Meet Susan Allen
Susan Allen is the founder of Retreats NZ and the leading facilitator on our New Zealand retreats.
Susan’s mission is to play a part in the awakening of human consciousness where all people experience ease, feel connected, and can flourish to their fullest potential. She is inspired to demystify meditation by sharing accessible, transformative practices that cultivate ease, expand the heart and restore our sense of connection and belonging.
If you’re looking for a New Zealand wellness retreat, come and learn from one of New Zealand’s most experienced and knowledgeable practitioners.
Susan has been teaching yoga and meditation for over 22 years and running New Zealand retreats for over 15 years. Following a career in Mechanical Engineering, Susan came across these practices while travelling in India in 1999. Like many before her she felt a strong attraction to this investigative and transformative path.
Susan is the founder of Yoga Ground, yoga and meditation studios in Auckland and Wanaka, Aotearoa, New Zealand. She also owns The Yoga Transition, a yoga teacher mentoring business and Entering The Stream, a world class online yoga and meditation platform.
As well as an in-depth knowledge of these age-old practices, Susan also has a distinct talent of delivery, communicating complex sophisticated ideas in a way that is easily digestible and clear.
Having practised meditation as a teenager, meditation has been a lifelong passion of Susans. She has been lucky enough to study under some of the great living meditation masters. These include Dr. Dan Brown – Tibetan Buddhist teacher as well as clinical psychologist at Harvard Medical School, Osho – contemporary meditation teacher in Pune, India, secular Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor, emptiness master Rob Burbea and vipassana teacher Goenke.
Travelling to India in 1999, Susan was instantly drawn to the blend of the physical and mental that yoga offers. In 2002 she studied her first yoga teacher training in the Sivananda lineage in Uttarkashi, India. Rooted in traditional yoga, as opposed to the contemporary fitness yoga movement, this school offered a good foundation in the philosophy and cultural aspects of yoga. In years that followed she then studied extensively in the Anusara tradition with John Friend and the Krishnamacharya tradition with Gary Kraftsow and Vincent Bolletta. These two lineages offer a depth of knowledge in the asana branch of the practice with particular emphasis on personalising the practice for the individual.
In 2012 after experiencing a major shift in her health attending the Buteyko Method breathing course in Auckland, she subsequently trained to become a breathing practitioner. Buteyko Method is a sophisticated breathing re-training technique to normalise dysfunctional breathing patterns. This knowledge added depth and understanding to what she had previously learnt through the pranayama yogic practices.
Susan's teaching method
Relevance – Susan’s vision is to demystify these ancient practices of yoga and meditation and present them in a contemporary manner that is relevant and inspiring to New Zealand retreat participants.
Personalisation – everyone’s meditation and yoga experience will be different. A key part of the meditation and yoga teacher/student relationship is the opportunity to ask questions and get personal feedback. Feedback and personalisation of the practice is a key part of our retreat format.
Practical and structured – having previously worked as a mechanical engineer, Susan is skilful at presenting complex material in a structured and clear manner.
Bringing the practice off the cushion – At our meditation retreats Susan will give you numerous suggestions around how to bring the practice and principles of meditation off the cushion. How the practice can transform our daily moment to moment experiences, our relationships and our lives is the central goal.
Susan's vision is to demystify the ancient practices of yoga and meditation and present them in a contemporary style that is relevant and inspiring to participants
Meditation approach
The meditation practices and discussion will have a particular emphasis on cultivating quietness and steadiness in the mind as well as cultivating insights that bring freedom and peace of mind into our everyday life. Tibetan Buddhist meditations value an intelligent and structured approach to investigating ‘What is the mind?’ and consequently frame meditation in a practical and methodical way. The meditation practices will be taken from the Mahamudra and Dzogchen Tibetan Buddhist tradition. These will be presented in a secular, practical fashion.
3. Quiet time to nourish and gain inspiration on a path forward.
What are the meditation practices?
Almost all meditation techniques have a concentration component. When we become skilful in paying attention, then the tendency to get lost in thought reduces and the mind begins to quieten. These are often called tranquility practices. Concentration objects may include the breath, mindfulness of body sensations or concentration on an object such as sound or mantra. On this retreat you will learn refinement techniques to improve the stability of your concentration or mindfulness. The stability of mind means peace of mind, we are more able to focus in our daily life, we indulge less in negative thought patterns, our stress levels decrease, and we feel more at ease. These include intensifying practices which are used to bring greater awareness to background thoughts as well as to the dullness that can develop in the mind when meditating. If your meditation progress is stagnating then this improvement in looking more closely at the object of your concentration will enable you to start progressing again. It is through this increased focus that we experience a stilling of the busynessof the mind; a tranquility and clarity arise.
Emptiness practices are a central component of Buddhist meditation. Emptiness means ‘a construction of mind.’ In our meditation, and of course in our daily lives as well, we get caught up in, and strongly identified with our thoughts and emotions. On this retreat we will introduce emptiness of self, emptiness of thought and emptiness of emotion practices. This does not mean having no self, thoughts or emotions but rather realising experientially how our thoughts and emotions are things that the mind is constructing. When we learn this, we become less emotionally reactive in our relationships and with ourselves, we tend to be more open and less rigidly entrenched in our views and opinions. These practices are liberating and freeing, and most importantly they bring ease and joy.
Much of our daily life we tend to be busy thinking, we operate a lot out of thought, and for some of us many of these thoughts are repetitive and negative. However when we learn to still the fluctuations of thought we are able to shift to spending more time in awareness, an awareness that is beyond the busyness of thinking. When we operate out of awareness there is no reactivity and we feel less self-centred and more connected to others; We will investigate and examine the characteristics of operating out of awareness as opposed to thought – exploring qualities such as spaciousness, connectedness, and the tendency to fabricate experience. On this retreat we will then practice taking this off the cushion as we interact with others and the nature around us.
Each of us have habits that we develop in our practice, some serve our meditation and others don’t. On our meditation retreats Susan will encourage you to be observant and disciplined in the habits that support your practice and bring more awareness to those that don’t, both on and off the cushion. Personal suggestions will be given to each student so that you can be inspired to develop this life changing and abundant practice. If you are looking to find a silent retreat or health and wellness retreat in New Zealand, this expert guidance could be just what you’re looking for.
Yoga approach
Retreats NZ, led by Susan Allen offers an authentic yoga practice that has a thoughtful, careful and intelligent approach. You will be invited to cultivate strength, mobility, awareness and thoughtfulness in the yoga practices offered. We have little interest in doing a yoga circus. Our yoga sessions will have plenty of challenging principles for you to work with, from developing your asana practice in a safe way, to cultivating self awareness of body and mind. The Yoga sequences taught are slow, thoughtful and spacious. They are suitable for all levels of practitioners.
From many years of practicing and teaching Susan is constantly encouraging students to make the practice their own. Regular practice of yoga, from asana to meditation to pranayama, is truly transformative when one decides on that course. As one practices more the division between practice and life starts to blur and yoga becomes a way of life as opposed to something you pay to go to a studio to do. It is this progression that Susan encourages her students towards.
In many ways the yoga asana and meditation practices serves each other. The mindfulness and equanimity learnt in meditation create a means for exploring body and breath in yoga asana – developing sensitivity, awareness and a spaciousness in the body. Unfortunately many yoga approaches have lost this context of the practice and are just teaching a fitness or a stretching practice. Susan is a proponent in this area encouraging and mentoring teachers to rediscover this broader, more transformative context for asana work.
Upcoming India and New Zealand retreats
Retreats NZ runs meditation and yoga retreats New Zealand wide as well as well as to the spiritual heartland of India. If you are looking to deepen your practice or your intention is simply to have some quiet time to yourself, we’d love to have you join us.
Coromandel
28 May – 2 June
Wanaka
13-15 June
Auckland
23 – 27 July
India
27 Sept – 8 Oct
Wanaka
5-9 November
If you're looking for the best wellness retreats New Zealand has to offer, Susan Allen's experience and guidance could be just what you're looking for.
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