While times get overfilled with events, visits, engagements, preparations, and possible winter illnesses, we quickly get overwhelmed. Simple tasks are no longer manageable and flood away our attention span. It gets harder to stay on top of everything and calm amid a storm. Having felt this way, it was the right time for the long-planned two-day silent retreat.
Leading up to the course brought me the focus I needed to put daily life into perspective and ensure not to anticipate or overexcite myself for the event and instead take every moment for what it was.
After spending two days at the retreat, I was able to revisit a practice that planted important seeds of my relationship to mindfulness and discovering significant aspects of life.
The experience was to come back and realize what mattered most and how to be effective in tackling the everyday struggles. The most valuable insight I received was that there will always be challenges, unexpected occasions, and misbehaved kids. Spending this worth time with myself, let me believe to be on the right track. Understanding that there will be periods of too much going on. When we need to take a step back and give ourselves that self-care for a couple of minutes, hours, or even days, it also showed me to keep practicing and knowing that we only can give our best by taking one step at a time, time and time again.
Having had a conversation with the Assistant Teacher at this course also taught me that there is a fine line of following a practice that we believe in and what we want to contribute and communicate to a community or a group of people. I want to make sure that what I want to reach with mindfulness is solely to raise awareness of how we approach life as a whole and on the daily. It is my purpose to make us receptive to the imperfections and unpredictabilities out there. To connect and reconnect with ourselves and the people around us.
Besides the acquired knowledge for mindfulness during this retreat, I additionally regained self-awareness with the people I care so much about. Furthermore, it showed me "I" can only go so far. It is the "we" that can move mountains. It is "we" who need to be open and understanding of our own and other people's perceptions. We all are constructed and wired differently; the more we are accessible to these differences, the more we increase togetherness.