Pandemic Journal 26-28/8/22 — Blossoming at Bloom Holistic Retreat

Sending love to everyone at Bloom and the Octopus Garden retreat. 

The extra-ordinary Bloom Holistic Retreat is located on Darling Lane on the shores of beautiful Loughborough Lake in South Frontenac County — three hours from Toronto and about 20 minutes north of Kingston, Ontario.

https://bloomholisticretreat.com/

Plenitude? Splendour?

Think of a word to describe this moment, said Pat in the Saturday morning class.

“Plenitude,” I muse, “or perhaps “splendour”?

This yoga retreat is splendid. Though I can’t decide between ‘splendour’ rooted in the Latin word for brilliance, and the abundance of ‘plenitude’.

Not only are the retreat yoga teachers superb, but the sumptuous setting and convivial fellow participants are thoroughly welcoming. We create a beautiful nourishing community of fellow travelers in just a few days.

The retreat is a luxurious reward to myself after a year of heavy steroid and biologic medication to treat the sudden onset in the summer of 2021 of Giant Cell Arteritis, an auto-immune condition that affects the arteries that cross the temples to your eyes. It can cause blindness, heart issues, and even death.

Throughout the year of my treatment, I continued to practice yoga almost daily and study intensively with various teachers at Octopus Garden Holistic Yoga and Pur Resilience Yoga, both Toronto studios that offer zoom classes to my home in Edmonton, Alberta, 2706km away.

My Intensive Octopus Garden yoga teacher training over five months was demanding and rewarding. I am grateful for the practices of meditation and asanas.

The discipline of attending to the present with calm and focus helps me to heal.

A few days ago my rheumatologist said my tests indicate my inflammation is no longer. I like to think yoga helped me reach my present-day condition of what appears to be remission.

I came to this three-day retreat in part to reconnect with myself and to find some equilibrium. As a mother/writer/student of yoga. And as a lover and companionable friend.

I am so happy to have found this place. Here the air and the water buoy me up as though I’m swimming morning to night in a mineral pool.

This 2022 retreat reminds me of my first yoga retreat in the late 1970s where I pivoted in my life and enrolled in graduate school. In the midst of that retreat, I found my calling as a teacher, writer, professor and intermittent activist.

Forty-four years later, I am a fortunate retiree pivoting from my mothering years with an empty nest. At this retreat younger yogis tell me they hope they are as healthy and supple as I am at 71 and I feel lucky to be in recovering health after my brush with serious illness. Pivot or no pivot, I sense the power of reflection and rest and care. In the midst of our increasingly challenging world, yoga’s meditation and philosophy and breathing and postures help me flourish.

Octopus Garden Holistic Yoga Teachers

Two of my beloved teachers from Octopus Holistic Yoga Teacher Training, Pat Harada Linfoot & Jennifer Helland are here.

Bloom’s Beauty

Sensation

Over the course of the weekend, we have wonderful classes including a yoga therapy class. Pat advises us: “Eat your gummy bear slowly being here now”.

What are your sensations?

Sensation, said Jen earlier when describing the sense of an asana.

Sensation, I thought connecting with pleasure at the pleasure I derive from my daily yoga practice.

Sensation, I thought while practicing Warrior 2 in class today. Pain.

Sensation fills me as I contemplate my painful shoulders – painful with or without yoga these days.

Seventy-one-year-old shoulders. Old woman’s aching rotator cuffs etc.

Sensation, my lover whispers in my ear.

Sensation, how pain when filled with breath, the two-count inhalation and the exhalation slowed to four counts, eight, ten…. The breath fills the pain. The sensation rounds with each breath. The pain opens out as the alphabet transforms the word

p a i n

into open breath a space of simply this

Blooming

Eat your gummy bear slowly being here now. That was Pat’s instruction at the beginning of the yoga therapy class.

Sensation, said Jen when describing the sense of an asana.

Sensation, I thought contemplating my painful shoulders – painful with or without yoga these days. Seventy-one-year-old shoulders. Old woman’s aching rotator cuffs etc.

Sensation, I thought while practicing Warrior 2 in class. Pain.

Sensation, my lover whispers in my ear.

Sensation, how pain when filled with breath, the two-count inhalation and the exhalation slowed to four counts, eight, ten…. The breath fills the pain. The sensation rounds with each breath. The pain opens out as the alphabet transforms the word

p a i n

into open breath a space of simply this.

After asanas

The world is such a tragic mess. The leadership of the Canadian Cons and Alberta’s UCP, not to mention the dilemma of their voters. The rise of neofascists and appeal to White Supremacists in Europe and America and here. War in Ukraine and elsewhere around the world. Women suffering under misogynist regimes. Reprehensible U.S. anti-abortion legislation. Not to mention the environmental catastrophes of storms and floods and fires and droughts coast to coast to coast to coast on our fragile planet. And the suffering of friends.

On my return home from the retreat and my travels, I feel a profound wave of loneliness. And awareness at how COVID isolates and unsettles my patterns of friendship and community. I am grateful for so much and cut through by what is missing.

Psychologically I’m working on becoming intermittently oblivious to my worry about the world. A real challenge. This doesn’t come naturally. But the focus of meditation and asanas helps.

On my best days, my body remembers I am still in my kayak bobbing between water and sky on this restorative lake.

And the memory of new friendships and conversations resound in my ears. When retreat weekend participants come forward to tell me they want to be as energetic and supple as I am at 71, they make me laugh and fill me with the best tonic of all: love.