2 weeks hiking meditation retreat life review.
September,2 to 16, 2017.
What is meditation? What are the benefits of meditation? What is natural mindfulness? How is it linked to innate life review and awakening? Why retreat into simplicity and minimalist living to rediscover natural mindfulness, life review and awakening? How to attain inner peace? Why moral development a condition for spiritual awakening? What is spiritual awakening? 2 weeks hiking stillness meditation and silent retreat. Wandering and living as an hermit into the high Pyrenees mountains. Rediscovering and deepening natural meditation and life review. Life coaching retreat.
What is meditation?
What are the benefits of meditation?
What is natural mindfulness
and how is it interwoven with bodily felt experience and innate life
review?
Why retreat into simplicity and minimalist
living to rediscover natural mindfulness?
How to
awake and attain inner peace?
Why does psychological maturity forego spiritual awakening?
How does
natural meditation's innate life review invites to spiritual awakening?
2
weeks meditation, life review and coaching and natural fitness
retreat.
Participation conditions.
What is meditation?
Reviewing all those proposals and literature about meditation techniques and marketing about awakening and mindfulness offered by a multitude of spiritual schools, masters, gurus and sects, for (often a lot of) money ... . One would almost forget meditation is, as are sleeping and dreaming, a natural innate gratis process.
- Meditation is your innate ability to mere experiencing. Bringing into your awareness your bodily felt experience of your life and way of life.
- You don't need to concentrate or focus. As sleeping and dreaming you cannot make this natural innate ability to mindfulness happen nor make it deepen.
- Meditation, mindfulness, do not require any special posture. It does require relaxed free breathing. Allowing your breath to become naturally deep and effortless. Then meditation sets on naturally while withdrawing into solitude and stop doing.
- It is this freeing of your breathing that restores bodily felt wordless experiencing and becoming aware of how your body (=you) is experiencing your life and way of life (=you). This innate restorative process of the organism naturally invites to awakening.
- To meditate is to allow yourself to free your breath, relax and start experiencing.
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You don't need any breathing techniques, focusing, concentrating to become 'mindful'. Meditation, mindfulness, is a natural innate physiological process of free relaxed breathing integrating body, mind and life. It is natural.
What are the benefits of meditation? - The main benefit of meditation, of this innate restorative healing process triggered by free relaxed breathing, is awareness.
- You become aware of yourself, your body, your life, the way
you work and love as an inseparable whole. This includes bodily
felt awareness of yourself as a limited time.
- Rediscovering your bodily felt experience of this intertwined whole, allows you to take care of your life = the only thing you really own since that's what you are. Allowing your innate experiencing to become conscious, allows you to assume responsibility for this intertwined whole.
-
Meditation isn't fleeing for reality in a restricted here and now.
- In stead it's becoming conscious. Aware of what you are participating in. To meditate is freeing your breath to allow your ongoing bodily felt experiencing questioning your life, way of life, life style, work, participations, commitments and involvements. The benefits of it are manifold. But in essence bodily experiencing your life, frees. Allows you to develop character = to choose what, given your limited life time, is really important to you and live up to it.
- The benefits of meditation result from this freedom to choose for the better.
- For the better of that inseparable whole you are and belong to : your body, your relationships, the work you contribute to. The greatest benefit of meditation is responsibility: it allows you to become responsible. Responsible for the lasting welfare, well-being, health, reliability, justice, love, wisdom and happiness of this as well bodily as social whole you are.
What
is natural mindfulness ?
- Regular meditation (= daily withdrawal into stillness, allowing your breathing to relax and bodily felt experiencing) rapidly results in a more mindful, aware, conscious, sensitive, empathic, careful, alert way of being, of dealing with the life you are = mindfulness. As a result your dreaming too gets more conscious.
- Longer times of withdrawal from ordinary life for meditation (=retreats), allows this bodily experience to deepen to a bodily felt experience of your life as a whole = life review. This restores and/or deepens your conscience = your sense of responsibility for your life and the lives you're intertwined with. This innate responsibilization process is effortless.
- Although moral development is necessary companion to meditation mindfulness, you don't need to submit yourself to any authoritatively imposed whether or not religious moral code. The greatest benefit of meditation is responsibility: it allows you to become responsible. Responsible for the lasting welfare, well-being, health, reliability, justice, love, wisdom and happiness of this as well bodily as social whole you are.
The hermit's way is an age old way of effortless rediscovering this - at first glance - mysterious 'mystic' experience. You don't need to be a monk or religious person to experience this innate life review rooted in your own bodily felt experience. Shepherds living in solitude from June to September know it too.
Meditation 'techniques' as visualization or breathing techniques, focusing, observing or trying to be mindful in any way are contra productive. Natural innate meditation is an experience of free relaxed breathing integrating body, mind and life. The only thing to do is exploring how you control you breathing and giving up this muscle tension. This restores natural deep breathing and experiencing becoming conscious.
To optimize this conscious bodily felt experience a normally good
physical condition is necessary. As well as all the time needed to
rediscover this innate healing process. That's what these 2 weeks of
introduction to hillwalking, mild fasting, mountain survival and
mountain meditation retreat offer:
In your rucksack only what you
really need: a lightweight tent, sleeping bag and mat, cooking gear
and simple food, spare warm clothes, what you need for washing and
hygiene and to stay dry and warm whatever the weather.
Hiking days alternate with 2 days of retreat, spreading out to camp
into solitude and loneliness. Alternating the natural physical
fitness training of hillwalking and days of living as an hermit
experiencing stillness.
How to
awake and attain inner peace?
Hiking is the natural fitness training restoring your natural optimal physical condition and stamina. Care for a normal good physical condition is the necessary, though not sufficient, condition for inner peace.
The alternating 4 periods of 2
days offer plenty of time to unwind, relax and nap, daydream and
letting your mind wheel freely.
Both good stamina and
being well-rested are necessary to be able to relax your
breathing, start experiencing and allow your life to decant and
clarify.
Those stillness retreat days allow you to keep it simple.
Inner peace is achieved through simplifying your life. Times of retreat into minimalist living and simplicity allow
you to experience it's benefits.
If you are recovering from some more stressful period, use this
retreat to allow yourself to discover and experience - experience is
bodily felt - your process of recovery. Your body needs the
time it needs to recover fully. Allowing to rise into your awareness
your bodily felt experience of your life and way of life,
shows you how to achieve inner peace through a purposeful,
self-directed life.
Inner peace needs a balanced life style, a balance between contact and withdrawal and between action and contemplation. Periods of withdrawal and contemplation (= meditation) allow bodily felt experience and life review to occur. Daily meditation before sleeping integrate this life review with dreaming and allows you to rediscover your loving inner spiritual guide.
Why does psychological maturity forego spiritual awakening?
Stress in stead of enjoying life and inner peace is mostly due to
failing
development of the social skills needed to cope with the problems of
your current stage of life. Moral development hasn't that much to do
with submitting to any moral code. It's psychological
maturity developing the
necessary skills to solve conflicts we're personally involved in.
In summary:
As a baby and toddler we need to develop
curious,
adventurous pleasure in developing our body's
sensory and motor skills and exploring our environment.
From kindergarten on up to our puberty we need to complete this
with learning basic social rules: becoming friendly, polite,
reliable and assertive.
Understanding and using social rules and negotiation
to realize goals we cannot realize alone and develop our
cooperation (we make a positive difference, cooperate
with others and make friends) and leadership
skills.
Growing up into adulthood we need to broaden these still
ego centered companionship skills to friendship, intimacy,
heterosexual love. Commitments are only lasting as we replace our
childish egocentrism by friendship, love, group and value centered
skills. Integrity (we are honest, trustworthy and
loyal), respect (we have self-respect and respect
for others), empathy and care (we understand and
support others and take care of the world in which we live),
belief (we explore our faiths, beliefs and attitudes).
As adults combining finding attractive work to earn a living able to
found and organizing family, career and leisure demand to
develop on top of our relational skills organizational competences
as developing our value hierarchy,
fair competition, sense of justice,
citizenship, ... .
Spiritual awakening is self-delusion as long as we haven't developed those skills needed to cope with the problems of life and social reality.
What is spiritual awakening?
- Rediscovering, giving in and allowing your bodily felt experience of your life and way of life to deepen into awareness and conscience, leads you to question what kind of world you are helping to create = spiritual awakening.
Narrowing meditation to experiencing a limited here and now cannot lead to spiritual awakening. Bodily felt experience, growing awareness and critical reflection on what we are participating in - through our work, membership of the different groups are the necessary 3 pillars of awakening.
Our understanding of our experience is shaped by our education and the ways of thinking and understanding in the groups we belong to. And, on a more unconscious level by the dominant economic, psychiatric and psychological thinking. The key to spiritual awakening is clarification of our value hierarchy. Becoming aware of how we participate in creating, maintaining and implementing inequalities. Question what we identify with and become more human.
2
weeks meditation, life review and natural fitness retreat.
Natural fitness is a necessary condition to freeing our breathing and deepening our bodily felt experience of what's going on an respond do the situations of our life in the best possible way.
Retreat into solitude, into the wild. Seeking stillness, rediscovering natural innate meditation and life review. 2 weeks meditation retreat living as an hermit unjoinable: no smartphone, no mp3, no radio, no etc. In your rucksack only what you really need.
Hiking the mountains strengthens your body. Brings you back into better shape, physical condition and stamina. Withdrawing two weeks into the Pyrenees mountains, Western Europe's last wilderness. Being at the mercy of the vagaries of the weather and wild nature invites, even compels, you to develop your awareness, care, strength, self-reliance and reliability.
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Hiking days alternate with 2 days retreating camping withdrawn from each other into non doing, rediscovering natural innate meditation and life review process. = the biological roots of any religion and spirituality.
Participation conditions.
Mountain meditation trekking leader : Richard van Egdom is a lecturer on phenomenology of moral and spiritual development and what is called 'Awakening' at School for Continuing Studies of Lille II University (France). Richard is a licensed Mountain Leader and an experienced body worker, gestalt trainer and life review centered focusing counselor. Besides hiking his hobbies include Aikido. Richard is fluent in Dutch (his mother tongue), English, French and German.
Participation conditions: This hiking mountain
retreat and stillness meditation holidays need good physical and
psychological health, reliability and the better physical condition
necessary to carry your +/- 15kg rucksack uphill. Your BMI should be
between 21 and 25 neither less nor more. Participation is at your
own risks.
You should be able to commit to live up to the unpredictability of a
2 weeks retreat and it's life review. This may be a
confronting wake up call.
Your
need to have talked through this unjoinable absence with
your loved ones.
Starting point is the Pyrenees quiet house Le Castel, Arquizat, 09400 Miglos, France.
Participants: 1 to maximum 7. Richard's hiking mountain meditation retreats have, since 25 years, never been canceled.
Participants get a list of the necessary minimum gear and food needed and other suggestions.
Maybe useful link: An experienced mountain leader's thoughts on the ultra light gear trend.
More information? Want to talk about it? Contact Richard richard@retreat-stillness-simplicity.org call him +33 626 99 33 11.
