It’s late February. It’s cold. The walking is icy and the sky is grey and foreboding. How do you spell relief?
Here’s an idea.
This mini retreat idea doesn’t quite hit the spot like a trip to Belize like everyone else seems to be taking! (Grrrrrrr) But, it is very refreshing and may be the kind of thing that can get you through until the buds start to sprout again and happiness prevails.
OK, the mini-mini version happens right there where you sit in your chair at this moment. This is the two-to-five-minute version. Lean back away from your screen and toward the back support of your seat. All you need to do now is take this time to come to awareness of your breath. Notice the sensation of cool breath entering your nostrils, and the slightly warmer feel of air exiting. Stay with that for ten or so breaths, and then take your hand and hold it over your heart. Become aware of the steady pulsing of heart muscle, of life moving, of your beautiful soul alive and sustaining you in this moment. Send a little love there and hang out, being with the breath and the pulse and your own precious life. Allow your heart now to rest upon the lungs behind it and the diaphragm below it. Just rest now for this is your retreat, and your organs can be support for this very loyal heart of yours!
Now take two hands to your ribcage and bring a fullness to your breath, expanding up toward your collar bone and your shoulder blades on the inhale. Match that volume in your exhale pushing out from the bottom of your lungs, pushing out the end of winter and all you are finishing with now. Inhale what you are beginning and what you wish to bring more of into your life.
That’s it! Find a way to finish up with gratitude for the abundance in your life, and I assure you that you will be a little more refreshed for the rest of the day. Repeat as needed.

For an extended version, you may follow up with some inner time.  This might be curling up with a journal or inspirational reading.  It might be getting bundled up and taking a thoughtful walk in the woods.  (If it’s not Febrary when you are taking your mini retreat, simply find the best link to nature and your inner self-beneath-the-speed-of-life.)  Or, it might be doodling or painting a visual version of what you are finishing with and what you are beginning, either purely on a physical level or more empirically on a whole-life level. 

I wish you lovely stillness and spaciousness.