Retreat Review Review

I'm not happy with my recent blog entry about my not so great retreat experience at Springwater Center.

 I 'm mainly unhappy with thy style but also with some of the content. When I was writing it I felt like I was riding a powerful horse while constantly pulling the reins to keep it in check. Why was I trying to hold it back? What was I afraid of? Loss of control? Anger?  This is complicated.

Lot's of stuff going on. I was embarrassed. My pride was hurt. I felt I had squandered $560 of our limited retirement money. Sure, Springwater shouldn't put unsuspecting people in the situation I experienced, and I think I clearly told them that. But both in the restrained writing and in my ongoing struggle to integrate this experience into my life I feel I'm missing something. There's something going on that keeps me poking at the wound. There's a discomforting restlessness that is demanding attention. I guess that's been a baseline feeling of most of my life but it's been more pronounced since returning from Springwater.

I have a suspicion that the issue beneath the issue may be that the ideas I was exposed to at Springwater represent a fundamental challenge to how I view how I fit in the world...a serious challenge to my assumptions, values and ideals. (I'm not sure these are the right words here but they're in the ball park).

Maybe my ten page tome about Springwater was nothing more than my defensive reaction to the challenge “meditative inquiry.”

To tell an idealist, as Toni Packer does , that “ideals are worthless,dangerous, blinding, hindering. And we constantly build them up and take our refuge in them,” is a challenge of the first order. How could I not be defensive? The trouble is I get her point. It makes sense. But I don't agree with it. I want to live in the moment devoid of conditioning and limiting concepts but I also believe it is important to make my moment to moment decisions about how to live be based on values and ideals not solely on the immediate reaction I'm having to the moment.

So again life raises it's paradoxical head and I'm trying to find my bearings. I'm getting too old for this.