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As I prepare for my Spring Retreat, I am reminded of the importance of not just having opportunities to rest, restore, and return to a state that is spacious, expansive, and easeful but of recognizing that state as our inherent though often unrealized state. 

The work that I engage in, day-to-day, moment-by-moment, within myself -- also the work that I guide my clients and students through -- is based in the integration of those experiences into life, itself.

We must develop an understanding of what it us dissolves, what in us falls away, allowing us to experiences ourselves in that way so that we can do the necessary inner work that changes our relationship to the lives that we've been given.  

I wrote about this a few years ago in a post that I'm sharing here:

Having opportunities to “escape” life, moments to leave the difficulties of our conditions, time to “be away from it all” is important. It can give a chance to rest and reset, to remember an experience of ourselves, a way of being and feeling that we often feel is inaccessible in the lives that we live. A feeling that we think our lives actually KEEP us from experiencing. 

Our modes of escaping can be healthy or unhealthy; the frequency and/or duration of our escapes can vary. 

But the thing is, we always return. We always come back to those conditions. We always have life awaiting our return. And thank goodness🤍

Here’s the thing, escaping our lives only teaches us how to be in relationship to what’s NOT, what doesn’t exist or is fleeting. It teaches us to, distinctly, only feel at ease, expansive, free when NOT in the thick of our lives.

But, again, life’s waiting for us on the other side. And that “reentry” can actually cause more friction, more suffering than before we “left.”

Learning how to be in relationship with what IS, with reality itself, means we can be in our lives rather than wishing to escape them. We can learn to work, inwardly, to undo and dissolve the material that keeps us wanting to move away from rather than toward our life, toward Life itself.

UPCOMING OFFERINGS:

With great big Love for each of you,