This post is another part to my reflections on retreat. Previous posts are:
- A Day On Retreat which describes a typical day from the retreat I attended in March this year; and
- Reinvigorated Practices – Reflections On Retreat, something of a sister post to this one reflecting on practices which had become dormant or taken a bit of a back seat in my life which the March retreat reinvigorated.
This post looks at five new practices the retreat I attended in March inspired. These are swimming in cold Tasmanian water, allowing the spaces between asanas (yoga poses), getting comfortable with the night, sound meditation and paying attention to ritual.
Swimming in cold Tasmanian water
Until now, I’ve been a bit of a wimp when it comes to swimming in lutruwita/Tasmania. The water is always cold and while I’ve got my feet and legs wet numerous times since I moved, I don’t think I’d ever got completely into the water until I took the plunge into Lake Cethana. This was something I then proceeded to do again because, while shockingly cold, it was also (perhaps for this very reason) massively invigorating. There is something so satisfying about plunging into cold water and feeling your body react, then start to acclimatise.
Since the retreat, I have swum several more times. I’m still a bit of a wimp and need the sun to be out for me to take the plunge, but as soon as the opportunity presents itself, I’m there! There is something addictive about this practice. The more I’ve done it, the more I’ve wanted to do it (that is, until the weather turned decidedly wintry!)
Allowing the spaces between asanas (yoga poses)
I’d often felt a desire to just rest for a few breaths between asanas, but the retreat was the first time a yoga teacher had ever told me that these spaces between were important and needed to be honoured. I had sometimes honoured the desire to rest for a few breaths, but frequently I had simply pushed on to the next asana. I am not good at resting and being still, so pushing on to the next asana always felt more comfortable.
Since the retreat, I have been really conscious of tuning in to and honouring the desire to rest during asana practice. Some days, this makes my practice look quite different. It can be much slower and gentler than it was before the retreat, which was already much slower and gentler than the asana practice I began with nearly nine years ago. Given my difficult relationship with rest and being still, it’s a great challenge for me to really lean into these spaces between.
Getting comfortable with the night
I’ve always been a bit afraid of the night. I can be completely comfortable in a place while the sun is out but then, when it’s dark, the place becomes scary. As a child, this was even the case in my family home. Some nights, I was convinced there was a person creeping around the kitchen or a man lurking in the shadows behind my bedroom door. For a time, I’d be paralysed by the fear, not wanting to move or make a sound, thereby drawing attention to myself. At some point, I would pluck up the courage to call out to Mum and Dad, or wiggle my way out of bed and across to their bedroom. As soon as I was ensconced in or beside their bed, or joined by Mum in mine, the fear would evaporate. I was safe.
As I got older, I grew out of this at home fear, but a fear of being alone in most outdoor settings at night remained. Unlike the at home night time fears of my childhood, which were almost completely irrational, this fear is not completely illogical either, particularly as a woman. Bad things can and do happen to women (and non-binary or trans people) who venture out alone at night. They shouldn’t, but they do.
On the retreat, I stayed alone in a gorgeous little cabin in the forest with no lock on the door, located a few minutes’ walk from the next cabin. This challenged my fear of the night. For the first couple of nights, I found the sounds of the night time brushtail possum antics kept me awake as the sound of possum climbing down a tree or scratching on the cabin walls or floor morphed in my mind into person lurking outside my cabin. Like the fears of my childhood, this was an almost completely irrational fear – we were on a locked property in kind of the middle of nowhere, so the likelihood of an intruder, of someone coming to harm me, was seriously low, but the fear nonetheless took a couple of nights to shake. The first couple of nights, I was on high alert, unable to drop off to sleep because I had to be ready should anything happen. Something which helped was sitting on the stoop of my cabin in the dark before trying to go to sleep, getting used to the sounds of the forest, investigating them by shining my head torch around if they frightened me. I did this for a short while on night two, longer on nights three and four. This meant when I retired to my sleeping bag, the soundscape was increasingly familiar rather than frightening. It was classic exposure therapy.
Sound meditation
As I described in my post A Day On Retreat, we started each day with a sound meditation which consisted of us humming or making the sound ‘om’ while the tamboura droned in the background. At first, I was a bit sceptical of this practice and the time spent on the first morning seemed to drag. By the last morning, this seemed the logical way to begin the day. It warmed up my voice; got me connecting with my breath and consciously breathing deeply; started to warm up my body; created pleasant vibrations through my body; and could be creative and fun as I played with pitch, tone, volume.
Since the retreat, I have continued to start most mornings like this. On top of the benefits I just listed, it also reminds me, and helps me tap into, how I felt on the retreat. I don’t usually sit and just do this practice, it’s something I do while I have a shower and get dressed, where previously I would have put music on and sung. I find I now prefer it to putting music on first thing in the morning. There’s so much going on in music, whereas the tamboura and sound ‘om’ are comparatively simple. It seems a gentler way to ease from the non-stimulation of sleep into the stimulation of the day.
Paying attention to ritual
The term ritual has long had negative associations in my mind. I’ve seen it as the domain of the religious or otherwise spiritual, as something a bit woo-woo from which I’d rather keep a safe distance. But ritual is not just taking communion at church, lighting incense at an altar or conducting crystal healing – the sorts of things I shied away from. We all have rituals we engage in, from daily rituals like a morning cup of tea or coffee to less frequent (often annual) rituals to mark time such as Birthday celebrations.
The retreat made me think more deeply about ritual and its place in my life. It’s also something discussed regularly on the Futuresteading podcast and new book of the same name, both of which I love. For any of us, life can become monotonous, can lose its purpose, if we don’t find ways to regularly, intentionally inject it with interest, purpose. Ritual is a way to add structure to our lives, to bring us back to the present moment, to prompt us to slow down and reflect. As I said, we are all engaging in ritual already, but it’s about approaching these rituals with intention, mindfulness, reflectiveness. This is not always possible. Sometimes my morning cup of tea is a utilitarian measure taken at the start of my work day to give me a burst of caffeine to assist in getting stuck into my work, not a chance take stock of my life. But my weekend cup of tea, when I don’t have somewhere I need to be or something I need to do, at least not right away, is a chance to slow down, to take stock of the week that’s just whizzed by, to write in my journal, to take some deep breaths, to be grateful for simple things like tea itself and the view of the timtumili minaya/River Derwent from my dining table.
I might have one more post in this series in me, but it’s been a bit of a wrestle trying to write it so far so no promises there!
Love, hope and peace from Emma.
Love Hope Peace 
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