Aloha Spirit

I just returned from teaching my annual Hawaii yoga and meditation retreat on the small island of Molokai. 

Retreating is important.  When I come back from retreat, I bring with me the spacious ease that I found in the rhythm of rising early and meditating, doing asana every day, being cooked for and fed with love and spirit (heaven!), taking a sabbatical from whatever I'm usually plugged into, and sleeping deeply.  On Molokai, we rise with the birds; actually, you HAVE to because they are LOUD, raucous, and abundant.  Like everything in Hawaii, they are extraordinarily full of life force.  Hawaiians say you pop a seed in the ground here and the next day it is 3 feet tall.

When you retreat, you see your own life from a distance.  You have more perspective.  You step out of what has been narrowly occupying your energy and time, and view things from afar.  We tend to narrow down to a mono-focus in the day to day perceived predictability of life.  Retreating, being in a new place, reminds us that life actually never is predictable or ordinary.  When you are at a distance from the day to day of your life, you can think more creatively about the shape you want your life to take, and can imagine its fullness and the steps it will take to get there.  You are in a liminal space, a space on both sides of a threshold.  You are not in your day to day life, yet you are still moving, living, breathing.  Every moment is filled with the unexpected, like wasps in the composting toilet, baby goats, puppies, flowers of irrepressible beauty and size around every corner, new people to get to know, yoga poses to investigate, chocolate mousse made out of avocados!

Sunrise, and the raucous, uncontainable good morning of tropical birds; then the walk through the dark morning to the lovely yoga yurt.  We gather in a circle, sleepy, to meditate.  The island takes us deep as there is only depth beneath us, a cavern equivalent to the Grand Canyon between Molokai and Oahu.  Like an eagle hovering over this small land mass, seeing the whole island entire, we view our lives from an enlarged perspective, and what we observe is: life is basically good, evolution is possible and positive, and time away is not a luxury, but is needed for the health of our hearts and souls.