I was invited by Lori Warmington, the founder of the Aspen Grove, to a retreat in the New Year at St. Benedict’s monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. The Aspen Grove is dedicated to cultivating and supporting conscious action that arises out of stillness, which is a characteristic of Presence.

The Benedictine monks had secured the privacy of a valley, and the stillness of the low mountainous surroundings, cushioned by glistening snow, provided the perfect setting for our retreat to the center of inner stillness.

The twenty of us gathered on the first day, some knowing others in the group already, others like myself first-timers. Three days later, we were all in love with our One Self.

The retreat was minimally structured. This allowed for each of us to sculpt the experience to our personal requirements, while creating a collective oneness out of our diversity.

Each time we met in sanga, the stillness was deeper, sweeter, more intoxicating.

In one instance, we broke into dyads to pose a question to the stillness in the other. My partner for this prefaced, oh so slowly, “This may take a while. I have been lost in stillness and find it hard to come back to using words.”

Of course, the words that eventually emerged from his stillness were sterling.

We were pioneering what the possibilities are for a world that practices stillness and takes action from this sacred space within us all. I felt like we were in a spiritual laboratory, pressing to discover new frontiers in human consciousness.

When it came time to leave, we all felt a sense of completion in that we knew right action would result from our retreat into stillness. 

We didn’t need to know what this would mean for each of us, or for the Aspen Grove. That would be going back to the “old” way, relying on the limited thinking mind and our separate sense of self to make things happen from “efforting,” instead of turning to stillness, which is the womb of all true creativity.

I am now back home, and Namaste Publishing is in the home stretch to the launch of our new inter-active website. My team is ahead of me on most fronts and letting me know that I need to tend to my knitting now to get things completed. 

How perfect it all is. Life is giving me an immediate opportunity to continue my practice of going into stillness periodically during the day, and allowing my actions, my work in the world, to flow from there.