Two events—Prairiewoods’ Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) eight-week class and a weeklong silent retreat—deepened my sense of oneness. Both experiences helped me slow down and become more aware of everything around me. One example is eating. In the MBSR class, we ate a single raisin in excruciatingly slow fashion, first examining it visually, then feeling it between our fingers, smelling it, then letting it rest on my tongue before ever so slowly biting into it. This was training to learn to slow down and eat mindfully.
One silent retreat day, as I ate my lunch, a spider on the other side of the window pane suddenly rushed to an insect caught in her web, and for a millisecond I was struck by the sense that she and I were eating together! It was a flash of an awareness and I can’t explain it now, but in that moment, I felt a oneness with her. And the gift of eating with others in the weeklong silent retreat helped me consider at every meal the chefs who prepared the food, the farmer who harvested it, the soil and sunshine and pollinators that grew it. Prairiewoods offers the gift of awakening to our oneness with God, others, and all of creation.
—Jenny Schulz, executive director at Kids First Law Center
image of a spider web by Amy Starr