celticstag

Recently I attended a day retreat on faith at my yoga studio of choice, The Samarya Center, here in Seattle. The Samarya Center offers all kinds of retreats and workshops on yoga related topics, often with a unique, unexpected but always authentic focus (prenatal yoga, yoga for athletes, yoga for chronic pain, circus yoga...!) Faith, too, seemed a special and uncommon topic for public contemplation outside of a religious setting.

It was a helpful exercise for me on multiple levels. I found it validating to share space with others who are interested in the topic. I consider myself a person of faith, but have not been a participant in mainline religion since high school. Faith and spiritual issues take space in my thoughts everyday and I've had a deep interest in these things since childhood. But rarely do I see anyone actively exploring the topic beyond the self-help shelf or inspirational television programming. So, it was great to commune with other ordinary individuals on the subject without the doctrinal affiliation of some religious organization. It was affirming just to see that there are other folk like me.

The facilitated structure of the discussion and exercises maintained a pristine balance, staying on the simple, taught line of empirical reasoning. Without swaying into a secular negation of mystery, and without falling into any given religious shape, I was surprised by the relevance and nuance it offered to my own very personal experience. Molly Lannon Kenny, MS-CCC, Samarya Center founder, leading the retreat, referenced a number of published resources and, presenting her own considered analysis, skillfully drew out a model of faith as human experience. She addressed her own religious background and there were a few raised hands and nodding heads in response here and there, but theology stayed in the background. The perspective was more spacious than comparative religion. It wasn't revealed exactly what combination of different traditions were represented among the participants, and I stayed comfortably cloaked in my pagan anonymity -- not feeling unrepresented (nor misrepresented), rather, feeling paganism as fully included as any possible path -- but mostly feeling free to explore the naked bones of all faith.

Renewal. What I came away with was a reflection of my own practice and devotion, recollected and remembered. Gratitude practice for example. Something I realized that I'd allowed to become a habit rather than a living interaction with my world. Observances I'd kept in years past, but haven't continued for changes in circumstance. I have an alter space (perhaps an altar) in my home. I pray there daily. But, there was a time when I brought offerings, with care and dedication -- and gratitude -- to celebrate the ancestors, the natural and the divine -- to celebrate the turning points of life. For some time I'd sleepily wondered if I'd ever resume those practices. Now a crack of light, morning has broken.

These are a few of the benefits that came from this retreat and I've barely touched on it in this post. It seems to be a well to which I may return for continued inspiration.

How should spring bring forth a garden on hard stones?
Become earth that you may grow flowers of many colors
For you have been a heart breaking rock.
Once, for the sake of experiment, be earth.
~Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi~

In yoga class the teachers often instruct us to "soften" or "be soft" or "find softness." Sometimes I can go with that in the moment, in the safety and focus of assana practice. But, continuing the principle into daily living feels like I'm only making myself vulnerable and I'm not sure what the point is in that.

Last night, re-reading The Fragrence of Faith by Jamal Rahman, I read these lines from Rumi and understood.

I am sometimes struck by how many people there are in the world. Not the 6,672,550,545 total population of humans on earth. That figure is too abstract to penetrate my imagination. I mean the faces I see every day of my life, on the sidewalks and streets of the city. Faces that will pass by me and I will never see again. The face that belongs to another who's life is exactly as intense and dense to her as mine is to me; who's innermost spark is equally divine. And how many times multiplied are these individual lives, like nested reflections in facing mirrors, opening into infinity?

Try to wrap your head around the fact that someone else -- a stranger -- feels the urgency of personal ambitions: to accomplish goals, finish work, continue playing, get attention, eat, sleep, make love; after seeing his face only in profile, moving through traffic -- and without knowing the details: what work, what games, who's love? Try to hold in your consciousness a sense of personal weight and mortality as sharp as your own for each and every passer-by, maintain your attention on each simultaneously, cumulatively, gathering them like berries at the end of summer.