Answering the Call
By Sarah Powers
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After our conversation, I returned to my practice aligned again with my initial commitment to awakening, reminded that the retreat was a superb opportunity to accelerate my release of conditioned, habitual ways of being. I felt reassured that it would enable me to be more present and loving, and therefore a more compassionate and mature wife and mother. When I returned home and my husband and daughter sensed the changes in me, they became even
more enthusiastic in their support of my retreat time. We had all confirmed that being committed to a spiritual life and being in a worldly life need not be in conflict.
Having had many such experiences of new insight and growth on retreat, I can think of no better way to uproot the weeds of discontent. When we start going on retreats, we can find the glimpses we get into the true Self to be
a beautiful blessing and an incredible resource. Through the hours of meditating, we can come to witness our internal warring voices from a place of impartial interest, eventually realizing that no one can dispel the discontented false self except us. Certainly, we need compassionate teachers to point the way and redirect us when we get derailed from our intentions, but they cannot do the work for us. Only dedicated use of the tools of
practice, again and again, gradually transforms us. Instead of identifying ourselves as bad or wrong, we learn to disidentify from the charade of the ego-self and to begin the slow, gradual process of compassionately metabolizing these patterns into our larger nature, our authentic Self. More than any other practice I know, retreats are the way to make ourselves accident prone to the grace of presence.
Sarah Powers teaches a blend of yoga and Buddhism, leading workshops and retreats internationally. She lives with her husband, Ty, and daughter, Imani, in Marin County, California, and can be reached at www.sarahpowers.com.
 
March/April 02
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