Each day on retreat will offer periods of meditation, self-inquiry and interactive dialogue, as well as time for Kirtan (chanting), Hatha Yoga, Body-Sensing, Breath-sensing, and Yoga Nidra. These are all supportive practices designed to still the mind that serve awakening to our true nature. This is the end of searching.

Because silence nurtures undistracted self-inquiry, we will hold social silence between our daily meetings.
Then awakening spontaneously arises.

This weekend, being together as a Kula ( a group of like-minded beings supporting one another in awakening) there are a myriad of opportunities to point you back to awaring Intelligence and begin to turn the underlying ground of suffering that you live from to one of Joy.

How can fully experiencing and acting from your significance on this retreat be a pointer to your awakening?

How will acting from the reality of wholeness rather than the conditioning that you are separate effect the group?

My direction for you on this retreat is to consider abandoning the ³becoming process².

Consider the possibility that the belief that we are this body, this personality, this mind, this gender, and so therefore must preserve it is a misperception.

Buying into the lie that we are not whole proliferates a sense of self that needs to search and attain positive feedback, pleasure, control, confidence from external references. This searching only adds to the ground of suffering in which our lives are then based upon.

If you can discard this violent behavior toward self, call off the search, and simply stop.......... turn inward to yourself and ask:

Who is wanting?
Who am I?
Go to the depths of this question.
Go not to somebody who wants, but to somebody untouched by any wanting.
Be still and know.

My direction to you is to decide to abandon the becoming process completely.

Abandon this belief that we are this body, this ego, this personality and therefore must preserve it at all costs.

Abandon any idea or information that seems to justify occupying this victim position.

We are accustomed to the victim position because we were set up in it by growing up in this particular society at this particular time.

Abandon the victim role.

I don¹t ask this of you lightly. I face it myself daily. We are beyond this body, this mind, these feelings and habitual needs for comfort.

Abandon becoming..........
be still......
and directly experience who you truly are.

Now claim this retreat as 100% yours.
Aim your awaring intelligence at the following:

Ask yourself 'how can I make this retreat go well for myself, for the organizer and the leader of our group, for our group itself?'

What can you contribute to this experience to embody your full significance to this group, to this life, to this world?

Together, we do make a difference in this world of ours.

Abiding,
Katherine