Practices and Resources

I offer an autumn retreat for people drawn to pause and reflection during this season.

About This Retreat

Spend a full day at a lakeside retreat during autumn’s beauty (10 AM – 5 PM). Located near Sydenham, Ontario. Maximum 4 participants. Facilitated by Tracy Riley, an experienced registered psychologist.

Your day includes: Guided reflection that invites you to pause, listen to yourself, and consider what might be supportive for you over the coming season; creative expression through collage; opportunities for sharing in a supportive small group setting; and generous unstructured time to walk a tree-lined lane, sit by the water, or simply be still by the warmth of fire in the wood stove inside.

This retreat is a space to pause, bring care toward yourself, and give yourself room to breathe.

Bring your own meals; hot beverages and materials provided.

Please reach out for more information if interested.

As we move through late August, September, October, November, and December, you’ll notice the qualities of daylight, dark night, and outdoor colours and temperatures shifting. What else do you notice moves and shifts? Things in the external world? Things in your inner landscape? Is now a time in your life when things feel like they are speeding up or slowing down? Is it a particularly painful time for you? An apprehensive kind of time? Or is it energetic, exciting, encouraging, or mixed?

The Autumn Intentions: A Seasonal Reflection Guide is a resource I designed to help you  meet yourself with listening and friendship  in the season(s) you are in — whatever and all that that may entail — and specifically as you go through the months of late August through to the last day of fall.

I will begin by asking, what internal radio station are you listening to right now? Is it the All Anxious Messaging All The Time Station (W-O-R-Y – where the worry never stops)? The Greatest Hits of All Times from the Bullies and Self-Critics? Or maybe it’s Endless To Do Lists FM, or, potentially, Mentorship at its Finest?

You will have your own particular radio stations and perhaps your own particular names for them. Whatever they are and whatever the particulars, the radio station that you are listening to matters.

In this post, you will find an impressively non-exhaustive, small, fluid compilation of links to guided loving kindness meditation practices generously recorded and offered by various individuals for personal use. Some of the meditations are focused primarily on the practice of offering loving kindness to oneself, while others include the practice of offering loving kindness to oneself and others.

Life includes (or can include) really hard things and awful things, in various places and at various times. Life also includes (or can include) things that are beautiful, often profoundly. One of the things I like about the photographs below is how they include a mix of both shadows, stormy tones, and also vibrancy and light—each apparently juxtaposed with the other.

In the free Insight Timer app (available for ios and adroid), you can find short, 6-minute and 10-minute guided loving kindness meditations offered and led by Sharon Salzberg.

Everyone has a nervous system. One of the things that this nervous system does is it listens. And then it reflects, and then it responds.

Daily Questions—or what I have been tending to refer to as the daily question—is a wonderful resource available on the website, Gratefulness.org, that I wanted to share here in case you or another might sense it to be a nice fit/resource for you at this time and/or it might be something you experience it as beneficial.

In the sweet little book written by Thich Nhat Hanh, A Handful of Quiet: Happiness in Four Pebbles (2012), Thich teaches a meditation in which we imagine ourselves being something such as a flower, and we imagine feeling a quality of that thing within ourselves. (For example, in the case of the flower, he invites us to image feeling freshness.) Read more ›

“Sleep is not an optional, lifestyle luxury. Sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity. It’s a life support system….And the decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations is having a catastrophic impact on our health, our wellness, and the safety and the education of our children.” —Matthew Walker, Talk at Google Read more ›