On a random Saturday in November, with thick-ish smoke in the air from the wildfires raging up farther in Northern California, why would someone get up out of bed and bring oneself to a gathering with dozens of unknown people for no apparent purpose and setting forth no agenda? When one can choose to be in any number of places, why choose this one – and, at the end of the day, at 5:30PM, how and why could life feel so different as a ripple of this single choice?



Such were the answer-less and awe-filling questions that closed the day, as more than 30 participants and volunteers reflected on what had transpired when they came together last Saturday, November 10, at Banyan Grove for our first day-long “Head, Hands, Heart” retreat in North America. While similar immersions have become a mainstay offering of our ecosystem near the Gandhi Ashram in India, it was a joy to bring these in-person opportunities for space and gathering to Marin County, California, perhaps just a few hundred or thousand yards from where a wise traveler – who had brought Eastern philosophy to the West at the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1898 – camped under the Redwoods and enjoyed a forest retreat in Samuel P. Taylor State Park in 1900.

And yet, by 5:30 PM on that day, things did in fact feel different – as countless ripples were spreading and seeds of transformation were already manifesting.

We began our day by naming the virtue each of us held most dear (later assembled into a word cloud of virtues) – and each shared a story of how caring for its cultivation arose in us. Some spoke of the cultivation of intuition – arising from the journey from physical "pain to intuition" – while others reflected on truth, wonder, loyalty to friends, hospitality, curiosity, surrender, ahimsa (nonviolence), oneness, and more. Amit heard Sujatha share about forgiving her Dad, sat next to Helen (who in turn was grateful for his own share on his mother's love), and so was inspired to write a once-in-a-lifetime letter to his Dad in the afternoon -- as we waited in circle, for our experiment in empathy. How’s that for some powerful ripples of a single, agenda-less, unplotted morning?!

After our opening circle of sharing, a group panel kicked off reflections on how to skillfully cultivate love and connection even amid the “head” lessons forged by the often painful reality from within seemingly intractable systems – of architecture, health care, justice and more. (Within the confines of the criminal justice system, for example, even when outcomes were difficult to shift, a participant said: “My clients nevertheless loved me because I loved them.”). We reflected on the question, “how do we continue to cultivate love even when we know it may not be enough” (from at least one lens) within such systems, and how do we help co-create and design systems for love rather than for the non-angelic side of human nature? Gandhi said, “men want systems to be so good that they don’t have to be,” so how do we design systems that encourage people also to be good, rather than shifting the “burden” of peaceful co-existence from the heart to the head, and from the human level to the systemic?

Powerful questions were raised, and insights shared. An environmental engineer wondered about green architecture and innovation -- “Who do we build buildings for? … I’ve seen how we create structure and forget the people in it, and learned to shift from striving to build the most intelligent building with the newest technology, to looking at what design best serves the people.” Similarly, an urban designer echoed the adage, “Be careful what you wish for,” noting that we can create with good intentions, but when driven by creativity without wisdom, it can lead to unforeseen negative consequences. A man who designs artificial intelligence offered, “Just a few years back, I had a job I hated but was seen as successful. I was strong, powerful, and angry. Doctors prescribed me whatever painkillers I wanted. But through a series of incidents, and experiences with pain, I softened, and healed on so many levels. One thing I do now is commit to crying for a time every week.” Another technologist proclaimed that “we need more examples of divine masculine energy in our world.” Sujatha quoted Audre Lourde: “You can’t dismantle the master’s hands with the master’s tools.” Whether in architecture, tech, law, and beyond -- we all reflected on tools that we’ve seen, or that we’re waiting to discover, that nurture our individual and system capacities for inner growth.

From there, we flowed into a gourmet lunch -- where we were nourished by the food cooked by devoted volunteers, with love as the secret ingredient. Helen’s daughter even made stunning notecards to label each dish -- and while crafting them up the week before, she shared an insight with her mom: “What you put out, nature gives back to you.” Following spirited lunch hour conversations, we enjoyed an hour of silence in the beautiful surroundings to nourish our selves, our souls, our soil, or our society – during which time walks in nature, gratitude letters, written prayer mandalas, swept walkways, and literal plantings of seeds abounded.



We learned to “see” in a different way, and Terry Patten (who joined as our surprise “guest lecturer”!) invited us into our three hearts, and to step into our heroic journey of service – as Payam, Aastha and Jina helped us close into a song led by Sujatha:





Rick, an urban planner, had opened the retreat by recalling a time he had been in Trafalgar Square in London and was “gob-smacked” by the realization that every single fragment – in the cobblestone and surrounding buildings – had helped to form the beautiful public space. And by 5:30 pm, at the end of the day of the HHH retreat, we all were “gob-smacked” by the realization that each of us had come together (agenda-lessly and somewhat serendipitously) to form the space of our beautiful circle – and that we all had helped walk one another home. At least some of us exclaimed that our hearts were saying a resounding “yes!”

In our closing reflections, UC Berkeley student Aastha observed that there’s no course offering on the heart. One woman noted that she had been chewing on a weighing issue when she came into the circle, but somehow, in that moment, it had dissolved by the end of the day, and she wasn’t able to see it as a problem. Another shared about being in the midst of a big transition, and reflected that it is okay to take some time and “not know” exactly what’s next. Payam recalled a humorously poignant scene he saw on a television show:

This guy's walking down the street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can't get out.

A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, “Hey you. Can you help me out?” The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on.

Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, “Father, I'm down in this hole can you help me out?” The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on.

Then a friend walks by, “Hey, Joe, it's me can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole.
Our guy says, “Are you stupid? Now we're both down here.”

The friend says, “Yeah, but I've been down here before and I know the way out.”

A group of people that didn’t know each other just a few hours earlier were sharing powerfully from the heart. And the ripples didn’t end at the close of the retreat, which in many ways was not surprising — as we learned, while no seed sees the flower, all flowers intuit the seed. And so the flow of the circle carries on and the flowers continue to bloom, intuiting the seeds planted and cultivated during our time together.