Truth is not to be found outside. No teacher, no scripture can give it to you.
It is inside you and if you wish to attain it, seek your own company. Be with yourself.
- Osho
What is a solo retreat ?
Alone in the wilderness . Only yourself and nature as company. You will spend four days and three nights in a place of your own choice. With as little as possible impulses and distractions. Without reading, writing , music, hiking, campfire, eating. With no more than the bare essentials in your backpack. And this, for the opportunity to be fully where you are. You stay where you are, literally , in your small arena. A circle of stones or branches with a radius of a few meters. Where time is irrelevant. Where awareness takes place. Where you can just be.
You can go on a solo with a personal question or completely open and without expectations. Maybe you have a knot in your life that you would like to untangle. Maybe you want to experience what it is to share your space with only the animals. Maybe you want to enjoy undisturbed nature. There are no good or bad reasons to do a solo. To feel you want it, is enough.
A solo can be done at any moment of your life. It is mostly suitable for critical periods in your life. Are you on the verge of a major transformation, are there big changes in your life, are you looking for your strength and your potential? Then the solo experience has much to offer. If you are open to growth and curious about your essence and mission in life, if you have a desire for personal wholeness and want to recognize and break through destructive patterns and fears, then you are ready for a solo retreat. With nature as primordial guide, there`s a good chance that you will find clarity and inner strength. That your personal development and spirituality get a boost. That you make (stronger) contact with yourself and the earth. You give yourself a moment to leave, to go, with nothing but your beating heart, singing with the sunrise .
What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours — that is what you must be able to attain.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Practical
The solo retreat of 2019 will take place in the period of the summer solstice, from June 15th to 23th. Our solo area is located in the French Catalan Pyrenees. Our base camp is located at the house of a shepherd and his wife, a beautiful camping spot called El Manau (www.elmanau.com), that we have for ourselves in that period. It is located a few kilometers from the village of Nohèdes , sixty kilometers from Perpignan. According to tradition, this is the place where Noah went ashore with his ark. This explains the huge diversity of plants, animals, and elemental beings in the region. The shape of the ark draws up until now off in one of the rock peaks. The diversity of solo spots in the landscape is large, ranging from sitting on top of the mountain to under a tree in the valley or at the bank of a clear mountain stream.
Guidance
Lien and Katrien are guiding the eight year in a row a solo retreat together. Besides guiding retreats they are both passionate about permaculture, which they apply in their homes, in Amsterdam and Cretas (Spain) respectively.
www.leavesoflien.com and www.kurkumfarmecovida.blogspot.com
The solo will be guided in English.
Info and registration: katrien.deboutte@gmail.com. Up to eight people can participate.
Do you know people who are interested to go on a solo retreat? Please send them this mail. Thank you.
We hope to see you around the fire…
“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
- T.S. Eliot
No comments:
Post a Comment