We are at Karuna Center, in Monchique, Portugal, starting our Autumn 8-day silent retreat.
When we sit together in silence, what differentiates us ceases to matter. Our personal stories and identities, while there, slowly begin to fade in the background. Another name for that background is emptiness.
As days of practice pass and deepen, we become more attuned and sensitive to a greater presence that, while all pervading and never absent, rarely impresses itself on us in the everyday. We are too busy and our preoccupies us gets in the way of us paying attention to it.
To be stirred by the dharma is to step into the ineffable.
Through all the colors of Fall the dharma speaks. Shedding words we are embraced by the subtle music you can hear at times in what is speechless though never mute.
We awaken when we hear silence sing.
There we can leave the teachings behind for everything we encounter; the glitter of stars in the vastness of the night, mountain trails illumined by moonlight, bird songs fusing from the trees, the first shafts of sunlight piercing through thick leafage, the murmur of water as it runs over the rocks, all reveal the dharma and teach the dharma in a silent way.
They do not teach the dharma. They are the dharma. The teachings are mere pointers. They point to what and what is beyond what we think.
I wrote these words in guise of welcome to our group:
This retreat experience will be revealing for you. What will it reveal? I don't know. It will be your journey to find that out.
Warm greetings from an abode of stillness and peace in Serra de Monchique.
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