Unpack Your Weary Bags – An Invitation to Retreat
Retreating or surrendering is one of the most incredible acts of freedom. Often in the media, we think of the word retreat or surrender as being on the losing side. Movies have shown us that the weak retreat and the strong win. In spirituality, the opposite is true. Knowing yourself well enough to understand that you need to rest, retreat, and reconnect is a sign of living with self-awareness. Self-awareness is a kind of freedom of its own. Self-awareness shines that light on who you really are. It helps you navigate life and relationships and supports you to find your Dharma (life’s purpose). Take, for example, this analogy. If you were a train heading towards some rock that had fallen on the track, you would take action to put on the brakes well before crashing. Yet so often in life, we see the “rocks” that we are moving toward and feel as though we don’t have the ability to access our brakes before impact. We might wait to course-correct until after we’ve gone off track and then wonder how it happened in the first place. After all, we were just living our life. Isn’t stress necessary? The act of surrender is an act of strength. When we surrender, we acknowledge that we need connection with divine energy. As we stop fighting, we find the power to rise up. I often think of the line from Amazing Grace; “I once was blind, but now I see”. Surrendering to the universal energy and asking for help shows us a new way of seeing ourselves and the world around us.
In yoga, we have a pose called Balasana (Child’s Pose), and this pose is one that we come to when stillness and inaction are needed. In Balasana, we rest, retreat, and then re-open once we feel ready. A retreat is similar to Balasana. The past few years have been a great world upheaval, and many of us carry stress that we may not even recognize. We have been strong yet also fearful inside. We might have internalized some of our own fears to make others feel safe. Many of us in leadership roles have masked or pushed aside our emotions to support others. Your invitation to retreat is here and now is your time – your time to disconnect from doing, to retreat into simply being, and to reconnect with a stronger connection to life force energy. This energy quietly strengthens and sustains you.
I coined a term I call “weary bags”. Picture yourself carrying large and heavy bags on your back. One bag bears the weight of the Pandemic, another bears the weight of heightened tensions in the world, and perhaps one bears the weight of aging parents. Add a few of your own personal weary bags to your back. The weight hunches you over and makes you feel heavy, slow, and restricted. You idealize things that will bring you relief and your mind says, “all I need is a vacation”, or “once this project is over”. On retreat, we create a safe environment where we are welcome to start to unpack our weary bags and lighten the load. We gain new perspectives and learn incredible tools to reconnect to our everyday lives. Let’s put down and unpack our weary bags together.
Join me on retreat, November 18 to 20th.
Much Love, Sheree xo