New Year, New Beginnings

I recently returned from a beautiful meditation retreat on a tiny island in Western Canada and am super excited to explore and share my experiences and what I learned with this growing community in the New Year. Traveling over 3,000 miles alone by (two) airplanes, a car, and a ferry to a place I’d never been, to meet and live with six people I did not know, would normally be unnerving. However, as I planned this trip, took the daylong journey to get to this remote island, and sat for five days (mostly in silence) with a beautiful group of people, I felt an unusual and magical sense that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing and I was exactly where I was supposed to be. What a strange and wonderful thing to have no doubt, no worries, and no second guesses.  
 
After five days on retreat, I left with many lessons that touched me deeply, and a new sense of clarity and ease. One lesson that was loud and clear to me was that everyone has the answers to the many questions we ask ourselves each day, we just need to know how to sit quietly and listen to our hearts and to our own inner wisdom so we can hear those answers. The problem we face is that our world is so full of noise and we are bombarded with loud and confusing messages and voices from all different directions that seep into our consciousness and create doubt and dis-ease in our hearts and minds. We allow all of the “shoulds” to fill our thoughts, creating inner confusion and imbalance.  We learn not to trust (or even to hear) our own inner voice and wisdom. 

Meditation helps us learn how to quiet those outside voices. It helps us learn to sit with ourselves for just a short while and tune in to our hearts and our own wisdom. Letting go of doubt and embracing a sense of trust and patience in our own inner voice can help us all feel a real sense of clarity and ease as we journey through life. This can help us untangle our tangled hearts, ease our worries, better understand what is truly meaningful to us and make more time for those things each day, guide us during times of transition and change, and see deep patterns of behavior that are making us unhappy so that we can uncover a path to greater happiness. For parents, it can help us guide our children to pay attention to their own inner voices, their passions, their instincts, and their hearts, rather than listening to all the messaging they are getting from others that often leads them away from exploring their true path in life.
 
Sounds a bit “out there” I know! But like my journey to Canada, I have no doubt that exploring meditation with this community in 2019 is exactly what I am supposed to be doing. I look forward to sharing with you ways to connect inward.  And, as we sit in silence and truly listen to what's there, we also connect to one another in a rather profound and meaningful way.