Our spiritual life depends upon knowing that we are both consciousness itself and wholly flawed and human—our practice is to learn to love both.
We will be in silence for a week, we need to keep that silence deeply for the potential of the retreat to manifest.
Because of so much going around and the amount of people that we are, I am not going to hug to start or end the retreat with anyone. Nothing personal, but better safe than otherwise.
This is an opportunity to go deeper in our work. Mindfulness is the technology for shifting from being ensnarled in suffering to being curious about it. When we understand interconnectedness, it makes us more afraid of hating than of dying.
We can see that we don’t see things the way they are; we see things the way we are. The aim of meditation isn’t to eliminate thought, it’s to free ourselves from suffering. The practice is for developing wisdom and understanding