Lightworkers Blog about going on retreats....

I love retreats on all topics, craft retreats and music retreats and cooking retreats.  I like large lectures on fun topics like mediumship, meditation, psychometry, clairvoyance, all the big ones, and no matter what the age of my hospice clients, they are ALL OVER THE TOPIC. 

I work through the wonderful service of Hospice, an organization that provides comfort care for people who are close to dying.  But what some people may not know is that until the last several hours many on hospice are coherent and interested in life.  They know your name and sit at the table to eat with everyone else.  Hospice care simply means that life saving medicine may be removed and others prescribed making it a pain free transition.  Once a person’s pain is managed they become re-engaged in life!

They are hungry for something different from their day to day experience.  And, I must say (as I pretend to coyly polish my fingernails on my blouse and gazes at them) I enjoy telling the stories. 

They will stare, spellbound and fixed to my every word as I tell them, 'who' I talked to when signing up for a retreat, and what they said, how they said it and how I felt about it.  One time, when I went on a Holy Tamale retreat (yes you read that right), my hospice patient told me she didn't want the story to stop.  Sweet thing hung on my every word and boy; I had a great time telling it. (hum, maybe I'll blog about that one...).

The lesson my clients teach me is that, near the end, there seems to be more time within each moment.   And when you have people who are in transition it seems that any 'every day' topic that they are able to mentally climb into helps with some of the physical and emotional discomforts in dying. Not to mention if the topic has anything to do with the afterlife. 

So back to my retreat…  It was 3 day 2 night event about developing a relationship with the Divine and took place in the mountains just up from the Mohave Desert in the mountains of Tehachapi California.  Cool and crisp as the event was scheduled after tourist season in late summer, early fall.  We discussed different kinds of prayer and how to meditate.  I made new friends and shared mystical stories of spontaneous healings and graceful transitions.  After the first day I had such love and joy in my heart with all the inspirational stories I couldn't stop smiling.

There was one gal there I just clicked with and we became favorite friends.  This retreat had dormitory style sleeping and since I knew we would enjoy chatting the night away we asked to room together, and as luck would have it I was moving my sleeping bag and cosmetics into her room before the first buffet dinner. 

After the evening lecture, (a wonderful presentation called the Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton), my new bestie and I went to our room and continued chatting it up till the wee hours and finally fell asleep.  Rather, I should say, my new peep fell asleep.  I lay wide awake listening to her steam boat snoring with intermittent patches of non breathing. Everyone reading this knows what it’s like to be trapped in a dark cold room with a moose calling for its mate but geez I found with every bazooka blast I got more and more annoyed.  OK, I’ll be honest… I got less and less spiritual. 

I tried praying, and focusing love and healing surrounding her like insolating foam.  I tried propping her up with an extra pillow, which just fell onto the floor during one of her gasps for air and body jerks. I put to test every spiritual, loving, non combative lesson I had learned at the retreat and all failed me.  When I started to think that placing all the pillows in the room around her head to muffle the sound was actually a good idea, I came to my senses. She is, obviously, not getting enough air already, that would be, well dangerous right?  Or, would it?

Realizing my thoughts were traversing towards homicide I gathered my sleeping bag and car keys and reclined my driver’s seat in my little Toyota.  I had two hours before the 6 am mediation yoga gong went off to get some sleep.

Am I that simple?  Am I only a fair weather Spiritual person? The answer is a resounding YES. I have discovered that if I am physically depleted I don’t have room to be ‘all loving’.  I don’t have the patience to smile and nod at every long and boring story.  I find that my ‘baloney’ meter is up and running 100% and I find I don’t hesitate in calling someone out on their baloney when I don’t get enough sleep or enough food or if the stress is too high. 

You see, I use to think a spiritual person simply allows someone’s baloney to bounce around the room respectfully giving space for a person to be themselves. A spiritual person who hasn’t taken care of themselves has to live life through the lower chakras (energy centers), to stay upright when they haven’t had sleep, or food or enough time to themselves. That alone takes so much energy it’s just too hard to play nice.

So don’t be disappointed in yourself because you may have been short tempered with a friend or your kids.  Maybe getting angry for ‘no good reason’ then chastising yourself because you feel you ‘should’ be better than that, because after all, you are part of the Divine. STOP IT right now and take a nap.  Yea you read it right, I am giving you permission to drop the kids off someplace and take a nap.  Turn the families TV off at 8 instead of 11 and invite the kids to read quietly, or, invest in headphones so you aren’t a prisoner of all the noise. 

A person cannot be of true service in the world without a certain level of peace.  The world needs you at peace.  The energy you vibrate at will be the energy that comes back at you.  If you are short tempered and irritated, that is all you will run into for the entire day unless you shift it. Have a beer with lunch.  Hire someone to tutor your kids with homework so you can use the time to read a book.  Make room for yourself.  If you don’t no one wins and life will just seem to get more and more complicated. 

As Ram Das put it, “If you think you’re so spiritual, try spending the weekend with your parents”.

Debra Zachau is a person anchored in this world to be of service for those whom are searching for their own truth and peace. Please visit her website at www.growyourlight.com or www.psychiclightreadings.com 760-622-1881