The four most transformational aspects of my journey towards self love
Why come on retreat?
Ultimately because it is an act of self love. In the past I was definitely aware of the self love concept but didn't really know what it looked like in my life. People talk about the importance of connecting to what you love and pursuing what you love as a strategy to lead you to a more joyful life. But what if you don't immediately know what you love or find it hard to imagine your life looking much different to how it currently does? If this is you, one answer is to come on retreat. Pippa and I have curated a variety of soul enriching activities and practices to enable you to connect to the joy in your heart and hear the whispers of your intuition.
When I started out about five years ago looking deeper into my life and embarking on my journey of self discovery I only seemed to know what I didn't want: to be married, to work in the pub and to spend any more time supporting and pursuing other people's dreams that were not my own. Self love was an alien concept. I didn't hate myself but I didn't know myself either or what I like, what I need and the sorts of people that I flourish around. Entry level activities appeared to enable me to start to notice that I had natural preferences. I recognised that I loved certain things just because I liked them that way: a particular shade of purple, tall trees with beautiful arching canopies of green leaves, the sound that water in a stream makes as it trickles over its obstacles, raspberries, my children, cashmere, the antedotal list continued. I began to see that what connected all those things was the way my body felt when I was with them. I began to feel what love felt like inside, what my heart called for and liked. It isn't a head thing, I don't think I like them: I have a knowing that I just do love them: just because of how they are. Because of how they are I feel the sensation of pleasure.
Perhaps the most obvious example of what my heart truly loves is the sound of the gong. I seem to feel it in my chest, as if my heart connects to its frequencies directly as it resonates. So step one in my self love programme was to learn to play the gong. Step two was getting out of my comfort zone and playing in a grand gong bath in St Andrew's Hall in Norwich. I convinced myself that with forty other gong players also hitting their gongs no one would be able to make my sounds out from the crowd. There I met Stacey and she and I decided to host our first gong bath on Caister beach for the summer solstice. That was two years ago and since then I have hosted many gong baths both solo and with other players. I now play gong while Pippa offers hands on Reiki healing with crystal energies and the results are a pretty awesome combination.
Following what I loved without any expectation of where it would lead me or how the outcome would look, has led me to many wonderful heart warming experiences. I have continued to read and study other people's thoughts and experiences about what is really going on in life. Four things really stand out as transformative for me in the journey from divorced, disillusioned, downhearted me to the much more resilient, self aware person who is now offering a retreat.
The first in line was an online course in transpersonal pyschology coaching. This course changed the way I experience and process life. It introduced me to Open Awareness which is the broadening of one's perception to go beyond the reality that is woven by my thoughts and feelings. By accessing the ability to view and hold this 'content' of my life within an all encompassing awareness or 'context' means all sort of possibilities open up for me and I ultimately become more resourceful. From the soup of life I am able to choose my next best step forward toward an ecological solution for both myself, everyone else and the world as a whole. What's not to love about this approach?
The seond help was the work of Tony & Sage Robbins (if you don't know them Google them). He is the number one coach on the planet who brilliantly explains human behaviour and our need to stay consistent with the identity that we define for ourselves. The third is the genius curriculum around the art of creating by a South African named William Whitecloud. In his Natural Success training he shows you how you can create pretty much anything in your life as long as you stick to a creative structure (that he teaches) with the proviso that the end results you are choosing to create are true for your heart to express in the world i.e. its part of your soul contract or what you have been born to come here to do.
Alongside these three educational trainings, I read avidly and completed numerous Mindvalley Quests. I arrived at a place where I was become firmly rooted in the pursuit of developing my intuition. My fourth pillar of education came from finding someone 'real' (as apposed to online) and 'local' to help me translate this knowledge into something practical and model it into a business. My plan was to spend time dwelling in all the things that I loved and earn some money at the same time. I found this in my gong master trainer Julie Adkin Turner of Healing Possibilities. I learned gong, tarot, more Reiki (as I had been attuned for a number of years) crystal healing and mindfulness meditation. Julie is enormously intuitive, clairvoyant and able to communicate with other dimensions so she has more than enough experience to guide me!
So self love? I found the beginnings of it all along the way. In doing what I love - yes - the sages were right in their recommendation. In practising the wellbeing of meditaion, journalling, exploring me and perhaps most importantly putting myself in different situations and with different people which were unknown. This allowed me to experience myself anew, in a way I was not familiar with, so although there were pre conceived notions about how that would look ultimately I didn't and couldn't know how it would actually be.
Experiencing yourself afresh or anew will happen if you come on our retreat. Pippa and I will guide you and as a group we will accompany each other through the three days and two nights of self love exercises to arrive at a place of greater awareness, acceptance and creative expression of that unique and beautiful heart of yours! And, as an extra bonus, Julie is coming to host an evening of clairvoyance. Intrigued? click the link to find out more about our retreat.