Being Blessed with Balance in the Most Unlikely Places

As I write this, the past eight days were spent in silence at Stella Maris Retreat Center, Elberon, NJ. This track of land that meets the Atlantic Ocean once was the vacation home of President Ulysses S. Grant in 1870. Stella Maris was also the site of the 1996 New Jersey T’ai Chi Chih Teacher Training. I have presented T’ai Chi Chih here to various groups in hour-, three-hour, and weekend segments.

What brought me here this time was my annual retreat – time that sisters take to renew their inner spirit. I treasure this opportunity to be in solitude and silence.

Throughout this year I have been privileged to travel to many places to speak with T’ai Chi Chih teachers and students. But how good it has been to give myself over to this recent quiet. To sit and gaze at the ocean, at the depth and immensity of this vast body of water, while being reminded of the polarities of nature. Observing the ebb and flow of the waves onto the beach, the high and low tides, these eternal cycles that expresses nature’s yinning and yanging. The last night of the retreat was resplendent with the rising of the full moon out of the horizon – magnificent!

My daily ritual had been to greet the rising sun with a full T’ai Chi Chih practice and to close each day, yinning and yanging, with the waves of the ocean as it breathes forth its own patterns of giving and receiving. It was my intention, in both morning and evening practices, to extend this Chi flow to Justin and all teachers and students who would be entering into the Cosmic Rhythm of their own practice.

In these days of no words, my meditations have been still in the awareness of breathing patterns – as lungs gently expand and contract, yin and yang, in and out in a slow, steady pace. I feel at one with no-thing. My being is filled in the absence of words. This one life in this one moment births blessings in abundance. This time of “being apart” prepares the next time of “being together” when there will be words, but perhaps fewer because they are more carefully chosen.

In this no-word stance, I was more aware of my surroundings from that first evening at T’ai Chi Chih practice. As the ocean breeze gently caressed my skin, I noticed a slight scent of honeysuckle. After dismissing it on the grounds that it wouldn’t grow at the beach, I was delightfully surprised in the light of the following morning to see an embankment filled with it. Honeysuckle is a symbol of the gift of the Divine Presence (and Presents) in my life. (See “A Love Story Renewed,” The Vital Force, 2003, Volume 20, No. 3, pg.23.) The gift of this retreat for me clearly is the conviction of “Being enveloped in the fragrance of the wild passionate love of the Divine essence in an Eternal Embrace.”

I am deeply grateful for this gift of silence and for the gift of T’ai Chi Chih practice, which brings into balance all the opposites that are part of this human struggle. To bring balance within and into life. May we each discover and deepen that balance in our practice and in our lives.