My experience of the Sharing Retreat in Spain 2010

by Mai Lovaas

… I am writing this as much to myself as to you, trying to put words to my experience, what this past week has been all about. I can’t label the retreat, it doesn’t have a technique or an orientation, but if I were to put some words onto it I would say a little bit of meditation, a lot of speaking and living your truth, about tuning in to the group collective, about feeling energy, about realizations and observations popping faster than you can speak them, and about tuning into something else by being present, from every moment to the next, with awareness, you can see, and avoid, conditioning, patterns, and come into something bigger. As Paul said, it is up to you now. 

And this brings me to Paul Lowe, who facilitated the workshop I attended three years ago. And it is impossible for me to say anything about this retreat and not bring up Paul Lowe. How I came to him and how I ended up at the 7-and 8 days workshop at Harbin Hot Springs in 2007 is another story, but it changed my life. It was something that I found that I was a total yes to, I found something that resonated so deeply, that was something I had been searching for my whole life, I found a way of being that gave such relief compared to the way I had been living.

Paul Lowe encourages people to live to their maximum potential, and so he challenges (invites? – paul) the way people go into automatic behaviours around jobs, careers, education, relationships, the way people talk to each other, the way people not talk to each other, he basically shakes it all up and invites you to see for yourself if you are living your truth, if you are really being who you are. And he demands (suggests? – paul) that you take responsibility for your thoughts, feelings and actions, meaning that whatever comes from you is a response to what is going on for you.

It is the concept of not putting onto others what you can take responsibility for within yourself, and with that, you can free your life up completely, because nobody else is to blame for how you live your life. If I feel angry about something, it is because there is something in me that is triggered, a pattern, a conditioning about how I think things should be, and a lot of the time if I look deeper there is a vulnerability around something that has been triggered.

What I love about Paul Lowe is that it is experiential, you learn by doing. I can sit here and try and explain until evening comes about how we do this and how we do that, but it won’t make sense, at least it didn’t for me, until I had experienced it. If I am sitting in group and have a judgment about something or somebody, there is something for me to go in with, to look at within myself. And, by doing that, I can see my patterns, see my conditioning, and I can set myself free. The world isn’t the way we have been told it is.

When I was at Harbin in 2007, Paul’ s very last group, about a hundred people were there, and the structure of the group was organized. We have one session with Paul in the morning and one in the afternoon, consisting of either guided meditation, or Paul talking about consciousness/awareness/behaviour, or a sort of question-answer thing, although Paul rarely answers a question directly, it is more of a tuning in to the person who asks, and so the response can be very personal, and, in all of this, it serves the whole group.

And Paul has an incredible energy, and his responses come with a certain effect. At night we would have sharing groups, with groups no bigger than eight people, they last around 2-3 hours and you share what comes up for you in the moment, now. Like other teachers, Paul also emphasizes the now, everything happens in the now, not the past or the future, so as much as we can, keep it present. Which means that you can’t come to group and tell your story, about where you have been in life, what happened last year when you were betrayed, none of that.

You also can’t tell your story about why you have turned out the way you have, because we all have stuff, from the past, from our childhood, parents, school, life, and the only way to move beyond that is to stay in the now.

So when you are in a sharing group there is no leader, you share what comes up for you. Maybe you are sitting with a certain feeling that needs to come up, or maybe when someone else is sharing what is going on for them you have something come up for you. And everything you share will reveal something about yourself. It is about daring to expose yourself, and daring to look at what is there for you.

Oh, and everything is from a feeling-based place. There is no intellectualization of concepts, there is no psychology, there is absolutely no fixing people, there are no reports about theories. It is all about, how do you feel, now. What is going on for you, now. And if you are not sure, you can begin with tuning into your body, where is the energy sitting, because by tuning in to your body you can find your way to the feeling, the body never lies, it always has something to tell you about what is going on.

And the purpose of these groups is to get to where you can feel what is going on, to have realizations, to see how much you live your life based on past expectations, or fear, or jdgment, or the way things ought to be, or the way you have been told things are, and realizing that none of this is true, and then finding something else, for me, finding freedom, total inner freedom.

As I said, when I came to Paul in 2007 it was very powerful for me.

And, it hasn’t always been easy to live this way out in the world.

So, now. Since Paul Lowe retired in 2007, after having travelled the world doing groups for decades, he has declared that it is now up to us. I wasn’t sure what he meant at the time, because for Paul he has taken all of this to the next level, which means, what is your responsibility to the world, how do you give back. Naturally, Paul got tired (? – Paul) of sitting there giving feedback to people all the time, some take it, others don’t, and he wanted to move beyond the personal to what is going on with the planet, and the shift in consciousness we are going through. Which, in my opinion, always starts with the personal, and Paul connects the violence inside of you, the violence in relationships, directly to the violence out in the world.

Side note: When I came out of Paul in 2007, slowly, things weren’t working for me anymore the way they used to (or, never did, really). It didn’t make sense to me to work away at a job that I hated, to do something because I should. Now, more than ever, I see that things have shifted for me. I’m not drawn to living in the city anymore. My system has gotten sensitized, and I am not feeling drawn to the trains, the streets, the buildings.

What comes to me is, there is a different way of living.

And, out in the world there are certain sets of living.

My challenge is how to live out in the world with this new now.

So, it is up to you now. Ryan and Veronika, who organized the retreat in Spain, have taken the invitation and are continuing, it is up to us, this is how we will do it. The community in London, people who did the Paul Lowe workshop in 2007 and have done workshops with him in the past, have a weekly sharing group. (In London)

After I did the Paul Lowe workshop, when I came back to New York there were also people there who had done the retreat and we got together and did sharing groups, but they fizzled out rather quickly.

Sometimes when I go back to Harbin Hot Springs there are people there that have done Paul Lowe groups, there are several people that come down from Calgary in the July/August every year, and then we’ll do a sharing group of 8. And, in the few times I have stopped over in London I have come to their weekly sharing group. Since 2007 some people have fallen off?and a lot of new people have started coming to group, people who have never experienced Paul Lowe.

Veronika and Ryan did a retreat in Spain last year with 10 or so people, and this year the group was 23, so it has grown, which is really exciting. I knew ten people in the group already, I met them at Paul Lowe in 2007. So, this is the continuation of Paul’s work, the sharing group, and when I went I really had no idea of what was going to happen, because Paul’s energy can’t be matched and I doubted that Veronika and Ryan would sit and explain his work, and, also, this isn’t about Paul anymore, he has retired, it is up to us, he is no guru, whatever he has shown us resides in us already, it is a matter of bringing it out to the world. I also wondered if we would just be doing sharing groups all the time, and I thought, what will we talk about, what will come up? I saw from the schedule that after breakfast there was morning session and after lunch there was afternoon session, then dinner, and that turned out to be as much structure as we would get.

In the morning group on the first day we were all 23 sitting in a circle not knowing what was going to happen. Veronika and Ryan were sitting there as part of the group, and took no charge, gave no structure, and slowly people started freaking out and the energy turned rather hectic as people were trying to understand, do we break into groups of 8 now? Do we stay here in the group? How come Veronika and Ryan don’t say anything? Some people said, the nice thing about being in a group of 8 is that the energy is more tight, more can happen, if there is a bigger group the energy dissolves. And then we sat in the big group the whole morning anyways, some people would say it was a structural mess, other people would say it was perfect, it was exactly what was meant to happen, because it brought up so much stuff in people around wanting structure, wanting leaders, wanting to be told what to do, not taking responsibility, doing what everybody else says, wanting to take charge, wanting everybody to do what you wanted to do and the whole morning we just sat there, in the big group, without figuring it out and I tell you, it was brilliant. I find it brilliant on Veronika and Ryan’s part that they didn’t come in with some sort of explanation, but just stayed with it, what will happen now?

This energy continued in the group in the afternoon, and when 23 people are sitting together, watching, observing, the energy rises, and everything that comes up is magnified it is up to us now – the power of the collective. I really got that throughout the week, what we do with our planet is really up to us, and it starts here, in this group, now. Who are you in the world? Somebody said something later in the week about how when we are one-on-one it is how we deal with intimate relationships, when we are in the group of 8 it is how we deal with family and when we are in the big group it is how we deal with the world.

Part of what I got towards the end of the retreat is how I deal with the world in the three years it has been since the last workshop, which was my huge pull to going. where am I at now, three years later? What has happened for me?

On a personal level there is still a lot for me to look at, where do I have judgments, and more than that; how do I judge myself, where am I hard on myself? I feel that I am coming more out, opening up more, and I genuinely feel happier, I have more joy inside, and sharing that. And when difficult things come up, or judgments, or anger, not taking it so seriously. it is for me to look at, to move with. One of the good things about a sharing group, or sharing in general, whatever it is, is that something happens when you share it. The energy of the words, the importance, dissolves, and you feel lighter, You’ve said it, and it wasn’t such a big deal. And for me, sharing my truth, how I really, really feel, is so liberating, and it feels wonderful to be around people who want me to speak my truth, who expect it, and who won’t club me for doing it. Because, my truth may not be what other people want to hear, but nonetheless, it is me, in that moment, and I can’t change it.

I am so over trying to be correct about how to feel and how to be, to try and tailor my truth to whoever I am speaking to, it doesn’t work for me, it feels squashing to me. So here, in this environment, I get to speak my truth, and live it. And I say it from the heart, from my truth, and in everything I say there is something for you, and there is something for me. My truth isn’t about the other person, it is about me. And naturally, when a group of 23 get together for a retreat in southern Spain for a week, dynamics happen. People get attracted to each other, want to be with each other, people get challenged with each other. This is a place to practice being together, and being present to what is coming up, without manufactured ideas of how to be together, or how to react, or how to be. People get attracted to each other and express it, and might get a straight “I’m not attracted to you” back, and somebody might say to someone, I don’t like it when you do this – and then, through the feedback from the group, find out that that has all to do with themselves, and nothing to do with the person who is doing this.

I find it liberating to share what is going on for me, to just say it, get it out, what a relief. And, something new came in around sitting in the big group (on day two we started doing big group in the morning and smaller groups of 8 in the afternoon, so what ended up happening, all by itself, was that we did a combination of the two, which was excellent) in the big group, things came up for me on a much more aware level, in a way that, because the energy in the big group is more intense, more magnified, I found that plotting out and expressing how I felt in each moment wasn’t appropriate, but I found what when I sat with it things started popping inside of me. I felt energy moving from my pelvis through my belly, into my hips, rib cage, up into my chest, moving up, circularly, I felt that I was sitting on a boiling kettle as realizations, observations and epiphanies were popping inside of me like a popcorn machine in a fun-park.

And yes, it was absolutely exhilarating, when the energy in the room built, even with long pauses in between people sharing or saying things, I felt the energy build, and to me it felt like the energy of the collective. Of what is possible. In a bigger picture, of what is possible when we come together. And that’s what I mean around seeing where I am at now, three years later. Yes, there is much more there on a personal level, there always is, how exciting, and, wow, the collective, outside of the personal, and I have no words to describe that, it is more of a sense that that is the direction I am going, and writing that, I have no idea what that means, where that wants to go.

And, it has been three years. Experiences, love, the opening up of my sexuality through a man I met, then him leaving me, then a lot of pain, then the pain of trying to try New York, of feeling lost and worthless in the city, then having amazing experiences, making friends, travels, then letting go, then re-looking, re-finding out who I am and what I would like to do, and being in the middle of it, not knowing, feeling joy, being alive, having explored a couple of other workshops and directions, and listening to Paul Lowe tapes and exploring consciousness, educating myself through the internet, Eckhart Tolle, Joseph Campbell, and being curious about many more, and just finding my own way. Whatever that means. And, coming back to this way of being, coming to the retreat again, three years later, I am so grateful I came back to experience this. I feel alive, grateful, joyful, excited.

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