What’s Your True Nature?
Retreats act as an amazingly potent means of reminding your Body, Mind, and Spirit about what is closer to your true nature and authentic self than the Hamster wheel existence we are often stuck on in modern daily life.
To some degree or other, we often go to sleep into routine in our busy lives – valuable time passing when our senses are a little dulled and we are too busy thinking about all that we have to do tomorrow to enjoy today and the present moment.
So sometimes, just as a yoga class or treatment can act as a stress antidote to the strain of a day or week, sometimes we need to let the stresses and strains of the months, or even years to begin to fall away. We really need to just get away from it all. For this, your body needs space – your subconscious needs to know you have a few days to properly unwind. Sometimes we forget our internal organs carry tension too – having time and space allows the organs to relax as well.
The True Remedy
At my retreats, whether I’m organising them or working as part of a team, I want everything to give you the best possible nourishment on all levels you can get. But I also want you to start to know yourself better. This is where the skill is in life, the true remedy, and you have to start somewhere!
So what do I provide? I try to provide you with the most energetically potent retreat locations I can find and I bring you superb practices and therapies. But I don’t just want to feed your mind, body and spirit, I want to engage all your faculties too.
As my retreat mantra goes: I want to treat, teach, connect, and educate. We can treat you on an individual level, teach you yoga postures, and provide the conditions for you to connect with your fellow participants (after all, I also want to see you laughing while you look at the stars together; this is extremely good for your health!)
But the last point is as important as the others. I want to educate you – I want to engage your mind as much as nourish your body and emotions. I want you to go home and tell me you’ve learnt something, not just had an (admittedly big) antidote to the rest of your life and then go back to the same situation, thoughts, feelings, and perspective.
Being, Not Doing
It’s fairly typical when a person arrives at a retreat to still be very ‘internally’ busy. I observe this often, but after a day or two, the nourishment starts to come from the fact that you feel you can just start to receive and ‘be’ rather than ‘do’ so much.
This is very much related to the fact that in a retreat environment, you are receiving a huge amount of energy and nourishment from the activities and environment around you. The modern scrambling mind is very much generated by the fact that in modern life we are often scrambling around to find things to keep us distracted and nourished. Believe me, though, after a day or so on retreat, you will start to relax!
I’ve a massive amount of experience in holistic therapies and retreats in general, but even I was absolutely blown away by the energy at Moinhos Velhos. For the first time in months, maybe years, I didn’t feel like I had to ‘do’ anything. I didn’t need to pull my phone out of my pocket and check emails and Facebook. I didn’t have to open my laptop. I just felt content. This kind of perspective is priceless, we need to be reminded in our life we don’t need to run! – Richard Brook (Me! – and glad to share it!)
Big things grow from small seeds and my retreats are extremely fertile ground.
Thrive, don’t just survive!