Sacred Space Retreat Kit

Winter invites us to reflect, go inward, dream into the life that is waiting for us. Yet the activity of the holidays can overtake the season’s gentle pull. This Sacred Space Retreat Kit is SoulFull’s gift to you– everything you need to create a moment of interior journeying this winter. What is the season wanting to usher into your life?

I Go Among Trees
Wendell Berry

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet around me
like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places where I left them
asleep like cattle.
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings and I hear its song.
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings and I hear its song.

“Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future… To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world…Whether we stay or whether we go – to be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.”

-David Whyte

Where in your life do you experience “heartfelt participation”? 

Where do you feel that wholeheartedness is lacking?  What courageous questions might you ask of these areas?

Gut-check Meditation

Think about a decision you are facing that you feel uncertain about.  Settle into a comfortable position, and envision yourself proceeding with one of the possible courses of action.  Use your imagination to really flesh out what that would be like.  Now check in with your body.  Holding the decision you have made, notice how your body feels.  Is there tension?  Release?  Observe what you feel in your muscles, your throat, your chest, your abdomen.  Observe how you feel emotionally.  Anxious…  Relieved… Powerful…  Grieved… Excited?

Now go through the same gut check with all other possible courses of action, visualizing each one and noting how you feel.  You may do some journaling after this meditation to process what you experienced.  Now, how does the information from your gut weigh in on your decision making process?  Some people find that after a gut check it is helpful to invite “strategic mind” to the table to help you execute your decision wisely.

Crossing Some Ocean In Myself
Mark Nepo

Half a century, and finally,
what I feel is what I say
and what I say is what I mean.
What I mean is that others,
so used to my gargantuan efforts to be good,
don’t understand my efforts to be real.
They find me coming up short.

I’m simply burning old masks.
And the next step takes me–
I don’t know where–
as it should be–
I don’t know
just that I love who I love.
I listen with my heart.
I struggle with the reflexes of my mind.

I mean, the pains of life are sharper now
but disappear more clearly the way
knives are swallowed by the sea.
And the subtleties of being come on
like waves that cleanse but which,
when dry, cannot be seen.

So much like a gentle animal now,
unsure what I was fighting for,
except to breathe and sing, except
to call out the human names of God
that others have uttered when
thoroughly stripped of their plans.

So much like a love animal now
until the end of any day’s work
is the soft moment
when loving and being loved
are the same.

All year round,
the birds and trees instruct,
make visible the wind
the way reaching without shame
makes visible the love.

“When you are compassionate with yourself, you trust in your soul, which you let guide your life. Your soul knows the geography of your destiny better than you do.”

-John O’Donohue

Imagine that Compassion came to visit you like an old friend.  You sit a the table together, sipping tea and talking about your joys and stresses.  Journal the dialogue that emerges from a conversation with Compassion.

Desire
Alice Walker

My desire
is always the same; wherever Life
deposits me:
I want to stick my toe
and soon my whole body
into the water.
I want to shake out a fat broom
and sweep dried leaves
bruised blossoms
dead insects
and dust.
I want to grow
something.
It seems impossible that desire
can sometimes transform into devotion;
but this has happened.
And that is how I’ve survived:
how the hole
I carefully tended
in the garden of my heart
grew a heart
to fill it.

“There is a space between imagination and attainment that may only be traversed by longing.”

-Khalil Gibran

What are your desires?  What simple practices might you do to transform desire into devotion?

Walking Meditation

The body is the sense instrument of the soul.  Feed your soul by fully inhabiting your five senses on this mindfulness walk.

As you walk, first bring your attention to your sense of sight and take in your visual surroundings.  Next, focus on your sense of hearing, then smell, and so forth through each of your five senses.  Then begin again with your sense of sight, leisurely making your way through each of your senses over again throughout your walk.