind and Soul

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Mairela Reiki Healing Retreat is situated on the shore of Linnajärvi nestled amongst the pine forests of Finland, in an area of outstanding natural beauty. Come and spend some time here, leave your worries behind and learn to feel the true meaning of peace,tranquillity and relaxation. We offer holiday accommodation in our retreat cottage for holistic healing holidays, spiritual retreat and self healing workshops. Mairela Retreat's Holistic Healing & Spiritual Holidays have featured in several health publications across the world including Fifty Great Escapes, A Global Guide to Creativity. Mairela Retreat is within easy reach of Tampere airport which is serviced by low cost airline Ryan Air from Stansted and Dublin or slightly further Helsinki Vantaa airport which is serviced by Finnair, British Airways, Scandinavian Airlines, Easy Jet & Blue1

	I can truly see how immense and powerful the experience was. Mairela is such a beautiful place.. there is a pristine energy rising out of the earth and the air sings with it. It's definite and it's strong, and simply sitting by the lake, or high up on Kuhmoinen Hillfort, is enough to make your heart tingle and soar. I am in awe of the place. Without a doubt, without a shadow of a doubt, the healing I received through your hands has been one of the most profound experiences of my life, it has been life changing and will stay with me forever. I can say no more than that, because it is beyond words. ......more testimonials
Mairela Retreat is recommended in 50 Great Escapes - A Global Guide to creativity

Holistic healing holidays provide you with the keys to unlocking your true potential, self healing that you can incorporate into your everyday life, alignment of your intention and finding your purpose in life. Ultimately these are all the same thing. It's the coming together of the fragmented soul, welcoming all parts back into the oneness of being whole again. The so called shadow, lower self, inner child, erroneous beliefs and ego are all accepted just the way that they are, enfolded within the unconditional love of the one who sees and holds all. This is the higher self and it's not a self that we need to create, it exists already. Healing comes as we learn to recognise it and spend more time experiencing that aspect of who we are. There are occasions when the inner voice of the ego or lower self are shouting too loud for us to hear anything else. They are shouting in fear. Here at Mairela Retreat there is safety and love for them to feel less threatened, so that they can be present in all their glory; here you can be yourself with no judgement. By being fully present and open we can see everything in its true light thereby easing the way to making real informed choices.

There are many techniques which assist us to listen to our fearful inner child or ego or lower self such as reiki, inner child healing, sound healing, past life regression. There is a technique to assist in looking at our erroneous belief systems which limit our potential know as positive belief patterning, or EFT. These are the facts of life that we grew up with which are no longer appropriate but are still there beneath the surface of our consciousness. There are tools for increasing awareness and spending more time in a higher state of consciousness such as essence expansion, celestial healing, crystals, psychic surgery, relaxation, meditation and chi kung. All these come together to create a unique healing approach that gives the best to each individual. After all, we are one but we're not the same.

These are what you take home with you and incorporate into your daily life. Holistic healing or a spiritual path is not about 51 weeks of stress and strife all fixed with one week of serenity. It's about making your life an aware life so you truly know what you are doing and why you are doing it and you are happy that you are doing it! That is a spiritual or peaceful life regardless of what you are actually doing. Healing is about what you can do for you. When you connect to the higher power then you have the universe at your disposal...my job is to show you how to connect, the rest is your choice. I can show you the door but you must walk through it....

I'm Sara Gardner, your healer for the week and I live at Mairela Retreat, I'm an experienced Reiki Master who has been studying energy healing for many years including some time with the UK School of Energy Healing. I have personal experience of holistic healing, using the same techniques, to maintain my freedom from stage 3 ovarian cancer, discovered 8 years ago. A holistic healing holiday week at the retreat is available for £500 per person including the cottage rental. Half board (breakfast & dinner) is also available from £550 per person. A second person wishing to have a holistic healing week is an additional £200. This is a unique opportunity for one on one therapy in a stress free unpolluted environment.

Mairela Healing Retreat as featured in Kindred Spirit's Jan/Feb 2007 issue Wellbeing section.

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Sara Gardner's search for health took her to live in a pine forest in Finland

It was in January 2000 that I found out I had ovarian cancer, sometimes described as the Silent Killer. I was one of the lucky ones, my body had shouted loud enough for me to hear but even after the operation and treatment my survival statistics weren't good. I'd just split from my husband and had 3 children to support, so after using up my sick leave I returned to work as an accountant in the civil service.

Finnish line

I had an inner knowing that if I was going to eliminate cancer from the rest of my life then I needed changes to my life but I didn't know then what they were. Being back at work was a shock, not for the reasons you might expect but because people seemed to have been caught in a time warp. Although I had been away for a whole year everyone was doing exactly the same thing as when I'd left, as if I'd been gone overnight. That really frightened me because I knew that if I stayed that I would go back to sleepwalking through my life too. Still, I didn't leave for another year until the death of a colleague from ovarian cancer shook me out of my trance. I realised that I was working to pay my for my house, yet I was living in my house to be close to work and so I stepped out of the cycle.

I decided to move to Finland and live in the house that had belonged to my grandparents, which they named Mairela. There's a little wooden house, a cottage and a sauna all in the middle of the forest on the shore of a small lake in the beautiful lake district of Finland. I finished my Reiki teachings and became a teacher and healer. I have also been studying the old Scandinavian culture, in particular Norse mythology and the Runes. The Runes are old symbols used for Northern magic. I'm also trying to learn Finnish....one of the hardest languages in the world. The many challenges that I faced coming to live in a foreign country inspired me, the fact that I was learning something new everyday meant that I could actually feel the life force pumping through my body. Learning is living, it's what we came here to do. I had faced the fear of cancer and I knew that I didn't ever need to be afraid again.

The best part of being here is the closeness to nature, I'm not close to nature, I'm integrated with it. To feel yourself as part of the great wonder of all life is very easy here. You can smell and hear the pine trees on the breeze that laps the water on the lake's edge. I sometimes sit and watch the sunlight reflecting on the lake making dancing angels and I laugh to myself at how easy it is to enjoy life in the moment.

I grow my own vegetables in the garden and I can also pick many mushrooms and berries from the forest. I don't have to worry about organic labels when I take my basket into the forest and fill it with blueberries, lingon berries, chanterelles, funnel chanterelles, cloudberries, cranberries, milkcap mushrooms and boletes. The right to roam and pick wild plants here is the best in Europe and all the Finns share the natural harvest of the forest....although we don't share the locations of our best picking spots! I eat fish from the lake, which I catch myself. It's important to me that the fish live a natural life and I give honour and respect to any that I catch just as the American Indians would do.

Fire & ice

The house is heated with wood taken from the forest, which I cut, chop and stack myself, although I'm always open to offers of help if anyone wants to learn a new skill! I also have a wood burning cooker....although I admit to having an electric one too! There really is such a different energetic quality to the food that I eat because it grows naturally and locally and because it is cooked on a wood burning stove with wood prepared by me. The water that I use for cooking and washing comes from the spring just by the house so I don't need to worry about having chlorinated or fluorinated water. When I first arrived we would hand pump the water up from the well but now I'm all modern and have an electric pump into the house. That first autumn was interesting as I was using the outside loo in the garden and doing the washing in buckets down in the sauna too! I remember rinsing clothes in water and ice a few times. Everything at Mairela was originally built by my grandparents which also gives the whole place a fantastic energy because my grandfather built it out of love and then it was named after the woman he loved, my grandmother Maire.

The sauna is right on the lake's edge so that we can run straight down the pier and into the lake during our regular saunas. There are so many health benefits to having a sauna, not the least of which is the opportunity for me to sweat out all the old toxins from my chemotherapy and watch my cellulite disappear. My daughter, who's 10, is very brave about jumping straight into the lake but I'm a bit of a wimp and just dunk myself from the ladder!

Wildlife

A beaver come to live on my lake last spring and we'd see him swimming by in the morning and evening as he went to collect his water lily roots for dinner! He wasn't afraid of me and would smash his tail on the water's surface to try and scare me away from his territory! He eventually found a mate and they went to live on a smaller lake just up the road and raise their family in peace. It's not unusual to see a few elk by the house. A wolf clan moved into the area the same summer I arrived and the local community is debating whether they should be removed or not. I believe that we should adapt a little to allow the wolf to stay and live. There are also bears and lynx in the forest. In winter time you see tracks and realise just how many wild animals there are. Last winter I followed some lynx tracks leading from just by my house up to my favourite meditation spot looking out over the lake.

This place is the site of an old Iron Age fortress and it has a special quality to it, especially as you are standing above the tops of the pine trees breathing in their cleansing energy. Many birds that stay over the winter and I buy sacks of peanuts and sunflower seeds to feed them - the entertainment that they provide is wonderful. The male bullfinches in Finland in the winter are a vivid colour; one day last winter I counted 16 of them in the birch tree outside my window, all waiting for their breakfast.

I had thought that being here in the winter time would be difficult as I'd imagined it being very dark and gloomy. But the winter skies are fantastic - the pink glow at sunset and sunrise makes the whole place look so magical and moonlight reflecting on all the snow means you can walk outside at midnight without using a torch at full moon. The effect of torch light or sunlight on the snow produces a halo, as if someone has sprinkled bright glitter in front of you. The blue of the sky in the winter is unbelievable, it shows how polluted the air around dense populations is and it highlights the cleansing effect of pine trees.
The ice on the lake gets to about a metre thick so every winter time I walk on water! Last autumn I saw the Northern lights for the first time, it was the best nature moment of my entire life. I came out of my house at 10pm and the whole of the sky was lit up with bright white light, as if my house had been transported to heaven. I took my rocking chair down to the pier and sat staring up at the sky swirling above me whilst I listened to the sound of the lake freezing all around me. I reminded myself how lucky I am to have been given such a wake-up call in life and to have followed my heart to a place that gives me so much joy.

I've now completed the restoration work that needed doing on the buildings and I'm concentrating again on my personal healing path. I've started studying at The School of Energy Healing to become an energy healer and I'm looking forward to a future showing others the beauty and grace that is around us in every moment, hoping that I can help people back to the light.

Here is a recent article I wrote for natural Matters

Birch - Goddess of the Forest

The spring time has now arrived in full force here in Finland. In these northern climes the emergence of the new energy seems even more powerful after the winter's frozen consolidation. Primal power is abundant and tangible in the life force of the trees, if you look up to the line of trees on the horizon you can see the energy pulsing upwards from them in a beautiful shimmering aura. Here in Finland one of the most important trees is the birch tree, unlike the pine trees with their constant presence the birch tree flows with the natural life and death cycles. The birch was the earliest tree to recolonize the land after the ice age and is seen as a symbol of rebirth, springtime, regeneration and purification. The name birch is thought to have derived from the Sanskrit bhurga meaning 'a tree whose bark is used for writing upon'. Indeed during the war many letters were sent using the bark as both the letter and the envelope. The bark also has great waterproof qualities and must be removed or at least split if you wish to use the wood for firewood but was invaluable for making canoes. The name is also connected with the Anglo Saxon beorgan which means 'to protect or shelter' and is thought to come from its uses in boat building and roofing. Other descriptions for the tree are 'Mother of the Forest', 'The Tree of Venus' and the 'Lady of the Woods'. As you can see it has a very powerful feminine quality to it and is a traditional tree of healing.

In the past week I have been collecting the sap from some of my birch trees as it rises back up to deliver power, energy and valuable nutrients to produce the leaves. The sap can also be made into syrup much the same as maple syrup but not so sweet but I am just drinking it fresh, like a living water, for the life force energy and for the calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, manganese, zinc, sodium and iron. It is also diuretic. As soon as the leaves start to appear the sap will cease to run. There is no harm done to these trees as I only collect a small amount from the larger trees.

Springtime cleansing wouldn't be the same with out the fresh leaves of the birch tree. The leaves make a great tea with a bitter taste useful for gout, rheumatism, oedema and for the dissolving of kidney stones. In fact the leaf infusion is very good for any ailments concerning the kidneys including infections and jaundice. Fresh leaves can also be crushed and minced and spread over the body on the area of the kidneys to enhance the effects of the internal remedy, this is especially good when they are then covered with a warm towel wrapped round a hot water bottle. Birch leaves infusion is also a natural remedy for pain and cramps. To make an infusion take as many leaves as possible to hold using the tips of the fingers, pour boiling water over them and leave them for about 15 minutes. For kidney ailments and especially for flushing out in the springtime take the tea three times daily.
I've also read that the leaves are anti bacterial and reduce cholesterol.
The oil is especially good for skin conditions, if you add it to the water in the sauna used to produce the steam then the cleansing effects on the skin are further enhanced.
Here in Finland it is quite usual to see confectionary made with xylitol, a sweetener extracted from the birch tree which actually prevents tooth decay and in some cases it has been said to undo and repair the damage. A miraculous tree indeed

The rune beorc is the symbol for the birch and is a fertility symbol, drawn as a B but with straight lines it resembles a woman's breasts. It was the ancient symbol of fertility and the phallic maypole danced round as a symbol of new life in the spring is generally made from birch. I made my own set of runes from birch wood because of its healing qualities, as I sometimes use them in my practice when seeking guidance. Here in Finland at midsummer the entrance to the home is decorated with young birch branches which stems from an old custom to bring good fortune and to avert malevolent influences. The Yule log is also traditionally a birch log. The term 'given the birch' comes from the old tradition of punishment where someone was flogged with birch branches to drive the evil out of them.

Nowadays in the sauna we make twitches, known as vasta or vihta from birch twigs and use them to gently hit each other or ourselves with to stimulate the circulation and relax the muscles but which originated with the act of cleansing ourselves from evil spirits. Easter in Finland has now amalgamated Eastern and Western traditions and now both willow and birch twigs get decorated with brightly coloured paper and feathers and are sold to people by sooty faced children and witches reciting good luck poems. In the east people are whipped with them to cleanse after the long winter.

The chaga mushroom known for its anti cancer qualities feeds on and derives these antimutagenic properties from the white bark of the birch tree. It inhibits free radical oxidation which is very important in cancer therapy and it also induces the production of interferons which are an active part of DNA repair and balancing cell metabolism. It has been used in local medicine for the past 400 years as a cancer remedy.
It's little wonder that living here surrounded by so many birch trees that there is a special healing quality to the atmosphere. Just the very look of the tree is beautiful with its elegant white trunk and graceful branches, little wonder it is thought of as representing the Goddess.
If you would like to spend some time soaking up the healing qualities of this remarkable tree coupled with its forest mate the pine tree which resonates at the same frequency as the human body, then take a look at the holistic holidays available at Mairela - A Natural Healing Space.

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If you would like an overview of Finland then go to Wikipedia

The Finnish Tourist Board Official website is here

For a window into the Finnish culture go to Virtual Finland

For information on the Finnish Public Sector visit here

For a travel guide to Finland

The Lonely Planet guide to Finland

Local city guides can be found for Tampere to the west, Lahti to the south and Jyväskylä to the north.

The nearest town is Jämsä which is home to the ski resort Himos

The local village is Kuhmoinen (Finnish only)

Finnish weather can be found at Finnish Meteorlogical Institute and Northern Light activity at Aurorol Activity reports

For more information about holistic healing and to find a healer in your local area look here

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