Inside

Inside, looking out.  I'm back-blipping something of the retreat I was on from 6th-13th May at Hothorpe Hall in Leicestershire.  This was our main meeting space, the views from the windows are here.

The venue was chosen for its spacious meeting rooms, large enough to hold whole group meetings of one hundred plus; for its many elegant breakout rooms (which I didn't get around to blipping); for its beautiful setting with wide vistas on three sides and woodland dense with birdsong and wildflowers on the fourth; and for its excellent food.  It was a perfect choice, everything worked seamlessly to support an intense week. 

This first week-long residential retreat was a big deal for me.  I have wanted to join the Ridhwan School since I first heard of it in 2001 but it’s only now that my personal circumstances make this possible.  I can hardly believe my luck.  It’s been seven years since a new Diamond Approach group started up in the UK.  The group is known as UK4.  It will stay open, in that people can join, for a year or two.  Then as we deepen into the work it will become a closed group.  We’ll meet in retreat twice a year for the next seven years, Hothorpe will be our home for these retreats over the coming years.  After that we will  join with the participants of the previous three UK groups for ongoing Inquiry.  .

These are the main practices that form the foundation of the work, which we were immersed in during the week.

1.  Belly meditation - known at the Kath meditation (as this work is in part in the Sufi tradition).
2.  Sensing - feeling Presence in arms and legs, then torso neck and head.
3.  Inquiry into personal experience - alone, in pairs, triads, small groups and 1:1 with a  teacher.

Open-ended Inquiry with Presence is the main spiritual method of the Diamond Approach it facilitates the unfoldment and development of the soul.  The Kath meditation and sensing Presence are practices that support Inquiry into the truth of one's immediate experience.  In addition we had daily teachings in the whole group.

I LOVE this work, something akin to self-inquiry opened up spontaneously in me twenty-five years ago.  I’ll be writing about that whenever I get back to the book/blog.  But it’s only in the last year and a half that I’ve started doing shared inquiry with other people on the DA weekends and with partners on Skype.  So the core method feels natural to me but whole other areas of experience surface when engaged in Inquiry with one or more people.

Transition back to normal life is always tricky, whether from a holiday or retreat.  I've been feeling somewhat disassembled in my habitual reactions, softer and more open, somewhat adrift.  It's been a week since I got back [written on 20th May] and I’d like to share a few of the images I managed to take during the week.  

I've added a couple of links on my About page to make my hinterland a little more transparent.