Day 11: Begin
I want to tell you a story about the moon.
I know, I know. It’s a little too on the nose for a yoga and meditation teacher, but stay with me here.
A few years ago, I was leading a retreat with my favorite retreat co-hosts (my husband Sam and our teacher Simon) in one of our favorite spots in the world, the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica.
[Let me just pause here, before I get too far ahead in the story and point out that YES, a weeklong yoga, meditation, and surf retreat to Costa Rica is definitely a “long-form” practice!]
It was “post”-pandemic. But we found that for many of our retreat attendees (and there were nearly 30 of them!), this was their first major travel experience since before 2020. And certainly nearly everyone’s first major travel + healing experience in as many years.
In fact, it was our first major travel + hosting experience since 2019, and I had our two very young kids in tow with us.
Despite having very capable, talented, sturdy co-hosts, I knew a lot of the energetic and emotional landscape of this retreat and our people would fall to me (sound familiar, women?).
Luckily, nature is such a wise and reliable teacher, isn’t she?
And nature’s lessons are SO obvious in this wild part of the world where the jungle runs right into the rocky beach and the ocean’s tides change dramatically with the pull of the cycle of the moon.
We were there for nearly a month on this trip, and I got to watch how the tide carved out this narrow beach, coming all the way up to the jungle at the full moon and unbelievably far out at the new moon .. or the opposite I can’t remember now ;) But it was SO apparent.
And I laughed as I watched these dramatic pulls of the moon on the water because, well, we are mostly water too, aren’t we? And we love to think we’re so in control of everything, don’t we? And yet, here we are being pulled right along with the tides of our lives, literally and metaphorically.
So the boys would teach the morning practices. These strong, sweaty, several hourlong affairs. And I would hold the space for some quieter experiences in the evenings.
On one of the first nights, it was the Full Moon. (Pause here. Go ahead and google the moon phase for today — you’re somewhere on her path and all these lunar lessons still apply!).
So I gathered up the wonderful women from the yoga deck and we slooooooooowly walked down to the beach to do a proper practice: howling at the moon and stripping down to various levels of comfort and so that we could float for an hour or so in the buoyant, salty, bathwater of the ocean, lit by the moonrise. As one does ;)
As we slooooowly walked and talked and floated and howled and laughed, this was the teaching I shared with them:
“Look at this MOON. She is FULL now. In all her glory, giving us incredible light, pulling the tides, and powerfully effecting our whole earth’s energy. She is FULL and also in FULL SUPPORT of each of us right now. How beautiful is that?
And yet..
The moon is not always full! She is full and then as soon as she is full, she begins to wane. She begins to retreat. She gives less and less and less and less of herself to us until she disappears completely at the New Moon! She is FULL and then she is GONE!”
What a gorgeous teacher this moon, in all her cyclical glory!
And how much we can learn from her energetic generosity and how she still saves some for herself.
Great boundaries, that moon of ours has ;)
I offered this story to my women on retreat that week as a way of saying: I will give YOU my full support and I make myself available to you when I am here with you. And I will also need to wane and retreat to my own space (and caretake my kids, myself, you know..). And I gave THEM full permission to do this too.
It became a theme and a story for the week and beyond.
And now I give it to us here.
Because our growing commitment to our own practice, our own “gradually growing wholeness” in practice, requires us to take more for ourselves in this moment. To be in FULL SUPPORT of ourselves and our practice, and perhaps a little less available to the people & pets & emails & deadlines & partners that expect us to be there when we’re now carving out more time, space, and energy for our practice, in all its forms.
I get that this can be hard to ask for, to give to ourselves, to allow ourselves.
So I’ll give you my FULL support today and every day of these 40. And you can give yourself whatever it is you need in any moment.
Full support,
Cath
Meditation: We’ll keep going with the body-based practice this week. Build this muscle memory for presence in your body, one day, one breath at a time.
For Reflection: How are you with your own energetic boundaries? Do you give and give and give until there’s nothing left to give (that’s my working definition of burnout, btw!)? What is your practice showing you about this? Any helpful takeaways from the moon for you?
BONUS: Recall & consider Rumi’s words that got us here in the first place:
“A new moon teaches gradualness
and deliberation
and how one gives birth
to oneself
slowly.
Patience
with small details
makes perfect
a large work,
like the universe.
What nine months of attention
does for an embryo,
forty early mornings
will do
for your
gradually growing wholeness.”