Retreats

It happens on a retreat where we are introduced to the basics of “The Yogic Art of Healing” by Daniel. After a common meditation we have the  possibility to ask questions and to talk about experiences in our practice, while Daniel uses every opportunity to teach us. After he has already helped some of our group, I ask him a question about my meditation practice. He just looks at me, no answer.

Okay. I’m sure I didn’t make myself clear. So I try again and ask my question again. He keeps looking at me. Now I’m confused. Was my question so poorly worded? Or inappropriate? Or irrelevant? I think about it for a moment, but I will not be dissuated from rephrasing my question again. Daniel looks at me and smiles.

Help, that can not be true. The situation repeats itself a few more times and becomes unreal, exhausting and unpleasant for me. What happens around me in the room, the reaction of the others, I no longer perceive at all. Somehow, it’s all about Daniel and me. It’s already dawning on me that he’s trying to demonstrate something when he says, “There’s a much easier way.” I close my eyes and try to understand. To follow him. Although I am very insecure, I do not doubt for a second that he means well with me. And that helps me not to react defensively or to close myself off. I sense that there could be something significant in this for me.

At some point Daniel encourages me to open my eyes again and try again. I’m looking right at him. And under this view I do not succeed in ordering my thoughts or forming a coherent sentence. I am briefly tempted to avert my eyes in order to be able to collect myself when I realize that this is exactly what it is all about. It’s as if his gaze pulls me over to him, into him. It’s like an absorbation that makes it impossible for me to think. When I try to describe this phenomenon, Daniel gets to the point: To whom should I speak if there is no mind to listen? And then he asks me, “What is in you if you don’t think?”

My own feelings overwhelm me even as I speak. How often had I longed to feel deep connection and love. And now they were just there, without effort. So is peace. And abundance. And this time I can hardly speak out of gratitude, out of infinite gratitude. And because I’m so happy. What a gift. Bettina G.

Silence. Together we listen to the singing of the bird sitting in the tree.

Through your silence every activity, every thought and action falls away from me. Layer by layer the fog and walls dissolve, which enveloped my deepest inside.

Fog created by too much activity obscured my view. Walls built by myself in the hope of protecting this fine, sensitive part of me have prevented me from seeing, hearing, feeling.

D: “Can you hear the bird?”

K: “Yes! I’m listening. I feel. The bird. The sound. The silence.”

Completely naked and deeply touchable my inner being just sits there. Detached from everything that it doesn’t need here and now.

Dissolving into the blessing of listening together.

Secure, kept and gently enveloped in intense sensations of sound and silence, in your silence and words born from it and in my tears of deepest touch.

By nothing separated from the singing of the bird … the sound … far from space and time. Everything very close to me, with me, in me. Strongly connected and united. Katrin H.