Retreat to Bimini, Bahamas to Swim with Wild Dolphins
Recently, I came across the video of my trip to Bimini, Bahamas to swim with wild dolphins on a women’s retreat. It was a wonderful reminder of the rejuvenative power of travel and the message that I received from the dolphins: PLAY! It’s all about play for the dolphins, or that’s how it seems to me. They play “patty-cake” with their flippers, spiral together down to the ocean flood and then jet back to the surface to jump out of the water and re-enter the surface to jump out of the water and back into the ocean with a “whack!” of their tails..in unison! And…they played with us…humans!
Here’s some similar video from a Bimini wild dolphin adventure:
When I got my first glimpse of the dolphins, I was standing on the bow of the dive boat, watching expectantly as we heard the captain call down that he had spotted some dolphins. Magically, they appeared in the bow-stream of the boat, swimming in and out of our current, not more than a foot away. I felt like a little kid…jumping up and down and screeching for joy! Then I got on my belly and reached down in the water to wave to them (we’re not allowed to touch the wild dolphins). Their intelligent eyes and smiling faces welcomed us into their playful world of oceanic treasures.
Snorkeling on the surface of the ocean, the dolphins swam up very close to me and surveyed me with the “eye” that seems to pierce deep into one’s soul. Their clicks and squeaks were so engaging that I found myself trying to squeak back to them under water!
This was not only an adventure, but it was a women’s spiritual retreat. During our daily (optional) playshops we had the chance to delve into our own spirits and become refreshed, renewed, and sometime redirected in our lives and work. I’ve come back with the absolute knowledge that I need to make PLAYFULNESS and important part of my daily life, including my work.
How to Add More Playfulness to Your Life
Playfulness is seriously helpful to our well-being and access to intuitive guidance. Haim Goldenberg, acclaimed mentalist, did a “GoldMind” TV episode which showed how getting in a playful, child-like state of mind allowed a young woman to user her intuition to find the one balloon in a room filled with hundreds of balloons with a message for her in it from Haim.
If you aren’t out playing with the dolphins right now, there are still many ways you can incorporate the playful dolphin spirit into your life. One of my favorite ways to play each morning is to draw a card from my Transcendental Game of Zen Tarot deck. In the introduction to the book that goes with the cards, the author, Ma Deva Padma, tells us that the goal of Zen, through meditation, is to become aware of our eternal center–“a center that has the capacity to see life as a great adventure, a play, a mystery school, and, finally, a blissful journey with no purpose other than to delight in every step of the way.”
I picked the “Playfulness” card the day after I returned home from my dolphin trip. It comes with this commentary: “Life is rarely as serious as we believe it to be, and when we recognize this fact, it responds by giving us more and more opportunities to play.” My goal, and I hope you’ll consider it too, is to add more playfulness into my life every day. And as often as possible, I plan to take a playful retreat to get back in touch with the child-like sense of fun and delight I felt with the dolphins!
While I was writing this post, I had an intuitive insight: It will make me happy to move ahead with one of the retreats I’ve been thinking about attending at the end of the year. I’ve been feeling that I’d like to do something special to celebrate the end of the year, the end of the Mayan calendar, the special dates of 12-12-12 and 12-21-12. One retreat is an awesome retreat to Mayan ruins for yoga and life coaching at Hacienda San Lucas, in Copan Ruinas, Honduras. The other is a a Mayan adventure in Mexico with the Institute of HeartMath, called The Heart of Transformation–Activate Your Heart’s Intelligence. An “Aha!” experience: I realized that the I Ching reading I did for my focus for the year of 2012 was “Retreat”. What more literal interpretation of that guidance could I find?
Life is fun!
, the Two Listeners (who are the anonymous English authors) write for August 17:
Change Your Life for Good - CYL4G 