3 Takeaways From My Fit For Service Retreat, To Implement In Your Life
Photo by Kimberly Mufferi
Last month I attended the Fit For Service retreat in Sedona, AZ. I could tell you 100 stories, but instead I’m going to give you my three main takeaways that you can implement in your life. But before I do, I want to preface this with a general overview of what Fit For Service is. Fit for Service is a tribe of people who are seeking more, who are digging deeper, who are looking for community. The tagline on fitforservice.com is Connection + Initiation + Education = Transformation. And that’s exactly what it is.
The retreat was compiled of speaking engagements, guided meditations, thought provoking seminars, and solo/group activities that pushed your boundaries to illuminate the shadows in your subconscious. Surface level, it was a beautiful retreat with beautiful people, fantastic food, amazing music, deep connections and a TON of inner growth. It’s exactly what I wanted to experience. It’s exactly what I needed to experience. Now, my top three “pearls” from my Fit for Service retreat in Sedona.
1. The Container
Everyone refers to the space we were in as “The Container.” It’s a space of strict non-judgement. You are free to express yourself and be yourself in the container. It’s a safe space, which is 100% necessary when you’re going through all of these deeply personal activities. It’s also a permission slip to feel and express emotions. I haven’t cried this much since I was a baby. I’ve never participated in an ecstatic dance. And I certainly wouldn’t have been open to sharing certain things about myself to complete strangers. But, the container allowed your inner expressions the ability to rise to the surface and be put on display.
The raw emotions and stories shared by others in attendance moved me to tears. Multiple times. The guided meditations, the prayers that lead us into ceremonies were deeply moving. The container allowed me to let those feelings out. Everyone knows the feeling of getting “choked up” when you’re about to cry. Most men will swallow that feeling and bury it. In the container, the feelings were simply released. My tears became a mechanism for cleansing pain and anguish for emotions I had buried for years.
Before almost every speaking engagement or activity, the speaker would bring it up. They would ask the audience if we all gave permission for everyone to express themselves or react to the activity in the way they saw fit, and that there would be no judgement cast. And we would all verbally agree. This was powerful. There wasn’t a single point where I felt a condescending look, or like I didn’t belong. I was embraced fully. Everybody was. There is power created in this vibrational field when 250 people accept each other for exactly who they are. The magical feeling of a judgmental void. Judgement became replaced with empathy and love for one another. It moved me and I feel like if this container grew beyond the tents on Aubrey Marcus’ ranch in Sedona, the world would be a much better place to live.
2. Ceremony Consciousness
The loss of ceremony has been on my mind a lot recently. It was on my mind before the retreat and was evident that the practice of ceremony is not lost on Fit for Service. When we prepared for a guided meditation, they would serve us cacao which is said to help you open up and connect you to your heart. It’s especially effective when this is done with intention. Which is another thing that was done at almost every turn. There would be an opening “prayer” that would be a call to set your intentions for the activity that was to be performed. For instance, before we performed the “Death Meditation” we closed our eyes, engaged in prayer, verbally said names of people we had lost that were close to us, and we were asked to set our intentions for the meditation. The ceremony and intentionality of this work makes everything more focused.
When we had our vision quest into nature, we sat down in ceremony beforehand. We would quiet our minds, come to center, focus on the moment and set the intention of what “pearl” we hoped to find. Think of other ceremonies we may not even recognize anymore or just take for granted. The national anthem before a sporting event, for example. The players take their final moment of solace, the final moment to themselves to center in and set their intention for the game.
Ceremony is missing in a lot of aspects of our life. We can deeply affect our minds and our psyche through ceremonial acts. Instead of sighing deeply when you have to wake up with the kids, or get into your cold car for your morning commute, think about how you can inject ceremony into these small moments to re-direct your day. I remember one thing I used to do when I was camping and strictly using a pour over coffee maker. I would deeply inhale and smell the coffee as it bloomed and roasted. This set the tone for the morning. Think about the impact of saying grace before dinner. Setting the intention and saying how grateful you are for the delicious food on the table makes it taste just a little bit better. Ceremony makes life more enjoyable. More intentional. One of the biggest takeaways is to inject more ceremony into my life. I will inevitably be a happier, more intentional and more grateful human being.
3. Breathwork
When I say breathwork, I don’t mean like, take a few deep breaths and lower your heart rate, and reduce your stress. I’m talking about holotropic breathwork. This is where you’re taking deep breaths, filling and emptying your lungs for around an hour at a moderate to fast pace. This work was done with a barrage of people who were trained to guide us through the process. It’s said that holotropic breathwork connects you to your truest self by allowing you to bypass your ego. It’s said to help depression, stress, addiction, PTSD and give a higher sense of self-awareness.
I went into it having never done breathwork in my life. I was borderline scared because I didn’t know what to expect. As we were getting ready to begin, the panel introduced themselves and talked about their experiences. The demonstrations that they provided made me feel confident I could do this. So, I closed my eyes and I went on my first breathwork journey. I had a psychedelic reaction where I saw visions of my wife, my kids, my family and all of my loved ones.
By the time I was done breathwork, I was at a loss for words. Tears were pouring down my face but I wasn’t weeping. I was perplexed at how deeply healing this felt. I didn’t go into it with the intention of being healed. I simply went into it with confidence and an open heart. I was going to let the ceremony do the work, and it delivered. At the pinnacle point in my journey, my vision was of a transfer of energy. I saw this wave coming from a distance, swelling, and coming right for me. Once the wave fully engulfed my peripheral vision and I surrendered myself to it’s crushing power, the wave disappeared. The music in the background changed and in that moment a light beam came blasting out of my chest into the sky. I felt as though I was levitating off of the ground as this was happening. I still can’t really believe that my own breath lead to this effect/vision.
Breathwork is ridiculously powerful. I wouldn’t suggest integrating holotropic breatwork into your daily routine, but there are other forms of breathwork that offer a ton of benefits to your overall health and wellness. Understanding the power of breathwork was an amazing pearl, but my takeaway from this experience was to go into things that scare you with a sense of confidence and with an open heart. You’ll never know how profoundly it could change your life.
Conclusion
To wrap this up, I urge all of you to try to live in a headspace that’s free of judgement, but also free of the fear of judgement. Our society banks on your insecurities. It banks on your judgement of others and it banks on your material goods as symbols for your own level of self-worth. Living free of the fear of judgement encourages love, empathy, connection and authenticity. Second, I encourage you to integrate more ceremony into your life. We get lost in the monotony of the day, lost in mindless routine. So, let’s just take a moment to understand how much more you’ll enjoy your day if you set intentions before you do things. Practice gratitude out loud. Speak it into the universe. Third, lean into difficult situations confidently and with an open heart. Sometimes the weight of the world can feel like a wave that’s going to engulf you and never let you get another gasp of air. However, when you lead with your heart, you can turn the weight of any hardship into a new level of personal strength that was otherwise unrecognized.
