As I sat down at the keyboard to see what Life might drop in for this article, I kept hearing: “The Forever Retreat.” So here I am ready to see what may come out about that.
I joined the Forever Retreat some years ago. Like anything fabulous for the heart, egocentrickarmicconditioning/self-hate was in a pretty enormous amount of resistance and blustering. “Not my thing…. What??!...Not THAT!....Anything but THAT!!”….and many other flavors of “NO, NO, NO.”
Now, some years later I often have that experience of wanting to fall to my knees in gratitude. I see that this retreat has been and continues to be something that has utterly transformed my practice and my life.
Recently, we had a call where we reflected on some of our favorite insights about how we are transforming in this Forever Retreat. Here are just a few highlights of all that I saw:
- We are practicing with the same content, so when we are each looking at such similar experiences it is harder for ego to hide. Yahoo!
- Many times each week, there are opportunities to be together with Sangha and the Guide to do this work. There is an expression: “You become like the five people you spend the most time with.” Spending time regularly with this group of people committed to go beyond fear, resistance and limitations has profoundly changed me and supports the heart immeasurably.
- There is a sense of getting to know this human and the gifts that come through her, and stepping into more courage and confidence to share them -- a direct result of this practice of not letting fear voices stop me.
- We sometimes talk about this retreat as the closest thing to monastic practice for those not living at the Monastery. That is absolutely my experience. This retreat brings a powerful, wisdom-of-no-escape-type of joyful intensity to the ending-suffering process.
In deep gratitude,
Gassho
Jen Y.