Something to take
home in your hands
Retreats, quiet days and workshops on the Hand Psalter — for women's ministries, leaders, and retreat centres.
Most retreat weekends are a speaker's story and what she learned from it. The good ones are wonderful. But women often go home moved rather than changed — there's nothing in their hands come Monday.
Both hands free. The practice begins in the first minute.
The Hand Psalter is a way back into prayer through the body.
Jan Mombaer built it in 1494, for monks who prayed all one hundred and fifty psalms aloud every week and mostly just mumbled them forth. We all know what that's like.
It worked. And then it vanished, because it was simply too complicated to learn.
I've spent the last few years putting it back together — simplified, deepened, and remade for a modern woman's life. It needs no book, no app, and no quiet room. Only your two hands.
One is the garden.
The other is the gardener.
They leave with something
One complete practice
Usable that same night, needing nothing but their own two hands.
A twenty-second prayer
For the Tuesday afternoon that has gone sideways.
Their own before-and-after
Three questions at the start — about body, heart, and their sense of God — answered again at each stage, in their own handwriting. Most women are startled by what the paper shows them by the end.
And the book, free
A QR code on the screen at the close, and Holding Prayer in the Palm of Your Hand is hers to keep — the whole practice in writing, to work through at her own pace. Nothing is sold at the event.
How it can run
| Weekend retreat | Friday evening through Sunday morning — four sessions, the full teaching. Fewer if that suits your weekend better. |
| Full day | The core practice, complete. The shortest the whole teaching fits into. |
| Four-part series | Ninety minutes a session, online — the whole teaching, unhurried, over four weeks. |
The weekend and the full day can also run online.
Darlene Hull
I've been on a stage since I was three — Music Director for Youth for Christ Germany in my twenties, running workshops in five countries and teaching in two languages, then years of leading worship here in Calgary.
Then a crisis ended my music ministry overnight, and I left church altogether for five years. What brought me back wasn't more effort. It was the discovery of contemplative practice — new ground entirely, after a lifetime inside the church.
I'm a spiritual formation coach and an Ignatian Listener, trained through the Order of Imago Christi, and a vowed member of the Order of the Mustard Seed. I teach from plain Apostles' Creed ground, and I've worked with congregations from strict Brethren to full-tilt charismatic.
“The first time I sat with the Hand Psalter, I began to weep. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I had a sense I was standing in the Holy of Holies with God's sweet presence filling the room.”
Lois Johnston, D.S.W., B.A.Retired Child Clinical Therapist“Darlene brings breadth of knowledge and a keen sense of the needs of the learner, with pacing that invites processing at just the right tempo.”
Kathy PyrcRetired educator, Masters in Curriculum and Instruction · Order of Imago ChristiCome and see.
If you're wondering whether this would suit your women, write to me. I answer everything.
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