~Awakening Youth~


The weeks have kept sliding by; I have found my own rhythm here, syncopating with the rhythms of the various beings around me. There has been the recurring lesson/insight that I can live a life fully present within the moment, keenly aware, while also holding a sense of planning and a context for the overall picture. There is a way of engaging the mind, in full awareness, to plan and strategize, without falling into a mental trance. It is such an interesting and unique experience once you have it. Much superior to planning where there is an ego fog permeating the whole thing.

So in the last bit of time, two very cool events went down. First, over 50 full-on teenagers from 14 to 19 years old descended onto our quiet community, for a wonderful week of teenage spiritual expression. There was so much energy, so much going on, and so much maturity and vulnerability in the midst of awkward teenage expression. Really a very beautiful and touching experience.



I found their willingness to go to that space of vulnerability and not-knowing just ripped me open, made me so raw and receptive. I can easily say that it was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. Some pics...










And next came the families...



The famous family retreat began soon after the teen retreat ended. I was assigned the 2-5 year olds, even though I had no previous 'professional' experience with this age group. While the parents sat in meditations, or listened to Dhamma talks, the volunteers supervised the kids through various activities. Being with the toddlers turned out to be an incredible experience in shifting perspective/entering an altered state of consciousness.







Children this age truly have an altogether altered state of waking awareness. You can see it in infants/young children if you just watch them doing their own thing for a while. They can spend a half hour just observing the flow of a rain-fed stream, or examine the minute qualities of sand for 20 minutes straight. After a few periods of doing this with the kids, I began to enter into a deeper sense of magic and wonder of the surrounding 'everyday' world. I began to slow down even more, coming into a greater vulnerability.

The mind seems to come into this belief that what it thinks it knows is more powerful and satisfying than what it doesn't know. Yet this very belief keeps our experience narrow and repetitive. The mind fears the new, the unknown...yet the unknown is life itself, the mysterious and fathomless tao. Recoiling and withdrawing from the unknown, we end up stagnating, stuck in a lifeless space of our own making. And when we finally decide to really truly let go into this fear and vulnerability, we find something beyond words, beyond expression. We find we are beyond limits...for fears are limits and in opening to our fears, we dissolve our limits. And we find we are greater than our wildest imaginations of how it might be.

OneLight