How Relaxscape reshaped me…

I arrived in Portugal to start my new life, after 3 days of driving from the UK, with my two cats in the back of the car. It was the beginning of August and there was a sudden heatwave. We drove down through endless France, in a car with no aircon, the air through the open window blowing hotter and hotter, and the roads busier and busier as the whole of Europe set off for their annual holiday. Every so often the cats would rouse from their tranquilised sleep, and start miaowing (they hate driving), and I’d grab the tranquilising spray (herbal of course) and squirt it at them to stop them stressing at the unfamiliar countryside flashing past. We stopped one night in a motel in France (top floor, that was fun wrestling their cage up a narrow winding stairway!), and the next night in Spain. Coaxing them back into the cage each morning took almost longer than the drive! On the third day, we arrived, before the furniture van which wasn’t due for another few weeks. I had a camping chair and an inflatable mattress, and for the first couple of days, we just sat in the doorway of the stone adega (the wine/olive oil cellar, so beautifully cool!) and acclimatised, watching the silver flash of the olives trees as the sun danced over them and listening to the birds and the cicadas.

My parents are British, but I was born in France, and also grew up in Italy and Holland, before going to Edinburgh, Scotland to university, and from there down to London to work. It seems like a whole different life, happening to a different person, when I talk about it now; various different jobs, some more corporate than others, the last one as a headhunter, until the credit crunch in 2008/9, where eventually the company I was working for was taken over and I was given a redundancy payout. My ticket to freedom! I used the money to train as a coach, and have been self-employed ever since. I was in a turbulent relationship (then marriage) for 20 years (now I can see clearly my part in the co-dependent dynamic, and the reasons why), and eventually I found enough self-worth to end the marriage. I’d never really felt like the UK was my home, something inside was always tugging me towards living abroad again, so once the dust had settled from the divorce and I was back on my feet, I started thinking seriously about a move. At that time, mindfulness was a fairly new concept, but it really spoke to my soul, and I began to envision a place in nature where people going through change could come and work things out in the restorative peace of nature, away from their day-to-day pressures.

In 2018 I took the plunge! Sold up in the UK, got rid of most of my stuff and off we set, the cats and I, on our road trip. After seven months of building and restoration work, creating the vision for the property as I went along, having never done anything like this before (that’s a story for another time!), I opened Relaxscape to the first retreat guests in April 2019. In September of that year, I decided it might be useful to train as a yoga teacher too, so I could run some yoga sessions during the retreats without always having to try to find a yoga teacher. As I was running everything on my own here, I couldn’t take too much time off, so found a 2-week course in Spain, a crazy intense training which nearly broke me but was fulfilling and great fun at the same time :) And then, out of the blue, the pandemic started shutting everything down…for a new business, reliant on tourism and group activities, it meant that I had to start to reinvent myself again. I was grateful for the yoga training and the outdoor yoga platform, as it meant that I could give yoga classes in safety, and people were also asking me for online classes. And so, all of a sudden I had become a yoga teacher, giving sessions in Portuguese as well as English! Yoga also turned out to be a great teacher for me.

The time alone in between also gave me the opportunity to really spend time in nature. I started learning about the plants and herbal home remedies and healing teas from the older villagers, and the flowers and leaves also started to inspire me to start creating “Nature Art”. The more immersed in nature I became, the more I began to realise how truly part of nature we are, and how nature helps to heal us, and leads us back to ourselves if we sit still enough and listen. I started writing poetry, it started to pour out of me, in praise of nature, reflections on the Universe, us, life. They’re published now, in two volumes: “Dancing with Shadows - Belinda Raitt Collected Poems 2021 - 2023”, which you can find in various online bookshops and buy direct from me if you are interested. And then somehow, things were never really the same after that time. I carried on running retreats, but began to feel that it was all a bit hollow, that it wasn’t what I was meant to be doing, it wasn’t aligned with my soul. I had begun to see so clearly that the way forward is inward, that our guidance, our strength, our knowledge, comes from within (directly from Source, our Higher Self, Spirit, the Divine, God, the Universe, whatever name you choose to give it!) I found that people coming on retreats or for healing/therapy sessions were usually expecting a quick fix or ready-made “one size fits all answer”, handing the responsibility for their own wellbeing over to someone else. And while there are many people in the wellness and spiritual industry (industry is really all it is to some!) who are happy to profit from that and proclaim themselves as such healers, it didn’t sit right with me.

I started creating art, and started playing the piano again, which I hadn’t done for many years. I joined a local (Portuguese) community choir, and from there, discovered a love for singing fado. I started painting too, and now I realise that this is all I want to do - or rather, be. I have moved into the being, creating phase of my life now. It’s been fun but hard work running, on my own, a tourism business with a big house and land, and it’s beginning to make less and less sense to me, this way of house ownership and working. Property and house ownership are just another way of keeping us trapped in the loop of endless consumerism, maintenance, financial burdens, societal norms…I have been dreaming of just living in a small eco-friendly hut on a small bit of land somewhere now! I feel I need the unencumbered freedom to be able to create more: I have books I want to write (let alone music and songs!), without being pulled away always by guests or house maintenance or marketing etc. So I was thinking about selling up, but something has been holding me back. I’ve poured a lot into making this house and space a sanctuary for people who need it, and I have always felt that this is what this land and place is meant to provide. Not just for me, for others as well. And a few weeks ago, I woke up with a clear sense that I had received a message: “Turn Relaxscape into a co-living shared space for women who need it, the same way you did when you were starting over.” And so here it is, Relaxscape Co-living, for women who need to find themselves again. It’s helped me find myself again, I hope it will you too.