🍁Mindfulness Autumn Retreat🍁 (Days 123-127)

Retreats are a chance to take all of the work you've been doing – practicing a little bit every day – and to dig deep into that now well-prepared soil of your mind. There are some parts of yourself that you can only get access to with time and space. When you work down at these levels, enormous and lasting changes happen.

In your monkey mind, we looked at the stories you tell of your life, and focused on one that's an ongoing problem (think, years!). Your story is how you could describe your situation to someone else, and is everything you think about life in general. The story you choose to tell determines the life you live.

Learning something about the nature of your stories, we uncovered your core beliefs. These are your implicit and unconscious beliefs about how the world is, how people are, and how you are. Core beliefs determine the stories you tell. We begin to make them as children, watching how our adults interpret the world. We have to become aware of our core beliefs and then facilitate their dissolution.

Then we looked even deeper into your mammal mind and uncovered your core reactions. These are more or less the same as trauma (unfinished/unreleased emotional reactions still being unconsciously held in your body).

We then looked at what your core reaction/s feel like in your body, and how they produce your core posture. Changing what you do at this level is how you begin to unravel your multi-layered, maladaptive, dynamic ball of tension (made up of your core posture, reactions and beliefs). In terms of our mental and emotional practice, this involves ever-increasing awareness and acceptance, which will release everything over time. And in terms of our physical practice, this also involves yoga and deliberate breathing practices. We learned a series of practices designed to re-align your body, thereby creating a well-supported container in which all of your tension/suffering can release.

Thinking and feeling a certain way, requires a certain body posture. Changing that body posture cuts your habitual thoughts and emotions off at the roots. Like a vase of cut flowers, they'll live for a little while on momentum, but their death is a fait accompli.

We also practiced winefulness, did some mindful chocolate tasting and cloud-watching, ate good food, laughed (and cried), and spent time in the company of others walking the same path of self-awareness.😊