Hi all
Just to report back a little of the above retreat.
The retreat was very profound and I think I can say that everyone gained hugely from it.
We had nine people over four days. It was a semi-silent retreat in that we had silence from after the evening session to after breakfast the following morning.
For some time I have wanted to incorporate some form of Inquiry into our weekly group in general and a good place to start is on a retreat.
To this end I have looked at NVC(Non-violent communication) and "the Work" by Byron Katie.
There has always been some obsticle to incorporating these in our group, it's like it was too much energy required and like a whole new approach would have to be incorporated.
Then I discovered Insight Dialogue. This is basically a method of taking the silence generated in meditation and bringing it into dialogue between people.
It is all about being in the moment at the time of dialogue and speaking out of bodily and here and now awareness, rather than out of "stories" and "conditioning".
I did a 7 day retreat in this Insight Dialogue with it's founder Grerory Kramer, earlier this year and was really impressed with the experiental results.
To me it is the ultimate self-inquiry weapon for meditators.
So in the retreat we did two Insight Dialogue(ID) sessions per day.
It was also found that the Insight Dialogue appeared to dissipate any tendancy to overload.
So for future retreats or days, it may be possible to incorporate 3 or even 4 AYP meditations. Three is probably prudent as a trial.
In fact, we did have a 30 minute breath meditation before each dialogue. These could be changed to AYP or maybe a mixture of both. We will have to see how it goes.
This work is normally done in a Buddhist meditation setting and it is really powerful in this setting.
We are continuing the ID practice each week after our normal AYP meditation and it continues to astonish me how effective it is. People are breaking into new ways of being so quickly with this work. It is also very gentle and non threatening, it sort of creeps up on you and you get insights about yourself that were totally blinded beforehand.
So I regard ourselves to be very fortunate to have a turbocharged system of meditation and now a turbocharged system of self-inquiry that dovetails perfectly with the meditation.
From a facilitation perspective, what is required is a good experiental working knowledge of here and now living. In Buddhism this is referred to as mindfulness. But this mindfulness is fully prevalent in the posts of people in this forum through the AYP practices, so there is no reason why it could not be adopted.
The AYP practices, as always, were very profound and the silence and peace generated was beautiful.
Katrine, as always, blended her beautiful energies into everything we did.
We also had two music sessions, incorporating Drums, Cymbols, Flute, Mandoline, Guitar, Bodhran and Voice. The CD will be out shortly[
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And not to forget the incredible Tango dance shown to us by a couple on the retreat.
There is much more to tell also, perhaps Katrine might offer something also.