Creating a Retreat

One December afternoon in 1994 I found myself walking in a forest filled with frosted evergreens.

It had snowed that morning and every tree seemed to be a living invitation - I felt the forest calling me, saying that it was time to make a decision, a decision to create Sanctuary, to protect natural life.

I felt that if we were willing to care for this land, it would care also for us.

The 160 acre parcel was for sale. I looked at the price and realized it was exactly the amount of money that had been left by my parents to my sister and myself. Within a month my sister and I put the entire family inheritance into the project and made the land available as sacred space to be developed in attunement with Life’s Intention.

At that time in my life I had been working for 13 years with a Sacred Circle - a community of people who met every week and on numerous weekends to refine their vibrational attunement with the organic Source of life. Over the time in which they had worked with me and with each other these people had experienced remarkable shifts in the quality of their awareness and their lives; but, inevitably it seemed, they would walk on. New people would gather; they too would be changed in the energy of the circle, and then they too would walk on. Very few would stay to help prepare the ground for others who might follow; the culture and its conditioning of the ego called them back to itself, subtly obscuring the opportunity that was opening to them.

As I observed this happening over the years I began to see that for an on-going community to form and grow creatively, we must have a 'hands-on' visible work - a work that is a direct creative emanation from the communion of Soul and Spirit which flourishes in the intimacy of Sacred Circle - something they could see, touch, sculpt - with their own hands ... If we were to go deeper in our work we were going to have to build a home. The Heaven on Earth we had seen and felt and experienced together was asking that it have a place where it can flourish into future generations.

In the years following the purchase of the land there was tremendous enthusiasm for the project, but I began to see again how difficult it is for individual egos to give way to collective attunement with Source. The depth of listening - to one another, to the breath of the land, to Life’s Intention - requires a rare kind of patience and devotion.

We are ordinary people with extraordinary faith in organic intention. We maintain it is time for humankind to remember we are Nature becoming conscious and that we can realign our sensory, cellular intuition and intelligence with the Source of all that is natural. We are still very few but we come together regularly to discipline our minds and bodies in meditative practice. And now - now that we have gathered the beginning of our core community, we gather on the land to build such things as our outdoor kitchen or to repair fences. We overnight in the forest and in the morning share our dreams, listening to what the dreamtime wants to make conscious for us. We find ourselves speaking together in Sacred Circle of wells, generators, of posts and beams and straw bales, of building codes and permits, of how to build forms for footings for our building and where to get cement and used wood. We are doing everything we can with our own hands and in doing this work we are developing healthy bodies. Money? Yes, we hear all the time that we will need money and we continue to trust that what Life intends will come to pass. Meanwhile we work together, listen, and stay in tune.

It is truly time for those of us who see beyond the veil of illusion, beyond the blind spots of our culture, to trust a new paradigm of understanding. Unlike the norm which tells us that we must first have a secure financial ground upon which to build a dream, we build upon what is eternally Real. Rather than put our faith in temporal securities, we place it in Divine Intention. We trust that gradually but surely more people will realize that there is a Voice to which we can listen, by which we can be guided. Listening to that One Voice - the Voice of Life Itself, heard in our sensitive cellular substance as vibration, translating into dreams, visions, feelings and spontaneous practical discovery - we intend to stay present for the creation of a place on Earth as it is in Heaven. Heaven is a state of consciousness existing NOW. We do not have to wait.

We can only intuit what is going to happen on the land because we do not yet know Life’s full intention for us. What we do see is that there must be places on earth which have no agenda - other than to follow upon the guidance which springs up in a community listening to natural process.

What does it look like so far?

Perhaps one to four people may actually live on the property. Others will rotate through as staff-in-training, learning to honour the land, the neighbourhood, (a farming and cattle-ranching community), and one another. The staff-in-training will live in stillness, talking with one another only when the sharing is arising from process or the practical needs of the community, the building, the land, etc. In other words, the residents have permission to relax the need to entertain or provide social interaction for one another or for guests. This we feel is the essence of the monastic life, where the relationship with one’s solitude provides a doorway to the relationship with Source.

This will be a community whose primary relationship is with our natural Source. Our retreats and conference work guide people into deeper understanding of the richness of such a life. It does not exclude joy, intimacy, or relationships in the world; but enhances and deepens them.

By Lynne Gordon-Mündel

- 3 - Edition 14, August 2003