Creating Your Own Mini-Retreat

Jenn Retreat from jennifer boire on Vimeo.


How I make a mini-retreat:

Some days, I am at a loss at where to start, what to do, to jump start my creative projects or just to ground myself and begin my day. 

Especially on a Monday, it helps me to center and focus if I set aside 30 minutes to an hour for a Mini-Retreat in my bedroom.

This short video shows where I begin.

Namaste,
Musemother/Jenn

Give Yourself a Gift for Mother's Day

"We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit."  - ee cummings 

What does every mother long for, deep in her heart?

Speaking for myself, I can say that when my kids were little I longed for a weekend morning to sleep in and not have the kids come and wake me up at 6:30 am. I longed for time alone to think my own thoughts, and once I hit menopause the need to get away and was even stronger.

I did give myself permission to get away on retreats and writing workshops for weekends, and once even for a whole week. But more importantly, I began to make time during the week for little moments of reflecting time, journaling or yoga or just listening to quiet inspiring music to soothe my woman's soul.

Once I learned about SoulCollage(R), I began to integrate making card collages and images into my retreat time. These days it's usually a Monday or Friday morning, when I can push aside the emails, phone calls, house errands and laundry to just sit and breathe quietly while I write in my journal or make a collage.

Why do I do this? 

My woman's soul is fed by solitude, quiet, and creative journaling, as well as writing down my dreams. I am a very social person with lots of friends and a busy schedule, but once a week, I need to have my time alone, to focus just on me. Sometimes my daily journal only gets a ten minute jot down, but during these mini-retreats I just let myself go and write for longer, or colour in my art journal, making doodles and expressing how I feel today.

This is what today's doodles look like. How I feel, and then How I want to feel.

It feeds my soul, and soothes my agitated mind. It encourages a dialogue between my left and right brain, it helps me understand what I'm feeling. I often find solutions to questions and quandaries I have by the time I've finished writing or drawing.

So for Mother's Day, give yourself a gift - create a time and space for your woman's heart and soul to be nourished. 

And if you need help with journaling exercises, there are some great books out there - 

Sark has juicy creative stuff at http://planetsark.com/buy-stuff/sark-books/succulent-wild-woman/, 

Jennifer Louden has published several books with retreat exercises for women http://jenniferlouden.com/products/books/ 

and there's some great journaling questions for women at mid-life in my own book, The Tao of Turning Fifty, What Every Woman in Her Forties Needs to Know (free excerpt at www.jenniferboire.com), order on-line.

Happy Mother's Day!

Musemother

ps check out The Tao of Turning Fifty's page on Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/TheTaoOfTurningFifty?ref=hl

Reclaim Empty Space for Yourself

Self-care is not about self-indulgence, it’s about self-preservation."—Audrey Lorde

I'm preparing a retreat for March 27, and as always, the exercises that call out to me to offer are usually things that I am working on myself or are close to my heart.

It seems life is always too busy for us to take a moment for ourselves. A busy mom, with three kids, in my yoga class today was complaining of sore legs, and the instructor asked, do you ever get a chance to sit for 10 minutes in the day? No, she replied, quizzically, as if this was unheard of.

I well remember those days of small children and non-stop activity. Life with young adults who have their own lives and barely check in for meal times is quite different.  But I still make myself crazy busy some days, and forget to stretch when I'm on the computer, or resist getting out for a walk in the sunshine with my dog because of the 'list of things to do'.

Here are a few suggestions for reclaiming that empty space on the agenda and filling it with Me Time (for your sanity and health, adapted from Oprah magazine).

Do one thing at a time.Don’t make the bed while brushing your teeth, check your voice mail while eating lunch or half listen to the kids while glancing at the news.

Get lost in the flow....learn a new musical instrument, write in your journal, sketch in a notebook, swim laps in a pool.

Stolen moments: take those tiny nooks of time to walk to work, eat lunch outside on a bench, make dinner without answering the phone, breathe deeply and check in with your body every hour or so, gaze out the window and daydream; The practice of doing nothing feeds your need to replenish, which is just as important as the to-do list.

Be silly. Do one fun, spontaneous thing that makes you laugh – dance alone, blast a CD during morning commute, eat a lollipop in public. 

Take a half-hour walk with a friend and leave your cell phone at home. Focus on discovering something new in your surroundings you’ve never noticed.

Give yourself a day of doing nothing, to balance the days of doing too much. Rest, or engage in joyful activity - what will recharge you?

Attend a one-day retreat, Sunday, March 27, Spring Wellness Retreat, H-OM yoga studio in Hudson. $75. 10 am to 4 pm. Bring a lunch. Come recharge your batteries with creative journaling exercises and gentle yoga. www.homyogacenter.com

nameste

jenn/musemother

I will be gentle with myself

here's a lovely video and song by Karen Drucker
found on youtube. I have her music on a Retreat CD put together for A Woman's Way (Karen Ely)www.awomansway.com and it is full of gems like this one. You can order it on-line at http://www.aretreatofmyown.com/

Value of Retreats

Yesterday was the Cultivating Your Inner Garden Retreat, at my home.  Eight women joined me to create a wonderful space of inner focus and exploration.

A retreat is a funny thing. On the outside it doesn't look like much is happening. But for the mind, it can be like a pressure cooker; asked to reflect on a question in silence, it can seek to run like quicksilver or mercury - when you press on it it scatters in a hundred different directions. Or it can settle and center in the breathing body, thoughts mesmerized by the soothing rhythm or the soughing of wind in the leaves. Nature can soothe, like lapping water on the dock, or soft music: combine the two with a journal, some yoga and walking, an inspiring quote, and voila - a sacred space is created. Ritual also does this, by repeating a song or phrase, lighting a candle flame, walking in a labyrinth towards the center, ancient routines to entrain the wild horses, corral the mind into a focussed pattern.

What do we gain? a heat or pressure is created, and something shifts. Sometimes it's seismic, sometimes subtle, but we gain clarity or understand a problem in a new way. We may feel like nothing has happened on the surface, but clarity, like a strong focussed beam of light has just lit up a dark corner, illuminated an area of shadow.

If we are gentle with ourselves and trusting of the process, a retreat can be restful, rejuvenating, relaxing, even while we are focussed inwards. It does take effort to stay inside the container provided by a retreat. The container is created by the structure of the day, by the respect of the retreatants for the focus and concentration required - by the ritual activity or by the relaxed interior gaze of the questions posed in our journalling.

Time spent on retreat stretches, loses its shape, becomes eternal for a moment - then elastic, returns.

How to follow up on a retreat and put into practice the learnings made?  Take baby steps, give yourself reminders to stop and breathe; regular practise is built over time by paying daily attention to our need. For instance, I need peace and quiet to reflect, so I build a time in my scheudle for meditation and writing, even if only fifteen minutes a day. I post reminders to myself on my mirror, and I write affirmations to help strengthen my resolve to be kind to myself.  I practise paying attention, slowing down when I feel the rushing happening. I don't expect to transform myself overnight, but I listen to the impulse, the desire for peace, the desire for soul food.  I pay attention to my hunger, and I feed it.

I am worthy of taking care of my inner needs, as well as my physical ones.
I deserve to experience this peace of mind.
I allow myself to take all the time I need.

nameste,
Jenn, retreat leader

Cultivate your Inner garden

I've been reading up on materials for a retreat coming up, about what fertilizes your soul, and have serendipitously also found a number of good books at a local used book store.

Woman, Earth and Spirit, The Feminine Symbol and Myth by Helen Luke is full of wonderful understanding about the creative feminine spirit.

Too often we align ourselves with the outer values of the work force; production, performing, success and goal making drive us forward until we hit the wall of exhaustion.  Luke would say this is because we don't value the feminine values of receiving, openness, holding space. The feminine fertilizes in the dark space where the seed lies in the earth, receiving nourishment, light and water and heat from above. It is the earth's nature to foster growth in the dark so that the seed may reach up to the light. This inner fertilizing of our soul growth is as important as the creative output phase.

The soul needs tranquility, and rest, not only fire; inner cultivation occurs in the darkness by resting, finding completeness and wholeness from within.  "The way back and down to those springs [water of life] and to the roots of the tree is likewise the way on and up to the spirit of air and fire in the vaults of heaven." Luke

If we don't give ourselves time to rest and be still, to listen within, due to the pressure to perform and feel worthy, then we "scorch our inner garden with the destructive fire".  We burn up, we burn out. We feel dry and empty.

So to find the fertilizing power you need, think about what elements you need to help you rest and go within.

Think about going on retreat, or making yourself a mini-retreat for an hour or two, by unplugging the phone, the computer and emails. Even over lunchtime, you can make a mini-retreat by walking outside in the sunshine, finding a shady tree to sit under, reflecting on the Waters of life that nourish you and what they may be.

nameste,
jenn/musemother