• This 3-Day Acting Intensive will take place in Woodstock, New York
  🗓️ Monday thru Wednesday
  August 3rd to 5th 2026
  11am to 6pm
  
  Location
  📍Sage Studio
  6 Deming Street 2nd Floor
  Woodstock, NY 12498
  USA

• Helena wishes to keep the classes limited to 10 to 12 participants.
• You will be paired up with a scene partner and you will decide on a scene to work on where you will get to go deeper into character and your process.  

Fee is offered on a sliding scale: 
**The different prices are designed to make it more affordable to more people.
All the tickets are exactly the same.
It's based on an integrity and honesty system :)

Standard: One payment of €550 EUR
Supported: One payment of €500 EUR
High Support: One payment of €450 EUR

Click this link below to read our terms and conditions 

https://www.helenawalshempowermentstudios.com/retreatterms

What is The Creative Path? 

"The Creative Path™: The Actor's Practice to the Integrated Actor" is a new groundbreaking methodology. This
revolutionary approach weaves together the creative mind and body in relationship
with story, others, the natural world, and the deep intelligence of the nervous system.
Designed to help you not just survive but to thrive in your life and art. This method
supports nervous system regulation, enabling you to stay grounded, present, and
expressive in highly pressurised environments. Through this approach your
relationship to, and your experience of, your creative process will be deeply
transformed. This lays the foundations for authentic expression, a vivid imagination,
and a capacity to be playful in the unknown nature of your life and career.

The Creative Path to the Integrated Actor invites you to discover, through Helena’s
teaching, your own unique creative process that inspires you. At its core, the work is
about your Creative Sense of Self, your Creative Identity, and your relationship to
Creative Source—placing the responsibility for your artistry back where it belongs:
Grounded in your unique creative essence.

In an industry that is often disorienting and dysregulating, this approach offers a
system of care for the artist. Drawing on nervous system regulation and sensory
awareness, it supports actors in building internal safety, trust, and creative
autonomy—so that you are no longer dependent on external conditions to access
your work.

You will be introduced to a three-phase process. Each phase has 2 layers, one
leading to your life and the other leading to your acting:

Rebalance: Creative Sense of Self – Integrating your creative mind and body
through your different channels of perception for your life and career. These
channels - imagination, sensation, senses, feeling, and meaning, are encouraged to
open up through pleasure, ease, and comfort. This moves your acting from intensity
to complexity, giving you much more specificity, nuance, and subtlety in how you
experience the story. It will also address feelings of imposter syndrome, inner critic,
anxiety, as energies you can include as creative material. Your whole neurobiology
will feel more balanced and you will have much more capacity to play with in your
acting.

Restore: Creative Identity – For your life you will build a sustainable, resourced and
artistic practice rooted in relationship, community, and the natural world, helping you
feel more restored, rested, and rejuvenated. In essence reimagining a creative
system that is truly congruent with the truth of who you are. For your acting you will
discover a whole new approach to story that will add multiple layers and dimensions
to the complexity of your storytelling.

Remember: Creative Source – Accessing flow, play, and freedom in your life will
make it much easier for you to enjoy auditions, filming, and performing on stage.
This phase builds your capacity to enjoy the mystery between Action! and Cut!,
between you and the audience. You will start to truly enjoy auditioning as a moment
of exploration rather than presentation. You will begin to experience everything that
is offered to you in any given moment as a gift to guide you to the next moment, truly
feeling that acting is a constant exploration and alchemy of the here and now.

This work is not about technique. It is about noticing what is already there—and
learning how to include it, trust it, and create from it.
Designed for professional actors navigating the demands of the industry, this
seminar offers a grounded, empowering approach to sustaining your craft,
deepening your originality, and reconnecting with the art of being human.

What is Fitzmaurice Voicework®?
The purpose of Fitzmaurice Voicework® is to support people in finding and using their unique voices—in healthy, clear, and creative ways—while developing greater freedom and presence.

Fitzmaurice Voicework® combines adaptations of classical voice training techniques with modifications of yoga, shiatsu, bioenergetics, energy work, and many other disciplines (see primary sources for more information). This integration serves to harmonize the voluntary and involuntary aspects of the nervous system, and the voice.

Through deep and practical explorations of the dynamics between body, breath, voice, imagination, and language, the work develops vibrant voices that communicate intention and feeling without excess effort.

Fitzmaurice Voicework focuses on the whole human voice, and can support speaking for performance, public speaking, singing, voice with movement, vocal rehabilitation, and developing greater presence. Since breath and voice lie at the intersection of the material and the non-material, this work can also assist in creative, intellectual, and spiritual growth. Visit Writings to explore further.

Where is it taught?
Fitzmaurice Voicework® is taught at Yale School of Drama, Harvard University/American Repertory Theatre's Institute for Advanced Theatre Training, New York University's Graduate Acting Program (and some NYU undergraduate studios), the University of California-Irvine, and hundreds of other institutions around the world.

Fitzmaurice Voicework® includes:

Destructuring  
Destructuring promotes awareness and aliveness in the body, spontaneous and free breathing, and wide-ranging vocal expressivity—using Tremorwork®, a variety of other dynamic exercises, and hands-on work.

Restructuring
Restructuring encourages a healthy economy of effort while speaking or singing—and a deep connection to language and listener—using modified bel canto techniques and the "focus line."  

Presence
Presence work develops natural vibrancy and the capacity to be open to the world while still having healthy boundaries. It is rooted in being fluidly aware of internal and external experiences while focusing on what matters in the moment.

Play
Play invites you to bring your whole spirit and curiosity to whatever you're engaging with. Within the context of play, you can explore all applications of Fitzmaurice Voicework.

Organic Intelligence (OI) is a unique theory and clinical practise of human empowerment, resiliency, and compassion to resolve the effects of stress and anxiety. 

This work helps the speaker turn nervous energy and anxiety into a source of empowerment and grounded self expression.

The Organic Intelligence^® (OI) clinical protocol suggests that, from a systems perspective, what’s wrong with therapy is the focus on what’s wrong — including the focus on trauma.

Organic Intelligence brings a necessary shift in perspective from pathology and trauma to the proven methods drawn from the wisdom of mindfulness and the science of self-organization. OI teaches how healing happens from the nervous system up and makes it possible to imagine freedom from suffering. Freedom from suffering becomes freedom for living an authentic, vibrant life in the here-and-now.

OI teaches coaches how to observe relevant client behaviors according to a very clear map. This mapping allows coaches understand the nervous system state, and reveals what kind of intervention is most likely to support natural systemic reorganization.

Rather than providing insight per se, Organic Intelligence aims to shepherd observable physio-emotional states according to a protocol which aligns with subtle, but naturally occurring organismic trends toward increased coherence — the rhythm of an integrative biology. We employ a ‘shaping’ paradigm of positive reinforcement — a true paradigm shift in trauma therapy.

Organic Intelligence was developed by Steve Hoskinson, MA, MAT, who has trained thousands of practitioners and mentored trauma resolution instructors in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

For more info on Organic Intelligence

What is NeuroSystemics  

NeuroSystemics is a mindfulness-based and relational method for people's personal and collective development towards greater levels of well-being, resilience, and empowerment in dealing with the challenges of daily life (work, relationships, community, culture). So that we can begin to meet and master life's challenges, which deepens our experience of meaning, aliveness and belonging.

How does NeuroSystemics work

Neuro = nervous system (which organizes the way we process information and experiences)

Systems = the many layers of systems (relational, cultural, societal, ecological) that we live within 

NeuroSystemics session = we have a free and unstructured conversation in which we'll talk about whatever is at the foreground of your life's unfolding that day (personally or as a group).  As a Neurosystemics practictioner, I will help you explore your here-and-now experience that goes along with the content of our conversation. As we'll begin to explore and expand on -- often unnoticed -- signals that are coming from your body and mind, we find that when these signals are noticed and nurtured by our shared attention, they will begin to bring new insights and resources for meeting and mastering your challenges and goals in life.

What's different about the approach

1. Working with the whole nervous system (MOSAIC) instead of one channel (like CBT, or emotion-focused, or hypnotherapy with imagery, etc.)
2. A positive reinforcement and non-pathologizing framework (looking for signs of health and healing instead of disease and disorder)
3. Going beyond Resiliency (phase 2) towards Prosilience / Coherence (phase 3). Prosilience (and coherence) mean our capacity to grow in many ways. This happens by meeting and mastering life's challenges. We therefore hold the possibility of living a full life, with on-going exploration of our human experience and an ever-increasing curiosity that fuels learning, growth and (spiritual) development.
4. Leaving behind the excessive reductionism and individualism of traditional therapy. We rather include all systems that we (and our clients) live in and engage with (i.e. Sense, Self, Social, Societal, Soil, Stars, what have you). To do that we offer different practices (self-regulation, 1on1, circles, forums)
5. We are utilizing the importance of the healing relationship and actively engaging as therapist/facilitator as compared to ‘doing a protocol’.