Preparing for retreat
Years ago someone noted to me that a retreat begins a month before the retreat. She was so right. This awareness has stayed with me since.
Sometimes that means, blissfully, a heightened state of intentionality; I go through my day with greater awareness of my eating or physical connection––breathing, body mechanics, etc., and feel so wonderfully capable of living in my body.
However, I often get internal and external flack for leaving the immediate premises of my life. I say, “I’ll be out-of-town and unavailable for a couple of weeks.”, and the fears start up. The unforeseen conflicts. The dramas. At times I’ve spun negative fantasies, always unrealized, that in my absence, I’ll lose my business, boyfriend, audience, connections, someone will have made off with my identity, my dog, in a fit of pique, will destroy the carpet, and my life will be a general ruin. These fears are real spoilers. Spoil my plans. Spoil my enlightenment.
Sometimes family, clients, friends, associates––different ones at different times––object. I struggle. Do I put aside pursuing my heart’s joy to remain as Caretaker? Or is this really what it seems….Perhaps, faced with an unreasonable, unsupportive demands, I’m facing a Hungry Ghost–-someone impossible to satisfy. These people remind me of my own insatiabilities. If I stay, if submit and feed them, I will be distracted, once again, from facing and healing my own Hungry Ghost.
Absence is always part of relationship. As we prepare our departure, what are the fears and fantasies?
Will retreat be worth the trouble?
Do we trust the practice?
Do others need us so much, or are we afraid they don’t need us?
Yes. This is the truth of it, and the fear, all wrapped up in my excitement and anticipation. I don’t know if it will be worth it, if it will be enough, if I will be too old, too fat, too stiff, too far from the practice, investing too much in this one week that may have to see me through another seven years of my daughter’s life.
But maybe not. Maybe anything could happen. That feels like a good thing now, not so much a fear. Today it feels like just getting there might be enough to start my journey all over again, and again, and again.
So true. I have noticed over and over that whatever the event, retreat, workshop … it starts for me the minute I actually sign up for it, no matter how far in advance that is. Somehow taking that step of commitment puts events in motion in my life. I think saying yes and committing to something is a powerful creative force.