Giving someone the time and space to unfold themselves | Andrea de Michaelis – Creating my own reality, one thought at a time

I have friends that are highly motivated, very creative and involved in many projects at once, like me. A few times a year, I like to create for myself a retreat atmosphere in my home and schedule time to sit down and focus on whatever it is I’ve chosen to work on. Usually my retreats are for self discovery or to finish a writing project. I’ve done weekends with friends where we also do yoga, meditation, creative visualization, some healthy cooking, writing workshops, tarot/divination intensives and the Monroe Institute Gateway Voyage Experience together. Sometimes we camp out in the yard and sometimes we spend the weekend in silence. Sometimes a friend wants a quiet, conducive space to finish their own project, like Domino right now.

He’s been having some personal revelations and is taking time to download them out of his brain and onto paper. He can’t do it at home, it’s too noisy and too many distractions and obligations, and he can’t afford to go anywhere, so we created a space here where he can be as alone as he wants to be while he has time off work. He’s rather monkish and keeps to himself, so I barely know he’s here. We have been doing functional silence, though we’ll write notes if we need to. If he hears me in the kitchen he may come out and share a meal, most often he’ll do whatever meals he does while I’m in the office. He’s a yogi also, so our habits are similar: morning puja, meditation, chanting he may join or not. We’ll sit together in the garden or walk outside and water plants, in silence. The silence is part of the process when you’re diving deep to bring out what’s inside you. He’s a writer and going through several major life transitions right now, at the same time he’s waking up to more of who he is and what he came here to be. He knows this information flow may not come again and he wants to create the time and space to receive it and understand what it’s trying to teach him. I give him credit, for he’s a Facebook junkie like all of us and he hasn’t gone online at all, he knows this is a time for inner work for him. I admire his dedication to his project. It’s hard to know what someone needs but it’s not hard to give them the space to figure it out for themselves.