A creative retreat in Greece with Rom Soul Escapes featuring Writing As Medicine.
My work has always begun with a simple but demanding question: how do we live well, with dignity and care, in difficult times? When I wrote my book Bella Figura, it wasn’t about style or surface, but about reclaiming presence — about choosing slowness over speed, beauty over brutality, attention over numbness. It was an attempt to adapt an Italian philosophy of living well into a contemporary practice: one that insists our daily choices, our rituals, and the way we meet one another are ethical acts.
Over time, this philosophy found another form. Writing As Medicine grew from the understanding that when we cannot tell our own stories, we lose agency. Our inner lives are overwritten by dominant narratives, trauma, shame or silence. Writing — done gently, honestly, in a held space — becomes a way back to authorship. Not to produce perfect sentences, but to remember ourselves.
Bringing these two strands together felt inevitable. And there was ever only one place it could happen: Greece. This is a landscape steeped in myth, storytelling and collective memory, where the land itself seems to hum with ancient questions about fate, belonging and transformation. To arrive here is to feel time stretch and soften. The air smells of salt and wild herbs. Light bounces off whitewashed walls and the sea changes colour by the hour — from pale jade in the morning to deep cobalt at dusk.
Days are shaped with intention but never rigidity. Mornings begin with movement sessions that prioritise flow, mobility and embodied confidence — gentle yet grounding practices that help participants come back into their bodies after years of living too much in their heads. There is something quietly powerful about moving together as the sun rises, feet on warm stone, breath syncing with the rhythm of the sea.
Writing sessions follow, not as academic workshops but as invitations. Participants write in response to prompts drawn from myth, memory and lived experience. Stories emerge slowly, held within a safe community where nothing is judged or consumed. Grief, rage, love and longing are given space to breathe. So too are joy and laughter.
Afternoons belong to Greece itself. Boat trips across glittering water. Long swims. Dance lessons. Conversations that wander and deepen. Shared meals full of sunlight, olive oil and laughter, where strangers slowly become something else — witnesses, companions, friends.
What makes this gathering different is its refusal to position healing as grim or solitary. In the right company, with creativity, dancing, swimming and heart- to-hearts, change happens almost sideways. My “Bella Figura” philosophy insists that pleasure, beauty and connection are not indulgences but necessities — especially in a world shaped by fracture, displacement and fear-driven narratives.
Throughout history, storytelling has been a form of resistance and survival. By gathering in this place, by writing and living together with care, something subtle begins to repair. Isolation loosens its grip. Complexity returns. And from that shared ground, we are reminded that another way of being — more human, more spacious, more alive — has always been possible.
Kamin Mohammadi is author of Bella Figura: How to Live Love and Eat the Italian Way and founder of Writing As Medicine.
