Last week I had the pleasure to accompany a Spanish group of professionals through the MBCL Teacher Training in the countryside of Catalunya, organized by our dear MBCL friend Sylvia Comas Barrera. I'm very grateful this event could take place on location, before entering another lockdown.

It was a magic week showing how profound healing experiences can take place in a safe learning environment where vulnerabilities can be shared. Participants of professional trainings are often deeply touched by revisiting MBCL practices from the teacher perspective and experience them in other ways. It is never too late to reconnect with the hurt and neglected parts in ourselves. Participants gave back how helpful it was to work with a smaller group size, quality being so much more important than quantity.

Also, the healing natural environment was much appreciated. Some of us had already come to this retreat centre for several years, but never explored any further than the fenced garden to do walking meditation. It was a pleasant surprise to find out that we could unlock a gate in the fence at the back and explore what was behind it. All it needed was to ask for the key, and then leave the neatly kept, precisely structured garden, where man decides what grows ... to discover a vast, largely unspoiled, wildly beautiful landscape, where nature decides what grows. It had always been there, but we had never ventured out to appreciate it.

This exploring of the outer landscape seems to me symbolical for how we can explore our inner landscape. Are we not always surrounded by the vast space of a boundless mind and a boundless heart with infinite possibilities – even if we are unaware of it? We guard the locked-in space of what we think we are or think we should be, and lock out what we fear. However, only when we enter the open space beyond our self-made fences and leave our ‘comfort zones’, we come home.

I recall words of John O’Donohue:

May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within. May you never place walls between the light and yourself. May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to gather you, mind you, and embrace you in belonging.
(From: Benedictus - A Book of Blessings)

Inspirational words to take with us whilst facing a second Christmas in lockdown ...

Keep an eye on www.mindfulnessconcorazon.com/ for coming Spanish MBCL events.
An MBCL retreat, English spoken with Spanish translation, on the same location is confirmed for 6-11 December 2022.