SOLD: Beautiful Happyzine

Last Saturday a group of women came together for the second Soul Sisters Retreat in beautiful Cable Bay, near Nelson. My friend’s house backs onto the tidal estuary. Both the house and the abundant rose filled garden have been created with lots of love and care and as soon as you walk through the door your whole being sighs with relief. Aah, a place where I can rest and be renewed!

A retreat is a space outside our challenging lives where we can switch off the busy mind and dive deeper into ourselves to remember what really matters. When we become very present with our experience we step into a space outside time, a state of pure being. When we share from this place we easily create a deep connection with others, a soul based community. It’s amazing how just one day can stretch into a timeless island of sanity and self nurturing.

Participating in a retreat is an opportunity to remember that simplicity is the key to fulfillment.  Everything we need for life to be a deeply satisfying experience is here, now, in every moment.  Much of the time we forget this simple fact because we are so busy running around searching and trying to create it somewhere else! It’s the mind which makes life complicated. When we succeed in stilling the mind, even for a few minutes, or for an hour, we enter the most delicious freedom.

You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars going from workshop to workshop looking for the Holy Grail. Here are three simple practices you can use to make every day a treat.

• Take five minutes a day to be totally present with your breathing. Just follow the breath in and out and enjoy the sensations. As you do so everything else fades into the background and you experience oneness with life.

• Take another five minutes a day to connect with nature. I mean really connect. Go outside in a state of presence and come to your senses. Look, taste, smell, listen, touch.   Allow yourself to drink deep of nature’s beauty. Give yourself this gift.

• Then take another five minutes each day to really listen to someone you love. Really listen from that place of silent stillness within you. Open yourself to hear, not only the other’s words but their emotional tone, listen to what they’re not saying, to the spaces between words, and to what wants to emerge. Don’t interrupt, and drop any ideas of wanting to fix, change, disagree with or judge them. Just listen with the intention of seeing the same perfect beauty in this person that you have witnessed in nature.

I guarantee that if you follow these three simple practices every day, your life will transform. Of course, it’s easier in a group because when we come together with a shared intention we co-create a more expanded energy field which amplifies the higher state of consciousness. Held in the loving embrace of the Now, healing happens spontaneously, everything magically shifts into a new perspective, we see that everything we’ve always wanted was here all along and we simply have to show up, open up, and allow ourselves to experience fully.

The next Soul Sister’s Retreats are in Cable Bay on Sunday 13th March 10.30-5. And in Golden Bay on Sunday March 20th, 11-6. Since this is near the autumn equinox we will be focusing on Harvesting our Gifts. For more information and to book please contact:
[email protected] or phone 03 525 7578.

Rose Diamond, February 19th 2011

Tags: simple