Full moon, where will you be going from here?
Into retreat.
Why do you take a retreat after fullness?
To make myself an empty vessel in order to be filled again.
~ Hazrat Inayat Khan
Sometimes one feels a longing to go beyond what one knows, and to enter into a greater dimension of being. The Alchemical Retreat, existing at the heart of our Inner School, provides just that.
Turning from the busy-ness of life, the Retreat offers an opportunity to welcome stillness and silence, and to cleanse the body, mind and heart. Becoming present to the vital life force of the soul and connecting to spirit in the richness of the inner world, dormant faculties awaken. One hears the voice of guidance that comes from within. A surety of being emerges.
No two retreats are alike, for the dynamic interplay among the facets of our being creates a myriad of possibilities for healing, awakening, understanding, connecting and becoming. The medium of our art is our very self. The soul’s longing, prayer, music and meditation, practices with breath, sound and light, zikr, and the concentration on and contemplation of spiritual themes spur the seeker onward. The retreat guide, well-trained in the alchemy of transformation, tends to the retreatant throughout – creating a safe and supportive space for solitude, sitting with the retreatant daily, providing guidance with esoteric practices, and helping the seeker find a way through the thickets and gardens that arise on the path toward the goal. Refreshed and revived, humbled and “retuned,” the retreatant emerges anew, bringing a fresh draught of spirit to a thirsty world.
There are individual and group retreats available for Ashiqs and Murids from one to 10 days in length. Longer retreats are available for seasoned retreatants at the recommendation of their guide and for higher initiations. For more information contact retreats@inayatiyya.org
On Alchemy and Retreat – From our Pirs:
Welcome to this gathering of spirits, this gathering in remembrance. We come together to fulfill a need, a necessity that is all too often overlooked. The need to step back out of the roles that we play, step away for a time from the game of life in this world…Tis necessary to step back from the world of appearances and turn within, and just as we do so every night likewise each year once at least it is so needful to sleep while awake. To go to the depths that we enter in the night, but now consciously. So that we can meet the dawn with new life. — Pir Zia Inayat Khan
I hope that after [retreat] experience, when you go back into life again, you will be transfigured, transformed, your batteries recharged, and you will be able to meet your problems and commitments with a new insight and a greater power…May you experience yourself as the silent music which is called the Symphony of the Spheres, and of which you are so much a part that the absence of your voice would spoil the Divine Harmony. — Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
Happiness cannot be bought or sold, nor can you give it to a person who has not got it. Happiness is our own being, your own self, that self that is the most precious thing in life. All religions, all philosophical systems, have in different forms taught how to find it by the religious path or the mystical way; and all the wise ones have in some form or another given a method by which the individual can find that happiness for which the soul is seeking. Sages and mystics have called this process alchemy. — Hazrat Inayat Khan
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