A retreat blog…

Too much happening in the little life of me recently to keep updating this bloggy. I'm back though, 2006!

New year brought a slew of change and I’m now in a new house, new job, new headspace, and clock of a heart has only been ticking inside me.

I’ve just finished a small retreat with the martial arts group I have been involved with for the last year. It’s different to other retreats in that you don’t go anywhere. But there are ways of retreating from habits for a period, and bringing a little more attention to other things, which can expand experience, open the senses up.

The idea of the retreat was to try to see yourself as something larger than just a body ending at the head and feet. To try to see yourself as connected to others, whomever you come in to contact with, to broaden the picture and become less self-focused.

In that way you can see everything that happens to you as more meaningful, and try to claim any feelings experienced. That means if somebody “makes” you upset, trying to remember that it’s more likely to be you who is making you upset, since it probably wasn’t the specific aim of the person you’re cranky at.

A lot of the time it is next to impossible to stop feeling upset in a situation, so during this retreat it was just a case of slowing down, recognising, and claiming the feeling as your own.

Part of what made the retreat so interesting for me was that if you claim all the difficult things, it becomes easier to claim the good things too, and take a lot of joy in that. It’s a great bargain to enter into.

I must admit it’s tiring to try to claim everything all day, first you have to recognise how you feel (which isn’t always easy) then to work out how much of it is your own doing (probably 90+%!) and then tell the ego that it’s something you claim. The ego won’t like it. I found it a struggle and gave up on a couple of occasions…

During the daily meditation we paid homage to certain things, namely our parents and ancestors for this physical form we have. It’s just a way of humbling and feeling less like the centre of the universe.

One thing which struck me was the number of ancestors I have!

OK, to explain, each of us have 2 parents. Who in turn have their 2 parents, etc. But try extrapolating this and see how many ancestors you have in the last 100 years (2+4+8+16=30 - assuming 25 years for a generation.) This means the tree of people you are directly descended from is (2 to the power of {n+1}) minus 2, where n is the number of generations back. That’s 30 people in the last 100 years. In the last 500, which is 20 generations, that is 2,097,150 people.

That means around 2 million people from the world’s population in the last 500 years have contributed to your genes.

And each of them managed to survive and reproduce before they died. Wow.

Still feel disconnected from humanity?? Someone please shoot a hole in my maths, these numbers get even more crazy as you go back further in time. What it means to me is how intimately connected we each are to the human race (and probably amimal kingdom too) and how large the gene pool is. Plus the fact that all our ancestors survived long enough to reproduce, all the way down the chain, is pretty incredible…