So, this is Pete again. In the previous newsletter, I began reflecting on Honesty Europe’s year in 2024.…

Thanks for being part of our year!
This is Pete. Tuulia usually writes these newsletters. Over the past few days, while Tuulia and I have huddled and cuddled here in our candlelit old farmhouse beside frozen Lake Koves in Finland, I’ve been thinking back on 2024 and what Tuulia and I did this past year in terms of organizing and leading events. ❄️
(I copy/pasted the above paragraph from what I wrote for each end-of-the-year newsletter since 2018. All the above information is again relevant with just the year and the location – now Syvilla – being different…)
You’ll find the statistics of our Honesty Europe in-person workshops and retreats (that I make very important for these year-end reports!) at the end of this letter.
Notable Events of 2024 ✨
The biggest event of 2024 for me and Tuulia happened early in the year. At the beginning of February, we signed the paperwork and forked over the money to become full owners of Syvilla. Whoop whoop! After two years of being co-owners of the retreat center with Hannu, we were then suddenly in charge of everything. We were excited that we could then set up things at Syvilla the way we preferred. At the same time, the responsibility of being full-owners scared us (well, scared me) since if something broke or went wrong, all the responsibility for dealing with it now rested solely on our shoulders.
In the winter, Tuulia and I spent a lot of time organizing the interiors of the main building and removing lots of furnishings that we didn’t want to keep. (Fortunately, the lady running the secondhand shop in town was eager to receive almost everything we offered her!)
In the spring, we hosted the first Help Out / Hang Out week at Syvilla. About 20 friends came and helped us prepare Syvilla for the summer by putting the dock in the lake, erecting the yurt, painting the exteriors of buildings, stacking firewood, removing lots of junk, etc. They also hung out with us in the sauna, the jacuzzi, the lake, the forest, the sunshine, etc. Lots of work yet also lots of fun!
That was immediately followed by our Housewarming Party weekend. About 25 friends spent a weekend with us to celebrate Syvilla now being officially ours. We ate a lot and used the other sauna – the smoke sauna – for the first time. Also, Hannu gave our group a lovely and informative guided trip to our nearby protected forest and marsh area Alkkianvuori.
Our Break
The other big event for us in 2024 came in the spring when Tuulia and I took an almost three-month break from leading workshops and retreats. Those were the first calendar months without us doing such work in 7.5 years! We had fears of having no income and of losing our momentum with our workshop-leading routines. Yet, we were also both getting tired of the amount that we had been working and wanted to take time away from working in order to better assess what we want to be doing with our lives.
During the break, we enjoyed many slow days at Syvilla and we explored the forest immediately surrounding the retreat center as well as forests (and towns) in the larger surrounding area.
We also went to Japan where we soaked in 14-15 different hot spring onsens. And we hiked over mountains and through forests. We did a three-day hike on the Kumano Kodo trail, where we chatted together much of the time we were walking. Upon completing the hike, I realized that we had managed to do the entire three-day hike without either of us saying a single word about our work (not about organizing workshops, not about running Syvilla, not about leading groups, etc.). I was quite amazed. I then realized that that was what I had ultimately been hoping for in this three-month break: to get to a point where work was so distant to us that we could talk for hours and hours for three days with none of the chatter having anything to do with work. ⛰️
In our first workshop after the break, I felt quite rusty in the opening hour. I lost my train of thought several times while talking to the group and simply missed some of the standard things we say or do at the beginning of our workshops. In general, I judged I wasn’t at the top of my game. Yet, by the second or third hour, I began to find my groove again. In the days afterward, I discovered a renewed passion and eagerness for doing the work Tuulia and I do in the workshop. I credit the break we’d taken for this rejuvenation!
Our Workshops
The year began with us cancelling a workshop in Stockholm. After receiving several requests for us to come lead a workshop in Sweden, we scheduled our first-ever workshop in that country for the first week of January 2024. Just a few weeks before the workshop was to take place, though, we had just one solitary registration for it. So we canceled it. Nevertheless, we didn’t give up! We decided to try to organize another weekend workshop in Stockholm for January 2025. And I’m glad we did since the response has been much different! At the moment I’m writing, 23(!) people are either registered for the workshop or are on a waiting list hoping to join. I’m very happy about that. (And we’re already scheduling another Stockholm workshop for later in 2025!)
Aside from the break, our workshop calendar more or less followed much of the pattern it has had for the past few years. We led seven retreats at Syvilla in 2024 as well as weekend workshops (in Amsterdam, Helsinki and Copenhagen) throughout the year.
As usual, we led three 8-day Intensives. The first was in the winter, on Tenerife, and the other two during the summer, at Syvilla. One major change was that after leading 8-day Intensives on Mallorca for five straight Octobers, last year we chose to stay at Syvilla in October to help get the place ready for winter (and so Tuulia could go into the forest just about every day – sometimes twice or thrice in a day! – to hunt mushrooms and pick lingonberries. I enjoyed witnessing her boast about how she’d never collected as many mushrooms as she did this past autumn!) Anyway, I’m looking forward to our first 8-day Intensive of 2025, in a few weeks, on the island of La Palma.
Something new that I enjoyed a lot was our first Professional Chairwork Training, that we led at Syvilla in August. I liked teaching others the skills and knowledge that Tuulia and I have acquired in how to lead people in so-called chairwork, where a client talks to a significant person in an empty chair or to a part of themself in an empty chair, etc. I liked thinking that each of the attendees could use these skills in their practice, without that practice necessarily being leading workshops like ours. When the training ended, I immediately began eagerly writing down my notes for next summer’s Professional Chairwork Training!
Another highlight for me was hosting our fifth Honesty Gathering retreat, this time with more than 40 people attending. I still really love the concept of having a larger group of people coming together (almost all alumni of our other workshops) and us offering concurrent workshop sessions led by various trainers that attendees can pick and choose from. At this year’s Gathering, I found myself saying to various co-leaders and attendees: “I think this is the smoothest Gathering we’ve ever had!” And I enjoyed hearing back from others similar thoughts. I also enjoyed seeing that within weeks after the 2024 Gathering ended, the 2025 Gathering was already more than half booked—eleven months in advance! I took this as a sign that others are as excited as I am for the next Gathering. (Shameless yet practical plug: If you also want to join, ensure your spot by booking it soon! 17-21 September near Berlin!)
In 2024, we continued to host free Webinars (with a lot of great support from our friend Tutur). In the latter part of the year, Tuulia began co-leading the webinars with various people on a variety of topics such as Boundaries, Joy and Victimhood.
Also in 2024, Tuulia led Honest Date Nights in Tampere and Helsinki as well as a Community Day in Tampere. And in 2025, she will lead our first-ever weekend workshop to take place in Tampere (in Finnish!), just a 35-minute train ride from our home in Parkano. (During that same weekend, I’ll be leading a workshop in London for the first time in 7.5(!) years.)
Oh, and in 2024, Tuulia co-led with our friend Kasia Mitschke a four-week online “UnF*ck Your Boundaries” Course. They liked it so much that they will be leading another one, starting in a couple of weeks.
We also have continued our online forums Honesty Europe and the private Facebook group Honesty Europe Community for the people who already joined workshops with us.
Practitioner Program
For the sixth straight calendar year, in 2024 we again ran our Practitioner Program where people work more closely with us over the course of the year, attending a number of workshops as well as participating in large-group monthly themed calls and ongoing small-group meetings. Towards the end of 2023, though, not many people seemed interested in joining the program. Tuulia and I discussed the matter and we both agreed that us taking a year off from running the program sounded enticing, especially as it would go well with our 3-month break from leading workshops.
Yet in late December 2023, several people asked to join the Practitioner Program so we decided to keep the registration open and start the year-long program in February instead of the usual January. Now, as we come to an end of the 2024 PP, I can reflect and say that I enjoyed working with and witnessing this year’s group.
And something similar has happened this year. Tuulia and I were considering dropping the program for 2025, then several people asked to join it, and now we’ll be running it from February 2025 through January 2026. I’m looking forward to our seventh year of the PP!
[OK, this is actually only about halfway through the year-end report that I wrote for 2024, and longer than I thought it would be! Tuulia said she doesn’t think people have the stomach to digest all this in one reading. So I’m cutting this one newsletter into two! In a few days, we’ll send out Part Two of my look back at Honesty Europe’s 2024, which will include the annual statistics!]
Love and hugs,
Pete (& Tuulia) ❤️