We’ve been running an experiment. A fascinating experiment. A significant workshop completed its run a few days ago. 

What an amazing experience. The things we navigated! Warriors. Amazing warriors!! We did our best to care for one another, for people closest to us, for strangers, for new life emerging. We practiced our roles within the container we created. We practiced bringing in parts of ourselves we were afraid of entrusting to other people’s noticings/observations. 

We took care of ourselves as best as we could. We committed to this experiment. 

On our retreat we completed one major experiment with writing. It began with Bri’s generous leading of us all on a hike. The silence we walked in led us deeper and deeper into the forest and inside ourselves. When we stopped, we were lighter, more at ease. Bri’s provocation, deceptively simple but delivered with such playfulness and authentic curiosity: what would your 9 and 90 year old self say in this moment? 

The words we heard set the stage for the next few days. Their responses revealed insight into each person’s lens on the world, what sort of thought loop they might be investigating. Bri held quiet and sacred space for all attendees, taking into account layers of direct experience with some people and just meeting others for the first time. 

Our first evening together ended with an invitation to walk in nature, to revel in it and to wake up the next day for action, for fun. 

Our Writing Experiment asked us to sit or walk in stillness and allow whatever comes. We each experimented differently.

Our experiments, offered up in trust, told a shared story of deep connection with the present-moment-experience and the expressions-of-past-events, the desire for connection with others, the desire for forgiveness and peace.

We listened to each other’s voices outside sharing, honing our abilities to notice, observe and respond. Grounded in love and wanting freedom to be our selves, we challenged our habitual patterns and noticed the effect of our being on others.

Deep Trust. Deep Listening. Deep Play.

Not always bliss, not always pain. An on-going experiment with life.

I witnessed a show of strength I am still marvelling at: a partnership I will always be in awe of. A partnership who inspires with their desire to embody love and compassion and to face their anger/fear over what it means in our society to represent a way of knowing unfamiliar to many people, feared by many people. 

In our communities, we encounter people with pent-up rage about difference and discomfort. Many humans want to relieve their suffering.  Our unconscious patterns are difficult to notice. We despair over our inability to communicate and/or to resolve our differences.

Intense fear spirals out a community of confusion, of dulled antennae, of static communication. Turned on one another through blame and anger? It’s a knot of buzzing and tightness, of strands coated with layers of suffering. It’s a very hot experience, this fear meeting fear, like a solar storm with lightning.

To embody steadiness in the storm requires practice. 

To be willing to live life intentionally with a set of principles is a profound shift. Startling. What will you do with your power?

Sometimes being present feels like bliss because it feels like you are in the place you belong. You breathe the air of the cedars and you are a cedar. You are fully you and more than you. You imagine a future where this happens minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. You would like to transcend. You’re willing to try to earn it. To practice. To listen. To be patient. You test yourself. The more care you give yourself through a cycle of attending/meeting the present moment, the deeper your ability to process your experiences. And when this shift is happening, the magic begins. This is the time when openings occur whether realized in the moment or not. In the evening, the moon entered the horizon: a huge ball of light-reflected shone shades of dark yellow tinged with orange.

We took care of the others on our retreat in the best ways we could.

All of our retreat participants expressed gratitude. 

We built relationships with our retreat members. We expressed a lengthening of the number of days. Also, a pre-gathering experiment to prepare our retreat members for content they might experience as we deepen our inquiry into relationship and various expressions of life. 

Stay tuned for an opportunity to join us in our next experiments.