The Whole World is Medicine: A Meditation Retreat
Sickness and Medicine Correspond with one another.
The Whole World is Medicine.
What Am I? Zen Koan
The "Whole World is Medicine" is a Meditation Retreat designed to give you a much needed opportunity to tune into your heart, your soul and your body.
We are guests in our body’s house and we do not get to stay forever. We have ways of distracting ourselves from this knowledge, but no one can deny it. Sickness can be a profound gate into vast, inner realms. It holds the possibility to catalyze and change our lives entirely. These times may be exactly that.
Whenever we are sick, suffering from loss or in drowning grief there is a belief that there is a "me" that I will get back to one day when I'm well. But outcomes are never certain. We arrive at an outcome by walking the path of our own lives and allow ourselves to be astonished.
In this retreat we will walk the path of our own lives through meditation with a Zen Koan, conversation with each other, a shared ritual, writing and small group sharing.
This will be a powerful, enlightening and insightful experience that will empower you to be engaged right here, right now in your life just as it is, fearlessly.
Illana Berger, PhD is a Spiritual Teacher, Counselor and Zen Student and Teacher and author of "The Snake and the Four Winds; Jewish Entrances into the Indigenous Mind and The Journey From Grievance to Gratitude. She has worked with Indigenous Healers and Medicine People from around the world and has been in private practice in California for 20 years.
This meditation retreat will give you an opportunity to drop into your body wisdom and the wisdom of the Earth by discovering the medicine that corresponds to all sickness; be it loss, illness or grief.
MY INSPIRATION
Learning to live with life as it is, without my hand in trying to make it better, different or more to my liking has been an act of liberation. Encountering my own journey with cancer, the loss of my marriage and a loss of my sense of worth has taught me that with every affliction or loss, the medicine needed is right there. The medicine I need, I discovered was right at my fingertips - in fact as close to me as my breath. All that was needed was to turn toward the affliction. Right there I found freedom. I'd like to share it with you and take to the threshold of that gate.
