“Sometimes the simplest and best use of our will is to drop it all and just walk out from under everything that is covering us, even if only for an hour or so—just walk out from under the webs we’ve spun, the tasks we’ve assumed, the problems we have to solve. They’ll be there when we get back, and maybe some of them will fall apart without our worry to hold them up.”
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have
I was given the gift of a retreat to Harmony Hills Retreat Center on Hood Canal. I cannot even fathom how I have gone so long without this kind of a break in my life with how fast our life feels at time. Now to be still, to reflect, be cooked for, be around beautiful strangers who shared from their hearts… magic! I highly recommend trying a retreat of any kind for your body, mind and heart to recover whenever you need. It can be an overnight to an airbnb by yourself as one of my clients is doing. It can be simple. Maybe it’s just a whole day of quiet set aside for you. This kind of condensed healing time allows one to honor and return to the preciousness of what’s important. Letting the world fall away for a while, you can see from another lens, a look back at your life that gives it new light.
“Just as life is made up of day and night, and song is made up of music and silence, friendships, because they are of this world, are also made up of times of being in touch and spaces in-between.
Being human, we sometimes fill these spaces with worry, or we imagine the silence is some form of punishment, or we internalize the time we are not in touch with a loved one as some unexpressed change of heart.
Our minds work very hard to make something out of nothing. We can perceive silence as rejection in an instant, and then build a cold castle on that tiny imagined brick. The only release from the tensions we weave around nothing is to remain a creature of the heart. By giving voice to the river of feelings as they flow through and through, we can stay clear and open.
In daily terms, we call this checking in with each other, though most of us reduce this to a grocery list:
How are you today?
Do you need any milk? Eggs? Juice? Toilet paper?Though we can help each other survive with such outer kindnesses, we help each other thrive when the checking in with each other comes from a list of inner kindnesses:
How are you today?
Do you need any affirmation?
Clarity?
Support?
Understanding?When we ask these deeper questions directly, we wipe the mind clean of its misperceptions. Just as we must dust our belongings from time to time, we must wipe away what covers us when we are apart.”
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have