Nov 16-18, 2007
Practice detachment.
Live fully in the body.
Come to terms with mortality.
Discover what’s of value.
These are the spiritual lessons to be learned as we get organized. We are beings of unlimited desires, ideas, aspirations, and hopes living in a world of time and space. What a challenge! How can we honor both our limits and our limitlessness?
Pam Kristan knows first-hand that organizing is much more than setting up files and cleaning closets. It is an intimate encounter with the stuff of our lives that can teach us what we need to know about being a human being on earth. Organizing honors the challenge implicit in our upright stance as bridge between limited earth and limitless sky.
The surrounding culture, with its endlessly attractive options and ever-higher expectations, makes disorganization all too easy. Cultivate the clarity, fortitude, and will needed to take a stand in the face of the avalanche of stuff while you accept your vulnerabilities, learn to live with them, and perhaps move through them.
We’ll use hands-on exercises, journaling, small and large group experiences, games, and meditation to discover practical strategies for change. We’ll learn how to arrange stuff so it reflects meaning back to us and set up space so power can flow. We’ll deal creatively with disorganization, share wisdom, spark insight, and plant the seed of a new system, a new way of being.
Bring an inch of unsorted papers (you know the pile!) and a bag of stuff you think you might be ready to let go of. Expect to engage your awareness, your vulnerability, and your power. Expect to be challenged and encouraged. With your inner and outer environments in harmony, your life can ring like a bell.
Pamela Kristan, author of The Spirit of Getting Organized: 12 Skills To Find Meaning & Power In Your Stuff, has been offering retreats, workshops, and consultations in spiritually-oriented time- and stuff-management since 1985 (www.pamelakristan.com). She’s made a living at both the piano and the computer keyboards and sees all sides of the organization question. Her experience with administrative details, the artistic life, spirituality, and the natural world give her a unique position bridging the creative and the practical. Her eclectic spirituality draws on text-based and earth-centered traditions and informs her approach to getting organized.