More!

So, this is Pete again. In the previous newsletter, I began reflecting on Honesty Europe’s year in 2024. (If you missed it and want to read it, go search for it in your inbox or spam folder.)

Now, here is the rest of that 2024 recap (as well as the statistics)!

Movie Nights 

In the first months of 2024, I continued to host monthly Film Evenings in Amsterdam, just as I had been doing in previous years. I still especially love watching films that have themes related to the work we do in our workshops (e.g. characters making themselves miserable by not telling others what’s really going on for them and then finally sharing that). And I love hearing what triggers, emotions, thoughts, memories, images, etc. arose in the others who watched the film with me. And I’m still fascinated that so often the experiences of others are so different from mine. We watch the same film yet we each have our own unique experience. 

Yet in 2024, with me spending more time in Finland at Syvilla, I was no longer in Amsterdam every month to organize such film evenings. Fortunately, two attendees enjoyed the film evenings so much that they decided to continue hosting them in the months when I’m not available to do so. Thank you, Sterre & Lucien, for continuing to organize and host that event! (And for those of you in the Netherlands who are reading this: I’ll be hosting another film evening in Amsterdam next week, on Wednesday 15 January. If you want to join, send me a message!)

Tuulia and I would love to host film evenings as part of some sort of weekend overnight sleepover in Syvilla. We haven’t yet figured out how best to do so, though…

Dance Parties

Similar to the movie nights, in the first months of 2024, I continued to host monthly online dance parties, just as I had been doing so since March 2020.

As the year wore on, though, I noticed I was getting sloppier and lazier with the planning and the organizing of them. Instead of posting the dates for the dance parties months in advance, I was only announcing them a couple days before they began. I’m not sure what that was about. I seem to love the dancing and the check-ins / sharing that take place after the dancing, yet organizing beforehand was a task that I enjoyed doing less than in the past. (Also, I had lost my notebook that listed who had attended each dance, and each of 1000+(!) songs I’d played (and whom had requested it), which I was quite bummed about and seemed difficult for me to get over.)

For now, I foresee organizing the online Dancing Alone Together dance parties on an irregular (that is: non-monthly) basis. The New Year’s Day dance party will certainly continue. (Last week, I hosted our fifth annual New Year’s Day dance, which I enjoyed a lot!) And the annual Tuulia’s birthday dance in mid-March will also continue (the sixth one happening two months from now!).

Trainings

In 2024, Tuulia and I attended a Forest Mind training together, which we both enjoyed a lot (and are both now certified Forest Mind Instructors). Forest Mind is a method of shorter and longer exercises done in nature exploring one’s senses as well as things like breathing, emotions, decision-making, gratitude, challenges and so on. Very powerful stuff!

Related to this: this year we will be following a several month’s long Forest Bathing instructor’s course, which will culminate in a five-day training in a forest in Japan (the birthplace of forest bathing!). Forest Bathing or Shinrin-yoku is a practice or process of therapeutic relaxation where one spends time in a forest or natural atmosphere, focusing on sensory engagement to connect with nature. This is a concept we plan to make more explicit as a part of the retreats we lead in the woods of Finland. 

In the autumn, we again participated in a Couples Tantra Retreat. We liked it so much that we plan to attend another one in the spring.

Also in 2024, I attended two Finnish language intensive courses in the city of Jyväskylä, one was 1.5 weeks long and the other was three weeks long. At the end of this month, I’ll attend another 1.5-week Finnish intensive course and, in the summer, another three-week one. With us being here so much in Finland, the idea is that I’ll be able to communicate in Finnish someday. At the moment, I’m far from achieving that, yet I’ll continue taking steps to try to make it happen. [I’m tempted to make a self-deprecating joke here about how poor my Finnish still is yet I think that would actually be an attempt to get you, reader, to not judge me negatively for my low level of Finnish comprehension.]

The year 2024 also saw me and Tuulia take up going to the traditional Finnish countryside dance halls (lavatanssit). Both the dancing itself and the culture in the dance halls was a world new to both of us. Together we have followed more than 20 hours of lessons for foxtrot and Finnish tango and fusku (a Finnish type of swing dance). Despite the lessons, we’re both still rather clumsy and awkward when doing these dances. Yet we continue to go to the dance halls since our individual dance floor clumsiness and awkwardness seems to actually be in sync with the other! Maybe the most important aspect of this whole project is that we’re sharing new and different experiences together – and enjoying doing so!

Private Clients

Tuulia and I have each continued to see private clients in 2024, Tuulia probably more so than me. [Tuulia is even leading a couple in a session right now as I type this sentence.] My work continues to focus mainly on leading people in Somatic Experiencing sessions or preparing people for the honest conversations they want to have with significant others in their lives (particularly their parents). Meanwhile Tuulia continues to work largely with couples (work that she says she still really loves and also sometimes leaves her feeling exhausted).

Book?

As I reported in 2023’s year-end letter: in 2022, I created an 80,000-word manuscript about the power of one talking to their parents and sharing what they have been withholding from telling them (e.g. expressing their anger, sadness, appreciations, lies, worries, etc. to their parents). And by doing so completing a lot of the unfinished emotional business in one’s life and connecting with their parents more deeply. Much of that manuscript consists of inspirational success stories from fifty participants of our workshops.

I judge both the individual stories as well as the book as a whole to be amazing and powerful. Yet in 2024, I simply didn’t do much to finish the project and get it in the hands of readers. I’m still eager, though, for this work to be read by others. So, if all goes well, you’ll be able to read this book for yourself sometime in the future!

So, that’s the end of the year report for 2024 for Honesty Europe.

Happy New Year! I hope to see and/or hear from you in 2025!

Love and hugs,
Pete (& Tuulia) ❤️

Statistics! (Personally, my favorite part of the year-end newsletters!) 

Number of in-person, multi-day Honesty Europe workshops per year

2015:  1
2016:  11
2017:  18
2018:  21
2019:  19
2020:  17
2021:  17
2022:  22
2023:  22
2024:  19

Number of those that Tuulia & Pete led together per year

2018:  15
2019:  15
2020:  15
2021:  13
2022:  16
2023:  19
2024:  18

Tuulia-led-without-Pete workshops per year

2018: (6) Three in Finnish, two with Jakob, one with Taber
2019: (4) Two in Finnish, one with Anna, one with Seán
2020: (2) One in Finnish, one with Bernie
2021: (4) Three in Finnish, one with Bernie
2022: (5) Two in Finnish, one with Micha, one with Kasia, one with Michi
2023: (3) Three in Finnish (two of which with Sanni)
2024: (1) One in Finnish (with Sanni)

Types of workshops per year

2015:  1 weekend workshop
2016:  10 weekend workshops, 1 retreat
2017:  12 weekend workshops, 6 retreats
2018:  10 weekend workshops, 8 retreats, 3 8-day Intensives
2019:  10 weekend workshops, 7 retreats, 2 8-day Intensives
2020:  8 weekend workshops, 6 retreats, 3 8-day Intensives
2021:  7 weekend workshops, 7 retreats, 3 8-day Intensives
2022:  12 weekend workshops, 7 retreats, 3 8-day Intensives
2023:  10 weekend workshops, 9 retreats, 3 8-day Intensives
2024:  8 weekend workshops, 8 retreats, 3 8-day Intensives

Number of countries per year

2015:  1 country (Netherlands)
2016:  5 countries (Finland, Netherlands, Germany, U.K., Denmark)
2017:  8 countries (Finland, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, U.K., Switzerland, Greece, Lithuania)
2018:  8 countries (Finland, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Spain, Greece, U.K., Italy)
2019:  7 countries (Finland, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Spain, Greece, Switzerland)
2020:  5 countries (Finland, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Spain)
2021:  6 countries (Finland, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Spain, Switzerland)
2022:  6 countries (Finland, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Spain, Denmark)
2023:  5 countries (Finland, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Denmark)
2024:  5 countries (Finland, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Denmark)

Number of people attended / number of spots available / percentage of filled spots

2018:  300 / 322 / 93.2%
2019:  277 / 300 / 92.3%
2020:  242 / 267 / 90.6%
2021:  245 / 272 / 90.0%
2022:  320 / 369 / 86.7%
2023:  309 / 367 / 84.2%
2024:  223 / 296 / 75.3%

Female-to-male ratio per 100 participants (these are estimates since, of course, not all of our workshop participants identify as either of these genders)

2018:  58:42
2019:  55:45
2020:  63:37
2021:  59:41
2022:  55:45
2023:  49:51
2024:  53:47