.png)
.png)
As the world changes from what many of us thought it was to something very different, there is a movement inwards for many toward self inquiry and seeking both answers and purpose. At the retreat we see this up close and personal, seeing also the connection is has to deep and often very challenging personal crisis.
When life becomes a struggle
Humans are in interesting example of a whole species that has essentially ended up following their "leadership" into an engineered life, one that simply doesn't work for many of those taking part in it. We have essentially and over time, created an existsence that has some key idea based pillars that are now the foundation of life and obsession for almost everyone.
These pillars are for most, inseparablke from life itself as a human. Pillars like money, careers, relationships, posessions, family, life and death, holidays and travel, religion, health, asthetic and diet have been embedded so deeply into us that many of us believe them to be natural and what life actually is.
The truth is however that these elements of our current existence have been created by humans as a set of subjective ideas that we "should" attach to and find importance in, and whilst we may not all be interested in all of them, most of us are deeply engaged with a core subset.
So why the struggle? The truth is that naturally or inately we are not born bound into a set of ideals and beliefs such as the above pillars. These ideas falsely confine our thoughts, actions and behaviours into a very small fraction of what is possible, taking our attention and focus obsessively to the exclusion of all else. This means that our minds are no longer free to meander and adventure within the infinite set of possibilities available to us. After all, if you didn't have to manage your life within those confines, where would your thoughts and existence be?
Having been given these ideas intensively, to run as a kind of program since we were born, we are mislead into believing that human life is all about this limited space of thought and action. More than that though, we become so focussed on them that they become like fragile balls to juggle, balls that we must never ever drop. We become all about them and get lost within them, overthinking it all and trapped in the thought prison they create.
It is this confinement that creates the struggle and the crisis, and the feeling of being trapped. And whilst it's true that some humans are layed back and free of the stress of it all, most are obsessed and tied in like an unseen contract that they must uphol,d for a whole lifetime.
At some point this often get to be too much. It creates a need of escape and a need to let go, often causing addiction, depression, suicidal tendancies or other patterns readily observable in a vast majority of the global population. The great news is, it means you're not alone but how do we escape it?
Transformation is innevitable
At the retreat, our purpose and reason to exist is to facilitate and help the process of letting go of those programmed ideas and pillars, to reveal the amazing human level of freedom beneath.
The only true freedom that exists is that which happens when we are released from the bonds of our own deepest held ideas and beliefs. The truth is that even if all of the ideas in our society and the framework in which we live were other peoples ideas originally, the act of agreeing with them or accepting them as our own truth, effectively makes them our own. This means we become them and identify with them as if they are who we are.
Freedom is not what you think
Meaning that we become prisoners to our own beliefs, not life. We feel trapped by and limited into our ideas about life and not life itself. Imagine being born free of belief and the structures you were givien to live by as a child. Imagine that there are no rights and wrongs, nothing is good or bad, there's nothing you should and shouldn't do and there's no job or amount of money you need to have or person you need to become. That's what freedom really is. It's the release of the bonds that say you must live your life a specific way and release from the bonds of ANY idea at all whether you perceive it to be your own or someone elses. It means you are free to do anything, go anywhere, be anything and enjoy it.
Importantly, this means that if you are currentl;y of the belief that freedom is "doing what I want" it's well worth questioning how you gained the ideas that currently tell you what you "want". For instance, did you want a relationship before you were shown what one was or saw an exapmple of one? Did you want money before you understood what it was? Did you want to travel before you were shown other places on the travel channel? And which things did you want before you saw that they existed? As we consider "wants" we see that they are all a result of what is suggested to us at some point, often in the media or at school.
The nature of these wants and the relationship to your programming with ideas can be quite a challenge to see or accept. It can seem like your wants are your own and that they are naturally part of who you are but on honestly tracing it all back, it reveals that they were assumed and accepted, rather than any being of your own creation.
It turns out that ideas are the most transmissable and contagious thing on the planet. We blindly believe what we are told or shown and what is inferred to us and we make it into a rigid framework of concepots to live by without ever questioning it.
Transformation is a journey to true freedom
It turns out that for us humans, there's only what's actually happening in this existence before we create labels about it or polarise it into good or bad and then there's a huge layer of ideas sat on top of it that we are at liberty to believe in or not. None of them are actual truth, they are simply subjective concepts that we create as stories to sit on top of something that otherwise has no meaning. Money is one, relationships are one, what you look like is one, what you have is another as is success, diet, life, death etc. The list includes everything that most humans are commonly thinking about.
Transformation is a journey to clearing the idea based program completely. A jounrey to finding who you were before the ideas were added and before they became a prison for you to live within and obsess about. It is the journey to release from all subjective concepts and to a state of complete surrender to the unplanned, thoughtless flow of what is. A return to the what is that has always been there before you decided to get involved and try to plan, control and manage it to fit the ideas you adopted about it.
The outcome is to finally feel light and free, to let go and find the joy in whatever comes your way, whether you "wanted" it or not. It is also what happens when your life loses all restriction and limitation because that's what all concepts and ideas bring. When we gain an idea of what we need to do, be, have and think we instantly become limited by it and lose a little more of our freedom to do anything and enjoy it.
Beware of false transformation, the exchanging of one idea set for another set of limitations.
When we are in crisis or feel trapped we become avid searchers and seekers. Our lives are almost a perpetual journey of searching for what will bring us peace and happiness, looking for the next things we can do, be or have that will bring it.
This means that while trapped and feeling slightly desperate we are at our most vulnerable. It's a time when we really do need to escape and as such will take anything we can get that gives us a hint of that illusive peace or happiness. This means that in order to escape the confines of the ideas that bind us, we often paradoxically add more ideas into the mix in the hope it that will somehow set us free.
This is when we find and add new idea spaces such as spiritualism and yoga, rituals and devinity, astrology and more. Having been trapped in a societal, money driven, consumerist, relationship driven world of chasing and fear, we opt for a whole new set of routines, practices and confines that come with the new spaces we are inocently exploring in order to find our peace.
Before you know it, you are meditating morning and night, entering into new postures and contortionisms, going through ritualistic dogma in ceremony and have become dependent on the astrology and stars to tell you how to feel. You may also buy into never drinking alchohol again, becoming a vegan, a life of service, gratitude and trying to love everyone whether you really do or not. At the time it';s hard to see that these are all just the new ideas from the space you are choosing to explore and at least while new, they feel way better than the old ones. Then comes your dependency on them.
When it's said out loud this may seem really obvious. It is the exchange of one idea set that you've decided doesn't serve you for another one that feels better, but when you are submerged in the process this can be anything but visible, with many of us getting trapped in the middle as part of the final journey.
How will I know?
Transformation is freedom. It is a total removal of limitation and it's a relaxed ability to experience your life in peace and joy no matter what's happening in it and around you. You become untouchable, absent of fear and happy no matter what.
The rules have gone, there are no rituals, there's nothing you must be thinking, nothing you must be doing and nowhere to go and nothing to be. It is a total letting go and surrender to the flow without needing to plan, think, react, worry, serve, abstain or partake.
As we awaken to the truth that we live in a reality with no rules other than those that humans make up, where nothing is right or wrong, where there is no specific way to be human and nothing you should do or not do to feel ok, we realise that how we feel is about the inside and not the outside. It is our own inner responsibility and has always been under our own control.
As we realise that no ritual or idea is needed to keep us feeling ok and that our journey has been all about realising that, we liberate ourselves from all restriction and allow ourselves the ability to be happy no matter what. We don't need the stars, or the absence of the drinks, we don't need to become vegan and we aren't bound into daily rituals, thoughts of gratitude or devotion and we don't need to positively affirm endlessly in the hope of combatting how bad we feel underneath.
Look out for the next 10 day transformational retreat for more information.
.png)
.png)
