Going Away to Return Home

Today I leave for a 10 day Silent Meditation Retreat.  A Vipassana Retreat.

No talking.  No reading.  No writing.  No music.  No relating to other humans.  Not even a raised eyebrow in passing or a friendly thumbs up. Nothing to do.  Nowhere to go. 10 days and nights with all opportunities for ego to get engaged, removed.  10 days going within.

Why?  Or asked another way… What the hell am I thinking?

A few days ago a friend asked my why I was doing this.  I realized that I hadn’t yet asked myself that question.  I had just said “yes” to the yes that was said within me the moment the idea was first presented.  But it’s an important question.  Why go away for 10 days with all external distractions stripped away?

Because increasingly I find myself in a palpable loving relationship with the creative essence of life.  God if you will, free of religion.  The universal unified presence that connects us all.  I’ve come to recognize that I am in relationship with this creative spirit, or life essence or whatever you’re comfortable naming it.  I am in relationship with life and with this breath that connects me to life.  I haven’t always consciously recognized that. It was a relationship that I took for granted.

And it has become quite clear that it’s important to spend some quiet and sacred time deepening and strengthening that relationship.

I suspect that this is perhaps the most important relationship I have (it is certainly the most enduring and unconditionally loving) and it deserves some quality attention beyond my regular meditations.

Just as when we set aside precious time to go away with a partner, a mate, a lover – our beloved;  We do so in order to see them again and to witness ourselves again within the spaciousness of relationship. To remember that we aren’t separate souls loving the other, we are one soul loving us together. We go away together to remember our connection, to rekindle the love, to breathe back into the preciousness of our open hearts, to drink in the lusciousness of our union without distraction. To dive in again and recommit with abandon. To witness a sunset together and to remember that its better this way, to appreciate life as one rather than alone. In creating the sacred intentional time together, we celebrate again as the unified and shared presence of one. In order to come home, to our true home, it is often quite necessary to leave the home to which we have become so accustomed.

If I am “seeking” anything perhaps it is this:

To discover what is the everything that becomes available when everything that we have learned to call everything is stripped away?

When I am left with the illusion of nothing, what is the everything that can then be experienced?

Or perhaps I’ll be able to quiet the mind enough to discover what answers arise when there are no questions asked?

Another interesting question that was posed by a friend, was how I could afford to be away from my work so completely for 10 days.

The answer to that is simple.

This is my work.

Separation is the illusion.

Blessings all.