After completing the overhaul of the ITP Website and Blog platform this Spring and Summer, I found myself in need of my own “Pause.”

The seemingly endless cascade of technology details, project roadblocks and challenges left me feeling both depleted and overstimulated.

With the start-up phase of the new website completed, we gratefully reached a plateau in our vision. It was time again to let the ground of my being lie fallow. I needed to empty myself to make room for a new phase of life.

And so I traveled to a yoga retreat in Bali.

I took a “Technology Chastity Vow” to go off the grid, including my cell phone, internet and email. This enabled me to have the space to “Drop in, Drop Down, Drop Under, and Drop Through” to a new vision.

These are just some of the mental meanderings from my journey.

Invocation

One can create all of the constructs for a relaxing vacation, but how the texture of the experience unfolds is a mystery.

Practicing yoga 4-5 hours a day in the beautiful & idyllic setting of Bali, as well as meditation, spa treatments, and some unstructured free time– were all part of the package that I designed for myself.

We all know that these types of activities alone, if done with the wrong mindset and lack of intention, can be stale and leave one with a saccharin aftertaste: not quite right.

The whole isn’t always greater than the sum of the parts. A yoga retreat isn’t always fulfilling.

Yet Bali was anything but this, thankfully! Balinese hospitality, so full of spirit, friendliness and generosity, seemed to wash me clean and left me with a sense of total well being.

We started the retreat with a cleansing ceremony by a Balinese priest and an invocation and blessing incorporating all of the senses: water, chanting, fire, incense, flower petals, prayer and meditation. With intentions set, I began to let go and arrive into the present moment again and again.

Integrated Living

Balinese spirituality is a unity of three traditions: Animism, Hinduism and Buddhism. Reverence is incorporated into every aspect of their life. Rather than the compartmentalized Western culture of a sabbath just one day a week, the Balinese bring their spirit, their bodies, their hearts, even the arts into one integrated being on a daily basis.

Everyone in their culture expresses some form of artistry as part of their daily life. They may dance or sing, create paintings or carve woodwork or make jewelry.

Children are reared from an early age to learn to incorporate these aspects as part of their being. The arts are not left to the domain of a select few.

I was inspired by their model of holistic integration and how beautifully their culture has woven such a richly textured fabric of existence as a foundation for the individual and their respective roles in the greater collective.

On the last night of the yoga and meditation retreat, at the Shangrila (so aptly named!) in Northern Bali, the village locals came to make music and dance their traditional Balinese dances for us. Twenty-two men formed a gamelan orchestra, and six women danced in the local tradition.

What this lovely group of amateurs lacked in “professionalism,” they made up for in heart, spirit,and soul– their dance and music were infused with their essence, far more enlivening than the professional groups we had seen previously!

They performed with the full weight of their being. As the conductor directed, it was as if the music rose and fell with his breath, his personal Universe of intention spilling forth into the gamelan group field and out into the room; and the dancers moved in alignment.

A harmonious, lyrical, repetitious cycle of beauty, line, rhythm and sound: this is what integration looks and feels like.

Healing Oursleves to Help Heal the Planet

I keep coming back to this concept of healing oneself to participate in the healing of the planet. And how I have sought with Invoking the Pause to promote the integration of science with the arts, allowing for the unknown to incubate in places of natural beauty. I have trusted that the focus on the out of time sensation of “chiros” will coalesce into substance and then manifest into form, knowledge and expression.

Yet there I was in Bali, all fragmented from a stressful 6 months.

As I snorkeled underwater with schools of fish in day-glo hues of blue, yellow, pink and green, I watched and felt the sensation as the air bubbles from deep sea divers percolated to the surface. Like champagne bubbles, they celebrated my release from the attachments of home and also the success of being in the flow.

It took all two weeks of the “tech fast” to fully decompress, to regain my subtle internal rhythms and allow new creative impulses to have voice in my consciousness again.

Enthusiasm

Enthusiasm. I needed to recover it. As I sat reading one of my daily morning meditations in Mark Nepo’s book, “The Book of Awakening” after my return from Bali, his excerpt summarized my experience brilliantly,

“We are each faced with the endless and repeatable task of discovering our enthusiasm,which means in essence being at one with the energy of God or the Divine. The word itself comes from the Greek en (one with) and theos (the divine).

“Enthusiasm is not a mood that can be willed or forced. Rather, it is a ripple that follows a stone. It can only be felt after we immerse ourselves in life.”

As I sat suspended in time, bubbles from the divers at Mengagen Island’s deep sea wall spilled out around me, the sounds of the gamelan filled my mind, enfused with Balinese generosity, I realized I had recovered my enthusiasm for the subtle beauty of life.

I returned home rejuvenated and ready to begin the next chapter of Invoking the Pause.