Meditation for July 1st, 2016
Spiritual Retreats (an Unpaid Advertisement)
Sometimes we need to get out of our daily schedule and retreat into nature with other like minded people and recenter. Spiritual retreats are a great way to do that. A little rest and relaxation, a little spiritual upkeep and a little quiet time. Everybody from Christians, Buddhists, ISIS to Google, Yahoo, Uber and Bing have retreats once in awhile to get the primary purpose refocused.
All of these groups use an outside facilitators to schedule, plan and execute these retreats. For the last 22 years, I, David Everett Fisher, have been a retreat facilitator. Using my experience as a life coach, councilor, drug and alcohol councilor, Jew, minister, artist and spiritual handyman, I, David Everett Fisher have run retreats that have had lasting effects on religious, cults and corporate groups successfully and have been asked many years in a row to keep facilitating.
Things that I offer:
Location
I will find a location that will best suit the retreats needs. Usually I find a place that is isolated from urban centers to keep the attendees focused. Usually a place that is out of cell phone range and offers no wifi. I will start the retreat by saying that we have a land line and the only cell reception is on top of that ridge past Rattlesnake Gully and Obsidian Knife Crest with an elevation gain of 2000 feet.
Some groups need a more intense practice in team work, project organization and a little diversity sensitivity training, so I choose a run down house in a very unstable urban location to rebuild, paint and film a montage to a rockin’ 80s song that may or may not have a sax solo while the gangs look on with intensity and fear. In many past experiences, my groups have pushed out the gangs and turned a mainly down trodden diverse ghetto into a thriving neighborhood.
The movie Band of the Hand is loosely based on a trouble teen program I ran in Southern Florida.
Location is important to be a character in the retreat. Being able to look at moss covered trees usually calms a corporate lackey for a weekend.
Food
Oh, yes, food is the way we keep our bodies nourished as we try to nourish our souls. I like to strip the food to being as Free as possible: gluten free, meat free, slave free, GMO free… Copying an eastern cultures diet is also ideal to give the impression that one is sitting cross legged next to monks that have taken the vow of silence for a century and can do pushups on one finger.
I like rewarding the end of the retreat with a noon time American cuisine to let the body know that it is about to leave this place and go back to civilization and hopefully become a better person with all the brand new ideas.
Silence
I like to state whole hours where silence is key. People spend all day in their offices or churches talking. Talking is the tool of our brain and our brain is just not capable of spirituality. I don’t want the gossip and the rating system to encroach on the retreats purpose, so I carry around a cattle prod and shock people who talk in the silence times.
We use the silence to contemplate life, meaning and solutions. I want the attendee to have the time to not hear the constant barrage of small talk and office gossip.
Time
Other than telling people when it is time to show up somewhere, I want no time to be presented. No watches, clocks or computers. Nothing that tells the time. Time is awful and the very thing we need to retreat.
Ideas
I also like opening time to hear people’s ideas. What is the problem and what’s the idea. I like writing on walls because it seems more rebellious that way. It makes the ideas more daring when I brazenly deface property. People will yell out ideas and I just waited it down in permanent marker on a wall that may not be able to be cleaned and or is a historical landmark.
A few years ago we were trying to come up with a solution to a problem at the company that made Segways. I wrote up all the ideas that we could come up with – even the real crazy ones. Well, one idea kept coming back to and discuss in great lengths.
Just so you know, I was in Portland, Oregon on September 26th, 2010 and was nowhere near England.
Yoga
Oh, god yes, we have to have yoga. Getting a bunch of out of shape corporate jockeys to stretch to the point of exploding sweat on mats to sitar music is the highlight of my life. I get the most beautiful men and women I can to not only go at an almost impossible pace, but by showing that while they maybe successful business people, they are ugly and fat.
The best thing is, yoga one weekend a year and not on a regular basis is completely worthless, but I gots to have physical shit, right?
Workshops
I have about three workshops a weekend. Two on Saturday and one at a god awful hour Sunday morning before coffee and breakfast. I do serve tea. I try to come up with names that really tell what kind of workshop they are getting themselves into. Some examples:
Intentions and minuscule target appreciation actions
Harbingers of diverse roll call scenarios and tactics
Leveling of course work outside of labor perimeters with managerial involvement
Bodily fluids, gas and flesh at the office
Suggested expectations versus realized set goals by leadership massaging talent
Being onwardly accountable and systematically valued
Donuts versus Kale chips
Emancipation of ideal candidates for bonus hours and accredited web cloud imports
Ropes Course
This is the highlight of the retreat. This is where we take a bunch of coworkers that may not trust each other at all because of all the corporate backstabbing and passive-aggressive communications through email and memos and we put them on a course that may actually seriously hurt someone.
We first fall from a large tree trunk and hope to god your shitty roommates catch you.
Then we sprint at a large wood wall and try to find a physical way to get over the wall using teamwork.
You get to a balancing beam and you and your companion must get across at a set time. Under and around the beam? Deep ass stinking fucking mud.
Then you must get through a maze. Don’t worry, I have a ‘minotaur’ mauling people who get lost or separate from their team. I have a strict Letter Releasing from Liability that all must sign before joining.
You then cross a pond with an actual man eating crocodile! Don’t worry, we have a trainer near by to keep the croc from getting too fat.
Next is doing five shots of Jaegermeister and then doing a calculus test.
Next I have attendees try to gang up on racist right wing libertarian grandpa and win an argument without being written out of the will.
We always finish the course off with a zip line down five and a half miles of deep evergreen forest. I like to get the adrenaline rush to out rush crack cocaine.
Exiting
I like the milling around and waiting for the busses to show up and take everyone back to their own lives. This is where long lasting friendships will tell promises of continuing the friendship back at the campus. This is where people who are married to other people had drunken sex in the boat house during silent meditation try to figure out if they should even talk ever again. Bosses will glare at the employee who may have been a little too honest with hostility. This is the closure a retreat needs.
Clients:
Yahoo
Uber
Bing
Microsoft
PLO
NAMBLA
ISIS
FARC
ANO
ETA
HAMAS
PKK
DHKP
Shining Path
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade
CIRA
Jundallah
Hizbollah
Goldman Sachs
Bank of America
Dow Chemical
DynCorp
Monsanto
Nestle
JPMorgan Chase
AIG
General Motors
Citigroup
Morgan Stanley
SunTrust
Friendster
Ask Jeeves
Dogpile
MySpace
LiveJournal
AA
Please contact me if you want anymore information or want to set up a retreat.