Permission to Play

“Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgement will be surer; since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose your power of judgement. Go some distance away because the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance, and a lack of harmony or proportion is more readily seen.”
Leonardo Da Vinci

The trees and flowers are starting to bloom around where I live. The days are getting a little lighter and it’s slowly warming up. Nature seems to be mirroring the inner process I am going through. With Spring coming, I am thinking about the places in my mind where I would like to shine some light and do some mental Spring cleaning, letting go of what no longer serves me.

To help me in this process, I chose a word for myself this year: “Aliveness.” What’s so great about choosing a word is I am noticing that anything that is not in alignment with that word or way of being comes up in my face, allowing me to make the decision of how I want to live. I am getting the “opportunity” to notice all of this with a women’s retreat that I am facilitating this year.

Most of the women’s retreats that I do I am simply hired for: I come in, facilitate a 3-day retreat, and someone hands me a check. In other words, I am not in charge of the logistics. I love doing this, but I have also had a dream for many years of producing my own retreat in a place that I love: Maui, Hawaii. I would think about it, plan for it, but then for some reason I would make an excuse of how it was not the right time. Basically I would put it off because I was afraid of all that it would entail to do something that big. But there was that word again: Aliveness. I had to ask myself the question: Would doing a retreat in Hawaii make me feel alive? The answer was YES! When I compared the different sites where the retreat could take place, once again the question of aliveness came up. Would staying at this retreat center, which was very affordable but not very comfortable, be the way to go, or would the place that I fell in love with that was beautiful and a little more expensive be the place? Again – what felt alive? The answer was to hold the retreat at Lumeria, a beautiful sanctuary that is all about pampering and beauty.

I realized that holding this retreat was stretching me in many ways: saying yes to a dream, yes to self-care, yes to faith of who would show up, yes to ease, yes to support. A retreat to me is all about connection, being with like-minded women, but mainly unplugging from your day to day life to get still enough to hear your inner wisdom. So how perfect that I discovered that March 7th is “National pull the plug day” where you are asked to step away from your smartphone for 24 hours and “tune into the world around you instead of tuning into technology.”  (If you would like to find out more information or take the pledge, go to:  http://nationaldayofunplugging.com )

The last song on my new CD is another aspect of my aliveness word:  “Permission To Play.” I want to create more aliveness in my life by doing just that: allowing myself time to play and connect with people I care about – and when I do that I am living my word of aliveness….