with Dr Emily Troscianko & Andreas Wren
Finding flow—on and off the mat
Date and time: Saturday 15 February 2026, 11 to 5
Place: Kirtlington village hall (view in Maps)
Cost: £45
This event is the first in a 2026 series: If you like this, save the dates for the rest! They’ll be on Sunday 17 May, Sunday 13 September, and Sunday 15 November, with details of format to come.
Everyday life often feels incompatible with patient, quiet focus on things we care about. We may have all kinds of things we love doing, or great ideas for projects we keep telling ourselves we’ll make time for, but because these things are “unnecessary”, we give priority to work, family, and life admin, etc—almost without realizing that’s what we’re doing. This 6-hour retreat day is designed to give you protected time and space to start, continue, or finish an activity or project that’s meaningful to you. Maybe it’s generating a first draft of that short story you’ve had the idea for, or coming up with a filing system for 2025’s photos that actually works, or finally knitting that hat, or trying out that collage, or simply reading lots of that wonderful book you started months ago—you choose.
But this event is not just hours sitting in a room with strangers awkwardly doing something supposedly self-improving. This is a retreat day in the fullest sense: retreating from ordinary life to find focus, creativity, and expansion in a protected place where others are doing the same. And it’s grounded in the reality that everything you do with your mind is shaped by your body, so the timed sessions devoted to your chosen activity are interspersed with physical sessions designed to help you find physical ease, flow, and presence. These include structured breathwork, seated stretching sequences, and a full but gentle yoga practice. We’ll also enjoy a bring-and-share lunch and a short post-prandial outdoor walk, and each focus session is preceded by mini sequences intended to help you harness your concentration, warm up your mind, and articulate your intentions, and is followed by some simple reviewing of what you did, how it felt, and what you can learn about yourself and the task at hand.
We end the day by articulating what we’ve learnt and feeding the learning into designing a detailed behavioural experiment to help us translate something specific that we’ve valued from the day into our everyday life. And you’ll come away with a range of tools and practices that you can adapt for your own purposes.
Your two facilitators have decades of experience in convening workshops that create unusual experiences. Dr Emily Troscianko is a coach, writer, and researcher who designs habit-focused academic writing workshops; Andreas Wren is a yoga and pilates instructor who brings irreverent humour and physical precision to all his group and 1:1 work.
To help protect the space for our collective concentration and relaxation, we ask all participants to commit to being free of phone, email, and other e-distractions for the whole day, including the breaks, so we can all benefit from each other’s help in making ourselves unavailable to the rest of the world for this pocket of weekend time. A cake tin for phone relinquishment will be provided! We also ask that you arrive on time and stay for the duration.
The day runs from 11 to 5 and includes 4 timed focus sessions, 3 body sessions with targeted focal points, and all our warm-up and reflective review sequences in between. Plus of course lunch and tea and coffee on tap!
We hope you’ll come away at 5 pm feeling glad that you took this time for yourself and for the activity that matters to you, despite all the easy reasons not to.
Any questions, reach out to us at emily@troscianko.com. Or book your place via the link below.
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(By booking, you confirm that you have read and agree to the event principles and pragmatics set out here.)
Emily T. Troscianko 