Post-retreat musings | #29
A week of surf, sun, writing and friends in Costa Rica
Hi friends, I’ve just landed back in London after a week in Costa Rica and a week in New Jersey and New York. Here is the latest from my time abroad.
Enjoy x
I just spent a week in the beautiful seaside town of Playa Avellanas, in Costa Rica with a wonderful group of people. I feel so truly blessed to have been given this opportunity! By that I mean to have stumbled upon this beautiful writing community; to make friends with everyone in it; to be in balmy sunny weather escaping the cold of London’s winter and to be writing this paragraph by a lovely pool in a dreamy surf house.
Feeling this level of gratitude brought me back to a workshop I took part in, where one of the participants said that we are all just spiritual beings having a human experience. I remember taking that sentence away with me because so often in the transience and impermanence of life, we forget that we, as humans, are spiritual beings and divine creatures. We each embody tangible and physical forms as a body in space and time, and the experiences we have are both ordinary and extraordinary.
Ordinary in the sense that many humans have travelled through Costa Rica and surfed the same waves I’ve surfed. And extraordinary in that those waves aren’t really the same, and to even have been given the opportunity to be human in the first place is beautiful and rare.
Each day on the retreat begins with an all-hands where we ground into the previous day, the day ahead and ourselves. Our lead facilitator, Dan, will remind us of the present moment by saying these exact words: “we are here in Costa Rica, Playa Avellanas, Guanacaste, the land of trees with ears”. Each morning, hearing that reminds me that I am a physical and living being, witnessing and living this experience. It feels so deep and shallow at the same time. Deep in that we all opted in to do deep and emotional work here at the retreat, and a lot of effort went into doing inner work before coming. And equally shallow in that we don’t really have to overthink any of this -- we can just have a good time.
The retreat started on a Tuesday and finished a week later. I turned my phone on aeroplane mode on the very first day and dropped into my feelings and set the intention to be present for the entire week. Throughout the week we had opportunities to journal, and in each of these moments I noted down some reflections I want to share with you all.
Writing as a sacred practice
Writing especially about life events is a beautiful practice of sensemaking and expressing. In our content-driven and social media pervasive world, it is easy to assume our writing needs to be for an audience or with the intention of growing an audience. Writing can simply be the means and the ends -- an enjoyable act in and of itself with the bonus of a piece of writing that can be shared, if desired.
Writing is an important anchor in my practice, and I’ve come to realise how much it helps regulate my overthinking brain, my need to order things and my nervous system. The turning point came when I realised I was no longer writing for the universal ‘you’ but for the individual ‘me’, the purpose being a way to make sense of my human experience. Making it sacred means I devote time and space to ensuring it has a fixed slot in my life.
Things can be meaningful just as they are
As a chronic overthinker, it feels like a deep revelation that things don’t always need to have some deeper and more intricate meaning to be meaningful. It can be just as it is. I’ve always known that cerebrally, but sometimes I get myself into a rut thinking things need to be much more than they are. Lately I’ve embodied this understanding. I imagine the average person isn’t sitting around overthinking things, and are more or less accepting things just as they are, or being happy with experiences as they are. I seem to almost thirst for there to be a bigger meaning. It feels immensely liberating for my embodied understanding to arrive at this point, to realise that experiences are valuable in and of themselves, and there doesn’t need to be more. I can just be here in Costa Rica because I want to be with my writing community and friends.
Letting go of needing the extraordinary and relishing in the ordinary
One thing I’ve really enjoyed witnessing being part of this community and friendship group is that we are all seemingly growing to accept the ordinary. Many people within this community have Type A backgrounds and many are founders or CEOs. But what has been cool to witness on this trip is how much that need to identify with a label has been dropped, not just for me but for a few others who I know. One founder sold their startup, the one they built when they conflated the notion of being a founder with solving the problem they cared about, and are now working on policy in the same area. Another serial founder realised that what they were building wasn’t meant to be the type of unicorn scale up that venture backed companies are and has been finding ways to lighten the company’s load and extend its runway so that what they built can evolve into another type of organisation.
Even when it came to myself, I saw that I wasn’t trying to prove anything to anyone in the morning yoga classes, in my writing, in what I wore or talked about. It’s just been a really nice time with friends, sharing a sunny experience by the beach, on surfboards, around the dinner table or in the pool. It feels so ordinary and so nice to be so ordinary.
Being in the moment with a camera?
This whole week, I didn’t use my phone but there were a few moments where I really wanted to. The first was when I saw another girl, Amanda, having her aguahara experience. She looked like a divine mermaid swirling in the water with the waterbased bodywork facilitator, Javier. The second was when we all had our faces painted by our friend Azalea ready for the spirit dance. And the third was when my surf instructor and I strapped my board to the back of her ATV and drove off. I had this deep urge to get my phone out to use the camera and then put it away again but because I didn’t even have my phone on me, I couldn’t do this. It made me wonder what it means to truly be in the moment and whether a momentary lapse of being in the moment, being distracted by taking a picture truly counts as being in the moment? And does it matter if it didn’t?
I contemplated the idea of leaving my phone behind at my tent completely at future camping festivals and to only take a disposable camera with me.
People always leave and it is okay
I’ve always had a very difficult time relating to others. My anxious need to attach to them means I either don’t allow them in or I allow them in so much that I want to morph with them, not knowing how to have space apart. Last year I remember feeling that way when Azalea left the retreat. I bawled my eyes out at her leaving the next day, hiccuping on a lady called Nibras’ shoulders. This year, two of the retreat participants, Andrea and Yash, left early. Their early departure dawned on me that the retreat was soon coming to an end and I felt the rising sadness within me. But the sadness was a deep understanding that people leave and it is okay. This understanding arose as a result of work I’d been doing across the year, accepting our close relationships aren’t always geographically close to us. And when people leave a container such as this retreat, it doesn’t mean they have left this realm and it doesn’t mean they are no longer in my life, they are just moving on with their lives.
The wave of sadness that came over me when asked how I felt about the retreat coming to an end felt more regulated and balanced. The emotion wasn’t overwhelming like a big overhead wave coming towards me, threatening to throw me under. It was more of an inevitable sadness one feels when something beautiful comes to an end. The beautiful kind of ‘negative’ emotion. I felt it, I shared it and others nodded and made understanding sounds.
Watching the sunset everyday
There is a practice in many coastal towns that people descend on the beach and watch the sunset each day. I remember at the last retreat in Puerto Escondido, where we did this but I didn’t understand what the fuss was about. I remember thinking to myself why are we all purposefully making our way down to the beach to watch the sun disappear each day? It happens every single day afterall! 2023, this past year, has been about leaning into intricacies and nuance. It was about realising that exactly because it is something that happens each day, everyone goes to the beach to observe it.
It was the deep realisation that things don’t need to be a big bang or only occur once-in-a-lifetime for them to have a place in my life. It was also the realisation that there is a lot of extraordinary in the ordinary. These small moments mark the passage of time. That we are mortal and mere. Mere humans on a little blue dot hurtling through the universe, both insignificant in that but also significant in our own individualised experiences. And precisely because our individual experiences are made up of so many small moments, that seem like nothing, and so few big moments that seem pressurising and defining that marking little moments feel even more special.
These little daily rituals help me understand that we are indeed getting older, that time is indeed passing but not to worry about moments we cannot get back. These small markings of change help us move incrementally forward in life, to not just live for the big moments, to not feel like life needs to be extraordinary to be meaningful. They remind us of our mortality, but also the beauty of having had the chance to experience life. It is simple and beautifully so.