From September 11-17th, I along with 6 co-facilitators from around the world ran the Mount Shasta Experience – a week long adventure to connect deeply with ourselves, to experience the beautiful Mount Shasta and surrounding national park, and most importantly to experience ourselves co-creating as a community.
My co-facilitators & I felt strongly that one of the key challenges and opportunities available now is to learn to create collectively in a way that:
- Is always from the heart and recognizes unconditional love as the platform for harmonious, effective and sustainable creation.
-Empowers each individual to recognize the abundance of gifts, skills, insights and unique talents they have to give.
-Honours all life, celebrates the abundance & beauty of Gaia and listens to her wisdom.
-Opens to flow, synchronicity and the ‘aliveness’ of each moment.
And with these understandings, the retreat unfolded itself in ways that challenged, opened and shifted us substantially, a metamorphosis from which there is no going back! Here are a few of the highlights
“UK44”
Firstly, unlike most retreats that spend 1 year planning, we sent out the first emails and information at the end of June. When we arrived in Shasta, our total group size had grown to the perfect size of 44. Many of you will have felt the significance of double numbers; my feeling is that they open and hold a possibility of new, clear, more potent energy. Some call these ‘Master numbers’, gifted to us at certain times for certain purposes.
4 is representative of the 4th Chakra = the Heart, and we went to Shasta to run a retreat culminating in the Heart Calling – an event to recognize the immense love we hold within us and ceremoniously offer this love to the planet and all who live on it. The whole group resonated and felt this heart opening profoundly, and in the town of Shasta, we became known as “UK44”.
Giving & Receiving
We went up the Mountain for meditations and as I sat taking in the majestic snow capped mountain, smelling the pine fragranced air and feeling the clarity that this level of purity in nature provides, I gained a deepened understanding of what it means to give and receive.
I felt how it is only when I honor the abundant resources within me that I can give fully. To give from a place of not valuing who I am, what I have to share, (or considering these gifts small), dishonors who I am and cuts off the opportunity to grow into my potential. Equally, to receive requires the same honoring of self – for if I don’t allow this soulful, infinite self to receive, what I’m given goes to a more surface level of a personality, ego self. The ego, (which by its nature is finite and limited to certain boundaries) can also only receive a finite level of resources that need constant topping up as each dose of receiving runs out. Its from here that ‘trading’ replaces giving & receiving, and also from here that we feel scarcity in what we have to give or in what we receive.
On Shasta, I felt giving & receiving as a dance of life communicating with itself, in the same way that a couple gracefully gliding across the dance floor are not ‘counting’ how many times their partner twirled or followed them, equally the flow of giving and receiving becomes one flowing movement, an interchange between different aspects of life. As one such aspect, my responsibility is to step more fully into who I am and then I allow the dance to begin.
The Natural Flow & Opening
Mount Shasta, and the surrounding areas are recognized by the Native American’s as a place of many sacred sites. Indeed, Shasta has become a place of pilgrimage, meditation, ceremony and retreat for people of different faiths. I also met people in Shasta who were of no particular faith, however felt a special calling to the mountain, traveling from all over the world to stay here. Their demeanor was one of stillness, peacefulness and also communicating that they felt fed by the energy of the place, even though they did not quite understand how.
As a group, we quickly dropped into the same energy, feeling the distinct energies of locations such as:
- The Headwaters of Sacremento River; energizing, joyful and prayful experience
- Panther Meadows on Mount Shasta: the meeting of streams, the abundance of wild flowers. When we were there a cleansing hail storm brought us in close connection to the trees, starting a spontaneous offering of song.
- Stewart Mineral Springs: one of the natural hot springs whose water crystals were photographed by Masaru Emoto, leaving our group feeling in total harmony, peace and stillness
- Healing ceremony at Castle lake, followed by a hike to Heart Lake, (heart shaped lake 6000 ft up with views over to Mount Shasta) for a very special meditation to connect with the area.
- Singing and dancing in the stillwaters of Lake Siskiyou, enlivening our soul!
As with all of natures sacred spots, what comes from the experience is beyond words, an awe at the magnificence of the place. We loose the edges of who we are and expand into nature as part of it, one with it.
The retreat experience also included profound, beautiful workshops, meditations, music & talks by each facilitator, amplified and imprinted by the landscape, (for example, what I had planned to run completely shifted on arrival to Shasta). Yet these also seemed to merge with the experience of being there, the distinction between ‘work’ and ‘play’ diminished and the flow of the week unfolded in new & beautiful ways.
Thank you Shasta, Gaia, Uk44, and all that is
