GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUNds to go on a meditation retreat!  

I am turning 40 today and I want to give myself a present, with your help. I don't want more things in my life. What I really would love as a birthday gift is an opportunity to go on a meditation retreat. Diamonds are not a girl's best friend, but a clear and kind mind is.    

I started meditating exactly 10 years ago, when Mikael was only 4 months old. As all mothers and fathers know, it is difficult to find time and space for yourself, being responsible for a baby 24/7. Meditation helped me to find this little personal space, an inner room of mine own, where I could find refuge in chaotic and insecure times. I got my first proper meditation instruction from a teacher which I found in a meditation centre in San Diego in February 2008. Since then I've been on several meditation courses and retreats. Some of them lasted only a day or a  weekend, some of them a week or two, and once I actually made it through a one month meditation retreat (and I loved it).    

I must admit that for me a meditation retreat is the only real kind of vacation. Because I am finally able to slow down the ever-turning and churning wheels of thinking and reacting and doing. I can calm down, be quiet and be my own best friend by learning to stay with myself as I am. And when I am getting better at being friends with myself as I am, it becomes certainly easier being friends with other people as they are. When I learn to judge myself less and be kinder to myself both in my thoughts and my actions, I also learn to have less pejudices and be kinder toward other people. It is quite contagious, I have noticed it many times! So what might look like a waste of time or at least a strange way to spend time (because you are just sitting there, seemingly doing nothing), is in reality one of the best treats you can do for yourself, and others.    

All of us (hopefully) have our own ways, tools or practices which can remind us of our own inherent goodness and the goodness of others, meditation is only one of them. For me it is the one that really works, time after time. And actually it makes me truly happy. I am not talking about a celebratory and ecstatic and dancing-on-the-table kind of happiness, but a more profound, lasting, genuine and gentle one. So if you want to give a little amount of money to support this gal's happiness, please do! Then it will be a truly HAPPY birthday. 

P.S. The money will go to pay my tuition for a meditation weekend course or a longer meditation retreat.