Greetings,
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Hello friends,
I’m writing to you during a weekend retreat to the desert. I truly enjoy the occasion for solitude that provides further opportunities to practice mindfulness. Whether I’m held up in traffic that allows me to meditate on the thoughts that “I can wait, I am patient” or encountering an experience, like with my golf game, that affords ample opportunities to practice non-resistance or non-judgment when its not going so well, mindfulness has been my focus. Facilitating the Practicums has been good for me in that it reminds me to be a committed student to the teachings and to practice what I preach. We’re all on this journey through life together and it’s through the concentrated power of the Sacred Path that we evolve as individuals and as a community.
At the end of February twelve men from the Wisdom Council joined retreat coordinators, Scott Ewing and Andrew Soliz, for a 3-day kayak trip down the Colorado River. We convened in Boulder City, Nevada, on Thursday night for a meeting to go over the itinerary for the trip and to set our intentions. Scott encouraged us to be mindful on this journey since it could make all the difference in our safety and overall enjoyment, and Andrew spoke of the sacred nature of the commitment we each made to participate in the adventure. The next morning we met in the parking lot with all of our gear ready to be loaded on the bus that would transport us to our launch site at the base of Hoover Dam. Security at the dam is quite high since 9/11, which only served to reinforce the awareness of how we would approach self-care and care for one another.
After packing our one-man kayaks with everything that we brought to support all of our needs while on the trip we started downriver. I’m going to refrain from discussing all of the nuances of our journey because there is far more to say than I have room for here, but I will express that it was truly a rewarding experience. It was challenging while quite invigorating. The preparation for the trip commenced weeks in advance, and I quipped to the men at our first meeting that I hoped that the trip would be like a colonoscopy with the preparation being the hardest part of the experience. The truth is that the trip itself was hard at times. We paddled a total of 15 miles and hiked through canyons, even using ropes to assist us to scale up and down canyon walls. We entered a lengthy vapor cave, the mouth of which was 1,500 feet below the top of the canyon walls, which narrowly snaked its way back about 100 feet into mother earth. And the men, one after the other, spaced about 4 feet apart, with one hand over head to feel the top of the cave and one hand at the left side to feel the wall of the cave, crouched in a bent over fashion and stepped carefully in the warm water toward the end of the cave, where we huddled together for about 45 minutes as we spoke our truths. Andrew just asked us to trust, and we needed to control our minds that raised images for some of the trapped miners and thoughts of what would happen if there were an earthquake. That, after crossing the river with the use of a rope against a rushing current of 55-degree water was just the beginning of the trip. While huddled together in the dark, each man spoke about what he was feeling, and there was consensus that we all relied on each other to help us man up to the challenges and that it would have been overwhelming to attempt them alone. That set the intention for the excursion and there were no injuries through the whole experience.
It was indeed a trip designed for spiritual warriors and it was filled with immense love. We laughed and cried together and we spoke from our hearts and reached into the depths of our souls to express our most authentic truth as we sat in council around the fire and shared in the stone people lodge. Yes, we even packed in all of the willows, tarps and stones for our sweat lodge that we constructed in the dark and entered late in the evening at the end of a very full day. Two additional men hiked in on Saturday and joined one of our men, Dan Stanton, for a three-day vision quest to commence on Monday. They had been in preparation for a year and Andrew watched over them from a distance as they sat on their medicine blankets for the three days and two nights without food or water. Another amazing challenge! My hat is off to those men.
I highly recommend this kayak trip to you. Scott and Andrew are facilitating them through Sacred Ways twice a year, so consider joining them for one. You won’t be sorry that you committed to the experience.
Commitment was key to participating in the kayak trip and commitment is the theme of our upcoming Call To Adventure retreat that begins next Thursday, April 10th. The kayak trip, the spring retreat and the practicums revolve around the concept of mindfulness. Commitment is central to living a mindful life. Pema Chodron, in her book titled Comfortable With Uncertainty, quotes her teacher Chogyam Trungpa as saying, “You can hear the dharma from many different places, but you are uncommitted until you encounter a particular way that rings true in your heart and you decide to follow it. In order to go deeper, there has to be a wholehearted commitment. You begin the warrior’s journey when you choose one path and stick to it. Then you let it put you through your changes. Without a commitment, the minute you really begin to hurt, you’ll just leave or you’ll look for something else.”
Pema states that, “The question always remains: To what are we really committed? Is it to playing it safe and manipulating our life and the rest of the world so that it will give us security and confirmation? Or is our commitment to exploring deeper and deeper levels of letting go? Do we take refuge in small, self-satisfied actions, speech, and mind? Or do we take refuge in warriorship, in taking a leap, in going beyond our usual safety zones?
This Call To Adventure retreat is designed to provide safe and yet challenging opportunities to stretch outside of your comfort zone in order to encounter yourself at deeper levels of experience. The dharma, as Buddha taught us, is about letting go of one’s familiar story line and opening to what is: to the people in our life, to the situations we’re in, to our thoughts, to our emotions. The dharma never tells us what is true or what is false. It just encourages us to find out for ourselves.
The Mindfulness Practicums have also provided the opportunities for this type of self-discovery. In January we dealt with the concept of non-resistance. In March we explored the practice of patience and in May we will delve into the practice of stillness.
Eckhart Tolle, in his book Stillness Speaks, states that, “When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world. Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from stillness. This is the I Am that is deeper than name and form.”
On May 17th we will enter the dimension of stillness and touch the deeper sense of awareness that allows us to truly know. In Discourse 40 from Paramahansa Yogananda’s extraordinary two volume darshans on The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You, he states, “When bodily motions cease and thoughts become quiet, God begins to appear as the blessedness of stillness and divine bliss on the altar of peace and changelessness.”
I have been asked if it is necessary to have participated in the first two Practicums in order to benefit from the Practicums that follow and my response is that each Practicum stands on its own. I am enjoying working with the men that have committed to participate in all or as many of the six Practicums scheduled for 2008 and I am always delighted to have someone engage in an individual Practicum and walk away with exactly what he needed to get from it.
May I encourage you to contemplate the meaning of commitment in your life today and consider that when you make the decision to participate in the retreat and the Practicums it is in that moment of commitment that your life opens itself for new learning to occur and it begins in that very moment that you dared to say yes and to take another step forward on your path.
Further information and registration forms can be found on our blog and on the web site.
I look forward to seeing you soon.
In brotherhood,
Stephen
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