Continuum Vancouver -Winter/Spring 2009

NEWSLETTER WINTER/SPRING 2009

Solstice greetings to All!!!  Looks like someone dreamed up a white Christmas for us this year.  I returned from sunny, warm California to a chilly -5 C.   Mostly, I am appreciating the beauty and softness of the white blanket world as it enfolds us in its mysteriousness and its quietude.   It feels like a continuation of the journey I have been on in the “Welcoming Dark” Continuum Intensive which I just returned from on Monday night.

As I entered the amazing cave/womb created at the Continuum studio for our 48 hour allnighter,  I experienced a powerful shift in my sensing and how I was locating my body & myself in space.    Finding myself pausing at the doorway, then crawling into the room until I adjusted to this new environment, I felt this in a reverse way that it must be for us as infants, emerging from the wet womb/cave in which we hibernated and grew for nine months.   With this change in context, there came a different sense of myself, or rather a questioning of who I am or what I am or even the disappearing of identity and form.  Somehow that did not even matter.

In my twentieth year of Continuum, I continue to learn new insights into how I have been operating both in Continuum and in my life.    For the past few years, with the onset of the deterioration of my hip cartilage and the ensuing hip replacement operations, I who was a doer and a giver have been learning to ask and to receive from my family and friends. It truly has been a gift (even though I didn’t see it that way all the time).   In the retreat I realized that in some ways, I have been “doing” Continuum and that it is extremely important that I open up receptivity on the biological level as well.  Otherwise, if the tissue is not receptive, no new information and consequently, no new growth or evolving is possible.   Learning to receive at deeper and deeper levels allows the penetration and sourcing to take place.

What I also learned in the next few days of the retreat is how strong the habits and the old defensive mechanisms still operate even after this profound insight.   It is almost like there is a recoil into the habitual defensive patterns which once served me but now limit me.   Peter Levine once stated that we let go of old patterns and holdings when we are resourced enough.   I truly feel blessed in the resources in my life, in my community, in the natural world around me and in my inner world.  I have never liked myself as well as I do now; it took 71 years but here I am!

As I return to my home and my life here in Vancouver, I realize upon reflecting and sharing with friends, that what I discovered in the retreat is all part of a process.  What has been occurring in my life over the past while, especially with my six month sabbatical, personal retreat from January to June, has resulted in my opening up to trusting, trusting that I’m not alone, that I have a community not just of the wonderful people in my life, but also the universe.  Increasingly, I have been experiencing that when I attend and participate as fully as I can, I can then trust that the universe will provide and assist me, maybe not in a way that I anticipated but for my and the greater good.  Even through the difficult global times we are experiencing, we need to build that inner heartfelt trust that we are part of it all and that it was all meant to be.    It is not so much the events we encounter in our lives, but our response to them that we realize our potential both in ourselves and in our world.

With love and blessings for now and for the coming season,
December 18, 2008                                                 Doris

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