Eliana Harvey

In 1986, Eliana Harvey and her husband opened the doors of Middle Piccadilly Rural Retreat in the quiet Dorset countryside near Sherborne. What began as a home for detox, rest and quiet care grew, over the decades, into one of England's most gently held places of shamanic healing — a home from home for guests looking for a way back to themselves.

Eliana is the founder of Shamanka — the School of Women's Shamanism, and has spent a lifetime training practitioners in ceremony, drum, breath and feather. In her late eighties she was still practising yoga each morning as she had done every day since she was thirty — twenty quiet minutes, without fanfare, without lycra, without Sweaty Betty.

Guests remember the greeting at the door — cheerful, unhurried — and the first instruction of the stay: "try not to do any work while you're here."They remember her calling to the winds of the west with an eagle feather in her hand; sitting quietly at the side of the massage table; asking, with startling perception, about a childhood she had only just heard about. They remember being told to yell — louder — and being held gently while they did.

She sat with the dying, the grieving, the lost and the searching. She was, one writer put it, "very likeable, friendly" — a woman whose whole practice was simply to not exile anything. The land at Middle Piccadilly grew around that work. What she leaves behind is not a business. It is a living practice, and a family of people who now carry it.

Her son Dominic Harvey has stewarded the retreat alongside her for thirty years — cooking the raw nut burgers and cacao cheesecakes guests still write home about, running the kitchen, holding the day-to-day. With her blessing he now formally takes his place as the elder.

"A home from home — they weren't lying."— Becki Burrows, OhDearyMe (2018)

Further reading:shamanka.com · middlepiccadilly.com