Come sit in the circle. Leave restored.
Small group retreats and workshops that help you settle your nervous system, understand your inner world, and return to your life with something steady to hold.
A circle is a room with no head of the table.
Most rooms we enter have a front and a back, a person who leads and people who follow. A circle removes that. Everyone faces everyone. Nobody is positioned above anybody else.
In a circle, the work is shared. Ruth holds the container, the timing, and the safety of the space, but the insight belongs to the group. You will be invited to speak, and you will be equally free to simply listen.
This is the format for every retreat and every workshop Circle and Rest offers, in person and online, wherever in the world the gathering happens to be.
Rest is a practice with four movements.
The REST framework, Restore, Equip, Sustain, Transform, has been practised through REST International, Ruth's family charity, for more than 30 years. Ruth brings the same four movements into every circle she holds.
Restore
Slowing the nervous system down enough to feel what has been carried, and setting some of it down.
Equip
Practical tools, boundaries, breath, and language, that you can use again long after the circle ends.
Sustain
Building the habits and the community that keep the work alive between gatherings.
Transform
Letting the returning become a lasting shift in how you live, not a single afternoon.
Held by Ruth Unaegbu
Ruth Unaegbu is a Registered Clinical Counsellor, Approved Clinical Supervisor, and Certified Brainspotting Consultant based in Vancouver. Her work draws on AEDP, Internal Family Systems, and Brainspotting, and on a career spent helping people feel what they feel without being overwhelmed by it.
She built Circle and Rest to bring two things together. The first is the REST framework, four movements of restoring, equipping, sustaining, and transforming that her family has practised through REST International for more than 30 years. The second is the circle itself, a room where everyone can see everyone, nobody performs, and what is said is held by the whole group.
Her gatherings are for adults who want a steadier nervous system, a clearer relationship with their inner world, and the company of others doing the same work. Therapists come to rest from holding others. Performers come because Ruth is one too, a trained actress who knows how much of the work lives in the body.
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