Retreat, Yes Please
Yall. I am going on a retreat!! I haven’t been on a retreat in so long and this is so needed. And it is so different than anything I have ever done before. The retreats I have done in the past have been more local short weekend women’s retreats through my churches or a solo trip to my parent’s old lake house when my kids were little to prep for a new school year.
This time I am flying to Salt Lake City, Utah for a whole week for a NLP retreat with Yager Training, a company my sweet friend Courtney works with and introduced me to. NLP is Neuro Linguistic Programming – an approach that focuses on how you communicate with yourself and others, and how this affects your behaviors and outcomes. It is set in nature at a beautiful Airbnb outside of Salt Lake City with time for workouts, wellness, alone time, connection time, and lots of intense coaching, breakout sessions, and hopefully breakthroughs.
It’s been a challenging season for so many reasons. It’s funny how you work so hard to heal, grow and change through one season to find yourself back in another still having to do more healing, growing, and changing. I guess we are just never truly done with the work in this lifetime and the good news is that all of the work is worth it and it pays off. Life is full of ebbs and flows, mountains and valleys. When you find yourself back in an ebb or valley, you aren’t starting from scratch – you are starting from a higher level of understanding and processing than before. It doesn’t make it easier, but it does mean that you can use those skills and tools to help you through the valley.
This retreat came with several coaching sessions that I have used to prepare for the retreat and saving some for maintaining after the retreat. My session yesterday was all about this concept of ebbing and flowing, mountains and valleys. The flow feels great. The view from the mountain top is amazing. But, the ebb and the valley are where the seeds are planted. It’s where the work and the growth happen. The flow wouldn’t feel quite as fabulous, and the mountain top view would be as spectacular if you didn’t have to work so hard through the dark valley to get there.
Where you focus goes, your energy flows. During the times in the valley, it’s even more important to be mindful of where your focus is. It is so easy to focus on the ways things are going wrong or how hard it all is, but then we may miss the small things that come along that are good and beautiful. We may miss that the scenery is changing and we are actually climbing out of the valley and up the mountain.
When I would teach yoga, I loved teaching Tree pose. It is truly one of the most basic balance poses and we so often dismiss it because of that, but it symbolizes so much more. A tree is strong, its roots deeply and firmly planted into the soil, grounded deep into the earth. No matter the weather, the tree, if strong and taken care of, may sway and bend, but it won’t break. The roots go deep in the dark to grow stronger and soak up the nutrients…for the tree to bloom. In order for there to be growth and blooming, there needs to be some darkness. Trees need care to stay strong and healthy. They have so much work to do – after all they supply oxygen to all of us. Trees need each other – they connect through their root systems and if one tree is sick or weak, the other trees send extra nutrients that way. Sounds a lot like being a human, huh?
Stay grounded and plant the seeds in the valley because the bloom after the growth is beautiful. There is so much good waiting on the other side.
I see some big beautiful strong trees and mountains in my future. I will keep you posted.
