Retreat

My Christmas present to my Mom and Sisters this year was a two day retreat at the Christine Center in Wisconsin. http://christinecenter.org/ It was really great to spend quality time with the family women and re-connect. It's been a long time since we had a "Women's Weekend." We were long overdue.

It was interesting to observe the different paths we've all taken with our spirituality, and it was interesting to observe my own feeling of having chosen just the right path for myself that is in many ways very different from my Mom and sisters. Mom and Youngest Sister have recently gone the "Born Again Christian" route. Middle Sister has stayed with the Catholic tradition, though on the liberal side, of course. Oldest Sister (me) has turned to the East for a completely different take on spiritual teachings. The deeper my committment to Buddhism, the deeper is my gratitude and confidence in the path. All the while I thought to myself, the Buddha was right on. The Dalai Lama was perfectly correct when he said that our purpose in life is to be happy. It really is everyone's goal! Who doesn't want to be happy? Even those who like to be melancholy are in some way happy to be melancholy. If happiness is our purpose, then the Buddha has laid out the perfect instructions to this aim. Namely, the Middle Way.

I talked with my family about Equanimity. Youngest Sister wasn't even familiar with the word. I gave the basic description of equanimity as not getting overly excited about good times or overly down about bad times. I may have described it better as pleasurable experiences vs unpleasurable experiences rather than good/bad. Equanimity does not involve judging experience as good or bad. It observes it as what it is directly.

I was happy to be able to meditate quite a bit over the weekend. I wasn't sure how that would work, since Mom and Sisters are not meditators. Fortunately the cabin had a heated porch that we designated as our sacred space. I always gave an open invitation for anyone to join me at any time. Friday night they all joined me for a 10 minute meditation. I kept the instruction simple: sit up straight in the middle of it all and just sit. Saturday they were interested in having me lead another meditation so I chose the "One Seat" meditation from Jack Kornfield's A Path With Heart. I was suprised and pleased that they benefited from the meditations and actually wanted more instruction from me. I didn't want to overdo it so I erred on the sparse side. I'll be more prepared on our next retreat! It was awesome to be able to share meditation with them. Middle Sister actually said she intended to make a five minute meditation a part of her daily routine. How excellent! She will benefit so much from that.

It was interesting to me that this retreat had the same benefit to me as silent meditation retreats I have been on. I have felt full of gratitude, compassion and patience upon my return.

But I am looking forward to my next retreat. I am seriously thinking about taking a retreat completely by myself, not with a meditation group. I think I have enough discipline to do it. I may talk with my meditation teacher and find out what suggestions he has on that. I still would benefit from participating in a group retreat though, so I'll keep thinking about it.