Acting From Overflow

I’m back from my annual pilgrimage to Te Moata Retreat on the Coromandel Peninsular. I’ve been going there since 2009, and a core group of us have been attending this annual silent retreat for 15-35 years (I’m a relative newbie!).

This year however, I arrived holding the thought ‘I have a bit of an aversion to meditation’. For more than a year now, I’ve chosen to not meditate each day. Which might raise the question why I was about to join a 10-day meditation retreat. But I knew why I was there - it’s for the group, for the sacred land, and for the teacher (as much as her teachings). The feeling of connection, warm welcome, safety and permission to be myself, in a group that has sat together for, let’s call it 450 silent meditation retreat with the same teacher, is profound, precious, and extremely rare.

My teacher asked me - which part of you is feeling the aversion? And, the aversion to what exactly? My heart absolutely wanted to be there, and so did my head. It seemed it was my body that was unsure about the sitting still bit!

But from the very first meditation period the evening we arrived, I glided back into it no problem. It was like a muscle memory - the space, the people, the native bush surrounding the retreat centre, the teachers, the warmth of the fire, old friends. I could feel my head, heart and body coming into coherence, receptivity and relaxation.

Connecting these three centres became a bit of a gentle and playful theme for me throughout the retreat. As the days passed, I could sense into whether I was moving / acting / thinking from one centre more than the other, or whether I was in full coherence. I noticed when my heart and head were ‘communicating’ and when they were performing in isolation. Not that it’s a problem to sometimes be more in our brilliant thinking mind, or tuning into the depth of feelings and emotions of the heart, or the needs, intuition and memory held within the body. But when we engage with life with all three centres connected, something else emerges. It’s like on one hand we become an antenna, able to receive more insight, guidance, and grace from the intelligent presence of life itself. And we also become a transmitter - other people feel our coherence, our welcome, our ground.

I could feel this too in the other people on retreat. Our teacher models this effortlessly, which is why I say I was there for her presence as much as her wise words. But also I felt it throughout the group, especially towards the end of the retreat once we broke the silence. Speaking whilst maintaining connection to our heart and body is actually quite unusual in ordinary life, it’s so much more common to speak with all our energy in our heads. Being with someone who is in their body feels different, deeper, like we are truly being seen and heard, and also like we can understand the other beyond words. As someone said to me, we could be talking about bananas and coconuts yet we would both know what we were really talking about. It’s transmission. It’s mystical and it’s also very real.

The retreat left me overflowing with gratitude for all the gifts that I’ve received in my life, and the retreat itself was immense in terms of how everyone involved - the teachers, staff, volunteers and other participants - were all so inspiringly open hearted with their time, their service, their presence and their love. How devoted everyone is about creating a kinder, wiser, more inclusive world.

On the flight home from Auckland to Queenstown, I found myself thinking about the recipes that I share on Substack and a growing conviction that I wanted to remove the paywall from all my plant-based recipes. Arising out of many moments of coherence between all my three centres, giving away all my recipes felt like an obvious next step. There's something that feels right about offering freely what was itself freely given - where do ideas come from anyway? I’m grateful to you all - paying or not. It’s our connection that ultimately matters the most. Cooking and recipes have opened so many doors and facilitated so many connections over the decades - I am truly in awe of what cooking has brought to me.

(If you are reading this and you are a paying subscriber, of course you can choose to cancel your subscription and receive recipes, including all new ones, for free… or to continue as a paying subscriber for as long as you wish. I realise this juncture is perhaps a little awkward… but I’m just meeting this moment as it is, acting from overflow. Please feel free to reach out.)

Since home, I am also back to meditating! Not in the old way that I did for decades - mindfulness / vipassana - but a simple quiet openness to my three connected centres, feeling the breath in my body and a receptivity to the greater field that is of all life. More than ever I have a trust that we cannot get this wrong - life will invite us back in the direction our souls want us to move, we just need to become simple and quiet. After a lifetime of complexity, I see that childlike innocence and playfulness have a lot going for it.

Thanks for being here,

Jenny X

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