Reflections on Our Denmark Retreat, and Our Retreats in General
Please walk with me into the dark and learn to see with no eyes
What is it that people are getting out of joining together for a three full day retreat on a small island in the North Sea?
I’m not a Zen teacher. I’m not really a Qigong or Neigong teacher. I’m influenced by Qigong, Tai chi, Aikido, visual art, Zen, Zhan Zhuang, indigenous cultures, dance, butoh, tracking, sculpture, healing arts, Shamanism, etc. I spent a lot of time in the Zen training environment, so some of my language comes from that, as well as some of the emphasis on tanden and body orientation, being no nonsense, grounded, comical, and down home.
I’m really curious. I’m feeling into the group. I’m led into this group process, I feel guided by the essence the group is calling for. I can’t explain the joy that is connecting with this beautiful process, connecting with everyone there. I am so grateful people sincerely give themselves to the retreat. It is so inspiring to see people become vulnerable and transform.
This is mysterious territory. We go into the unknown in these retreats.
I’m not sure what I am doing. I am interested in communication. I’m interested in getting closer to our experience together. I’m interested in group alchemy. I’m interested in a Dharma, a Tao that we can feel with our total being.
What many people can’t grasp is that in the not knowing, in the dropping of body and mind, creation happens. God speaks.
I’m not sure why people come. Their eyes begin to shine. They see something deep is happening. They touch something wild and primordial, and that begins to mobilize.
It is interesting to have something to offer that can’t be described. It can’t even be understood. It is beyond lineage or technique or religion. It’s like we are in this silent conversation we don’t have language for. We feel our way through the dark, stepping forward, discovering with each step. This is the process. Learning to function from a place of unknown, connected place.
I am being led by deeper forces which I have complete faith in. I’m not special but this truth is luminous.
These retreats are an experiment, a happening. They are evolving.
People who come are often serious meditators from a few traditions like Zen or Tibetan Buddhism. Others are coming because they are having some energetic experiences that they don’t know how to deal with. Maybe they come from a meditative yoga tradition and they need more tools to work with themselves to get into their bodies and learn to walk around in a grounded way. Often they feel a bit like floating heads walking around.
I am very wary of practice from a purely mental perspective. My alarms go off when people are coming from that place. I spent so many years having that blasted out of me.
I think most people think I am teaching qigong. But they know about my Zen background. Maybe some come to help deepen their zazen practice, and have heard good things. Many who come have read my blogs over the years and finally take the plunge to practice together.
I am so certain of this letting go. The whole retreat is this laboratory of giving in to this process trying to happen.
The body is a great teacher for helping us get into this connection.
And what is it to have complete confidence in something which is beyond thought? Something there below the radar… I’m offering this ability to move through life from a more connected place, one which can’t be written about. So we do these retreats as a testing ground.
We have a schedule for these retreats, but the schedule just provides a structure to play within. We sit in meditation, do some static Zhan Zhuang, take group walks, do some Qigong movement, some freestyle Non-Directed Body Movement. It’s all a physical sermon of feeling and engaging and exploring.
I am trying to give people a laboratory of feeling. I’m trying to give them permission to give space to what they are actually experiencing. I am trying to saturate them with time, and in that time, in the midst of physical down to earth practices, discover that there really is something happening, perhaps under their normal radar, which they can begin to interact with and allow to express. This is digested, often in dramatic ways.
It’s not therapy, it’s not just relaxing. What would it be like if our everyday experience was imbued with essence, if when we took a step it would feel like the universe is moving with us?
Because of my own longtime process, having been through so much struggle, so much letting go, I have such faith in the process waiting to be discovered when we sincerely feel and touch our experience.
Everyone does this differently, and so in that way, we are all on our own. And this makes the practice so alive as the masks, the walls begin to drop. Everyone is doing the same thing, and yet, everyone is doing it differently, finding their own way in. For most people, this laboratory of feeling requires stillness and time, as this testing ground of letting go and connecting can be quite disorienting and overwhelming at first. But I found that over time, as I faced myself, turned around to my experience and looked it in the eye, threw my life on the line, even though it was so frightening, that letting go feels so wonderful. And when we begin to find freedom internally, we see that this necessarily bleeds into our everyday life as a matter of course.
People often say to me on day one, “This is going to be a lot for me, I can tell.” Meaning, oh man, I’m going to finally have to face this stuff. These stuck places that maybe they have been holding at bay, even in their normal meditation practice they have found ways to not feel what is happening.
When I was in my twenties I was the most intense person around. And everything I read or heard about spiritual work was about turning that intensity down. But the teacher I was lucky enough to meet felt even more intense than me. And that gave me permission to allow my whole being into this process, to bring the devil and the angels and everything in between out into the light. I needed this permission. I needed someone who could take me, who was not moved around by my intensity. I think people in the retreats see that I am just not phased by what they are going through, but see them and know they can get through it, and this is quite powerful.
And I saw over time that these physical practices are a venue for gaining faith that I can be the most intense, I can be real with exactly what is happening, bring it all, all of that intensity can be transmuted to help all beings. The intensity is a real necessary gift that can be channeled. So, I put on these classes, these retreats, as a time, a special laboratory, for people to bring it all, their whole being. We learn to open up, maybe slowly as they can handle it. I’ve been through this process, have such faith in it, and so they have permission and space to feel everything they are holding at bay.
People need a venue to explore their process. Some have found a bit of freedom, but don’t quite know how to act in the world. They’ve touched something, and think maybe now they can be led by their intuition, but then see that they cause problems in their interactions with others. They now need to mature in this internal navigation. Or some have opened up, but their bodies can’t handle all of it, so we give them these down to earth practices to learn how to meet their bodies, and learn to relate with others in a real way.
Often people have been doing practices for years, even decades, and now, beginning to feel it all in their bodies and see the possibility of moving through the world from a connected, deep place is a revelation.
I use the word energy quite a bit in my retreats. Tanden (Lower Dantian), Ki, Qi, Great life energy, etc. This has been the language which has resonated the most with me and helped me to feel into reality. I know some Zen teachers don’t talk about energy, but that was not my experience in Japan in my twenties living with an energy master Roshi. This all is confusing for some people when they arrive, but soon they find all of this waking up as they get more in their bodies and more curious. They find their sitting begins to change and deepen as they connect to the energy.
In general, we all cook together, make tea or coffee together, have some time for discussion and a lot of time for quiet. We take walks everyday and do some touch exploration between participants as a way to explore relating.
The practices are challenging, but doable for anyone. But they put us in dialogue with where we are gripping, guarded, stuck, and that is uncomfortable. This is an incredibly personal and creative process for participants.
People in the retreats are self motivated, but at times I strike the iron to help sharpen the focus. Often we can feel the energy amping up and then things begin to get a bit unwieldy. Then I’ll say a few sharp things to bring the group back together. "Wipe the toilet when you pee! I shouldn’t have to tell you that!!"
I put people out to sea. I put them into the unknown, and take away their strategies. Maybe they have been doing a method for years and it is in a holding pattern which has plateaued. Maybe they’ve gotten a lot of identity boosting through being a good Zen or Buddhist student, but have gotten lost worshipping the form. I ask them to confront their assumptions. Most of us have assumptions about who we are and what we should do. What practice is. The retreats are a study in observing and feeling through the assumptions that are not actually true. With our bodies. It’s a rebellious practice.
People don’t believe in their cells that they can let go of body and mind in daily life. And so we have this special time in the oven of practice together to explore that possibility. Deep practice is the winning over of that realization.
There is time for discussion, time for one on one time with me. I don’t claim to be perfect. But I am offering something unique, I’m ushering in something powerful in this group alchemy, in this work. When practice deepens, it is such a relief that it is not about us.
Thank you to all who show up and who have shown up. Who've taken the chance to face themselves. I’m so grateful that we can all deepen together. This life is so precious, to be born in this human body and encounter something real.
Hugs to all of you!
Core
P.S. I would like to thank Lisbeth for hosting Rose and I and of course the whole group for this retreat at her childhood home. Lisbeth took care of Rose and I, showed us around Denmark, graciously included Rose (17) in so many ways. I am very indebted to her for that.
Photos by the one and only Joe Bateman
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Okay so I've been informed that Lyo might be best described as in the South Fyn archipelago,
or more generally in the sea south of Denmark