I finished last year by spending 3-weeks meditating in Barre, Massachusetts at the Forest Refuge. This year, I’ll finish the year on retreat as well, with a week of practice in Crestone, CO. For me, retreat practice is a time to turn inward, to explore my human experience in a more personal way, and to infuse that deep awareness of stillness and Being into the rest of my life.
I cherish the opportunity to go on retreat, and my favorite time of the year to go is in the winter. What better time to rest in silence, to unwind the mind and heart, than in the quietude of winter? During this time even sound is muted by the fresh coat of snow on the ground. Sound reverberates and is insulated by the snow, by the silence of our deepest nature. Returning to silence, returning to our selves, is part of the natural cycle of life.
Everything moves in cycles, expanding and contracting. Our Sun moves through 11 year cycles, with alternating periods of violent and magnificent eruptions–solar storm season–and periods of relative calm and stability. Our lives move through cycles as well, of going out into the world and making our mark, and then coming back to ourselves and nurturing some of the most precious and important qualities of our being.
The spiritual life is not about raising one part of the cycle above the other, but about honoring the natural flow, and surrendering deeply to it. When we surrender to what’s happening there is nothing but the flow of life itself, and what powers this flow is far mightier than all the Suns of the Universe combined. By surrendering to what is needed from us we can harness the power of life itself. Actually, we become the creative force itself; turning, churning, giving birth, and making love in the most intimate ways. We know ourselves as the light that animates and moves all things. And at some point the fireworks start to wind down, just as the solar storm season comes to an end, and we are pointed back to our nature as pure Being–where we are again nurtured by the place in (and beyond) us that is completely untouched by time and experience. This primordial place is, as the Tao Te Ching describes, “the mother of all things”–the fertile womb of Emptiness.
Whether you are in a phase of Being or of Becoming, may you know your true nature as that which is both unencumbered by life, and also completely inclusive of it. Anything less is a partial and incomplete.
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