Bringing It Home

is harder than I thought it would be

chaotic life

I arrived home last Wednesday having been gone from Seattle for almost three weeks. My dear friend Joan flew back with me and stayed overnight. I spent time with her as I re acclimated to my daily life. Chris’ cousin Jen arrived on Sunday to stay and I cooked us dinner and we stayed up late talking, which though fun, kind of knocked out my following day. It’s football season and my fantasy league is busy shifting players around and yes, we are watching a bunch of games. My work to do list is vast. Gone for three weeks, and three weeks to catch up I imagine. One of my dogs is sick, the kind of sick which reminds me that my two aging canine friends, one ten and one fifteen, are living their twilight years, and every day I get with them is an opportunity to get and receive love.

So, I came home to a lot. There’s more I won’t go into, the details of life, the feeding, cleaning, caring, hosting, loving, giving, writing that makes the routine of my days.

I promised myself I would bring home the feeling of Greece, the practices of the retreat, the healthy habits. But it has taken about a week to get back in the groove.

a beach in greece

Our retreat leader Lynn Roulo, who teaches a combination of the enneagram of personality with Kundalini yoga, offered us a personally tailored meditation to take home with us. We interact with her via a Google doc every time we complete a practice, and the expectation is that we will practice for a minimum of 40 days. I’m sure it comes as no surprise that my meditation is designed to help tranquilize my mind. I hold my hands in a quite complicated formation (mudra) 4 inches away from my body, and practice a breathing technique which involves holding my breath at the top and bottom of the breathing cycle. I do this for three minutes. I like the accountability and it reminds me of the daily Kundalini we practiced on Paros.

Mapping out my week is essential to me actually taking care of myself. I’ve seen it go down the tubes, with no plan in place, eating cheese and crackers for dinner and forgetting appointments, or even worse, overextending myself and burning out at both ends. My friend Tracy Benjamin hosts a weekly Sunday morning check-in, where we make lists and set up accountability. I look at my food plan for the week, plug my appointments into my calendar, set intentions, prioritze three top tasks which need to get done, decide what can wait, and overall have a visual picture of my week in a paper planner.

I pull tarot cards for myself and look at the astrology for the week, even though my knowledge of astrology is limited. Pulling three cards each week helps give me a context to interpret what is happening in my life and makes me stop and think. All these practices, the meditation, the planning, the tarot, this writing, all give me the right to pause. That is what bringing home a retreat really means I think. A retreat is a very long and structured pause, but we can pause in our everyday, in fact it seems necessary. I know my dog is sick and will go to the vet in an hour. I know someone is bringing in twenty boxes of art books to sell this morning. I know I need to get an estimate on a busted side mirror on my car. But having structure, and built in pauses in my life, allows me the ability to handle all this stuff without spiralling down into chaos mind.

I’m really interested to know what practices you’ve put in place to create calm and structure in your daily life. How do you retreat while the world is in chaos in so many ways? Let me know in the comments or send me an e mail at hanna.mc@comcast.net.

I have some space in my calendar for a few tarot readings this month. Sign up at my web site.

As always, thank you for your support.

xoHanna