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One Cause, One Cure
12th & 13th September 2026
Join Dave & Jenny Elleray & Dr Bill Pettit
Join us for two days of stillness, insight, warmth and deeply human conversation as part of Dr Bill Pettit’s 2026 Finding Stillness Legacy Tour.
This is a rare opportunity to spend time in person with one of the pioneering voices within the Three Principles community and to explore a profoundly hopeful understanding of mental health, human experience and our innate capacity for wellbeing.
Dr Pettit will not be undertaking this tour again, making this a particularly precious opportunity to hear him share the insights, stories and understanding gathered throughout more than four decades of work.
Most approaches to personal change begin by asking what needs to be fixed, managed or added.
This retreat begins somewhere different.
It points towards the possibility that beneath our changing thoughts, emotions, circumstances and diagnoses, there is something within every person that has never been damaged, diminished or lost.
Over the course of the weekend, Dr Bill, Dave and Jenny will explore how our moment-to-moment experience is created and how clarity, peace and wisdom can become more visible as the mind settles.
There is nothing you need to prepare.
Nothing you need to perform.
Nothing you need to be good at.
There is no pressure to speak or disclose anything you would prefer to keep private.
Simply come as you are.
12th–13th September 2026 | Ambleside, The Lake District
Dr Bill Pettit is a psychiatrist, educator and internationally respected teacher of the Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought.
He began studying medicine and neuroscience in 1965 and psychiatry in 1973. He has been board-certified in psychiatry since 1978 and has received further certifications in geriatric psychiatry, adolescent psychiatry, psychosomatic medicine and addiction medicine.
Dr Pettit has also served on the academic faculties of several medical schools and has co-authored peer-reviewed work exploring the Three Principles and their relevance to psychology, spirituality and mental healthcare.
In 1983, Dr Pettit met Sydney Banks, the philosopher and teacher through whom the Three Principles understanding was first articulated. Sydney Banks personally mentored Dr Pettit for the following 26 years, until his death in 2009.
Since that first meeting, Dr Pettit has devoted much of his life to exploring and communicating the relationship between spiritual understanding, medicine, neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry.
He brings an unusual combination of clinical experience, spiritual depth, humour, compassion and complete faith in the wellbeing within every human being.
One of Dr Pettit’s best-known teachings is:
“A diagnosis describes where you are, not who you are.”
His work offers a hopeful alternative to the belief that people experiencing psychological distress are fundamentally broken or permanently defined by their symptoms.
Through the Three Principles, Dr Pettit points towards an understanding of how thought and consciousness bring our experience to life from moment to moment.
From this perspective, anxiety, depression, emotional overwhelm and other forms of mental distress are not evidence that a person’s essential nature has been damaged. They describe a person’s present experience, but they do not define their identity, their potential or the health that remains available within them.
This does not require denying distress, rejecting professional treatment or pretending that difficult experiences are not real. Instead, it offers a deeper context in which those experiences may be met with less fear, shame and hopelessness.
Throughout his career, Dr Pettit has worked with and taught people across a wide range of psychiatric diagnoses. He has repeatedly witnessed people who had come to believe they were permanently broken begin to recognise greater hope, perspective, resilience and psychological freedom.
This retreat may be especially meaningful if you have:
Experienced anxiety, low mood, panic, emotional overwhelm or chronic stress
Received a mental-health or psychiatric diagnosis
Felt defined or limited by your past
Struggled with shame, self-judgement or the belief that something is wrong with you
Spent years trying to manage, analyse or repair yourself
Longed for a gentler and more hopeful understanding of your experience
You will not be asked to revisit painful memories, disclose personal information or force yourself into a particular emotional state.
The invitation is simply to listen, reflect and allow fresh understanding to arise in its own time.
This retreat is educational and reflective in nature. It is not a substitute for individual medical, psychiatric or psychological care, and nobody should change prescribed treatment or medication without consulting an appropriately qualified healthcare professional.
This weekend is also highly relevant for therapists, counsellors, psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors, nurses, coaches, social workers, educators, support workers and others working within the helping professions.
Many professionals enter this work because they care deeply about people, yet can gradually find themselves carrying the emotional weight of their clients, questioning whether they are doing enough or feeling overwhelmed by the apparent complexity of human distress.
Dr Pettit’s work offers another way of seeing.
Rather than viewing the person solely through the lens of symptoms, history or diagnosis, the Three Principles point towards the health, wisdom and humanity that remain present beneath the distress.
This understanding can support practitioners to:
Listen with greater presence and less pressure to fix
See beyond a person’s diagnosis or current state
Hold hope without denying the reality of someone’s suffering
Recognise the difference between a person and the experience they are having
Work with more compassion, clarity and psychological ease
Reduce the burden of feeling personally responsible for creating change in another person
Trust more deeply in the capacity for insight and wellbeing within those they support
You do not need to work specifically within mental-health services to benefit. The retreat is open to anyone supporting others through challenge, change, uncertainty or distress.
This retreat is not about becoming a better version of yourself.
It is not about acquiring more strategies to control your mind.
And it is not about adding another self-improvement project to your life.
It is an invitation to pause long enough to notice what may already be present beneath the noise:
A quieter mind.
A deeper intelligence.
A capacity for love and understanding.
And a wellbeing that has never depended upon having a perfect life or a permanently peaceful state of mind.
You do not need any previous knowledge of the Three Principles.
You do not need to identify as spiritual.
And you do not need to be struggling to belong here.
Curiosity is enough.
Dr Pettit has recently been immersed once again in Sydney Banks’ books The Enlightened Gardener The Enlightened Gardener Revisited.
Through this fresh exploration, he has been deeply affected by what the books reveal about stillness, presence and the reality of the present moment.
During the weekend, he will share what he has been seeing and how a quieter mind can reveal access to:
Wisdom and inner guidance
Psychological innocence in ourselves and others
Love, forgiveness and understanding
Creativity and meaningful productivity
Greater ease within relationships
Freedom from unnecessary mental struggle
Joy in the ordinary and simple moments of life
A deeper recognition of our innate wellbeing
This will not be a weekend of rigid lectures or complicated techniques.
Dr Pettit has a particular gift for bringing simplicity to subjects that can appear complex, often through warmth, humour, clinical experience and real-life stories of hope.
Founders of Freedom Thinking and experienced facilitators of the Three Principles understanding. Dave and Jenny create warm, grounded spaces in which people can slow down, feel at ease and explore a deeper understanding of themselves and their experience.
Psychiatrist, educator and internationally respected Three Principles teacher, bringing more than four decades of clinical experience and Principles-based understanding.
Dates: Saturday 12th & Sunday 13th September
Place: Ambleside, The Lake District
Times: Saturday 10am - 5pm | Sunday 10am - 4pm
Investment £200
Places are limited for this intimate two-day gathering.
You can secure your space with a £50 non-refundable deposit by contacting Dave & Jenny to book via email or phone;
info@freedomthinking.co.uk
07855014777
Come as you are.
Settle into the space.
And give yourself the opportunity to see something new.