So, here it is: an update on our plans and process.

As I wrote ear­lier this year, we’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out what we’re doing for the next phase of our lives, and the marker has been Dar’s ‘retire­ment.’ We real­ized that we really wanted to find was a way to live out our voca­tion — and to remind us of this, we have taken to call­ing this time-period “Our New Reality.”

There are two areas I want to write about today: 1) what our work is going to look like, and 2) a bit about the ‘geog­ra­phy’ of the next few months.

Dar and I have been think­ing about how to re-construct our prac­tice. We decided to take the dif­fer­ent aspects of our work, and to find a way to fit them more closely together. We decided to make the process organic — to apply a new focus both to the work I do, and to the work­shops and sem­i­nars both of us teach.

Dar­bella came up with the name Open Palm Solutions

The name is a Bud­dhist ref­er­ence — if life places a hot stone in the palm of your hand, your choice is to hold it tightly or loosely (grip­ing about is being there is a use­less waste of time.) It’s plainly silly to seek a life free from dif­fi­culty — we don’t live in such a world. You can, how­ever, learn other approaches to liv­ing life with openness.

We have grouped together four areas — 1) dia­logue, 2) med­i­ta­tion, 3) Qi Gong, and 4) Body­work. These areas are the focus of our own prac­tice, and will form the core of our train­ing events.

You can read more about Open Palm Solu­tions on the main page of our site.

Work­shops

A cou­ple of weeks ago, Dar­bella and I led a week­end train­ing event on Body­work, and it involved, to some extent, all of the key areas. We’re presently devel­op­ing sev­eral more work­shops and events, includ­ing: how to com­mu­ni­cate, build­ing deeper rela­tion­ships, dis­cov­er­ing sex­ual power, and in-depth Body­work. As each of these are devel­oped and sched­uled, we’ll let you know.

Geography

Us, on our Costa Rica land

Back in 2005, we let you know that we’d <a href=“http://www.phoenixcentre.com/costa_rica/ tar­get=” _blank”>bought land in Costa Rica. We still own it, and are ‘stuck’ decid­ing whether to build on the land, sell it, hold it, buy some­thing else, rent, whatever.

Despite only hav­ing spent 5 weeks total in Costa Rica, we con­tinue to be fas­ci­nated by the coun­try. And, we’ve made some friends down there, includ­ing a few who… wait for it… run work­shops that neatly dove­tail with our work.

We think it would be inter­est­ing to head South a cou­ple of times a year, both for relax­ation, and to run workshops.

As you likely know, peo­ple come to us and stay for a full day or for the week­end, and work on the top­ics we’ve men­tioned above. Hav­ing a place down South would mean the you could come for a week, stay with us, work on what­ever you want to explore, and also spend time play­ing tourist in one of the most beau­ti­ful places on the planet.

Given Our New Real­ity, we decided to head off to Costa Rica for 3 months, start­ing in November

See­ing the sights

We are in the midst of sell­ing stuff, dump­ing stuff, and stor­ing stuff. I’m sus­pend­ing my prac­tice while we head South, and we’re intend­ing to start up again, in the Kitch­ener area, when we return. The plane tick­ets are pur­chased, and we have a “home” for the first 2 months — for those of you inter­ested, we’re just South of Lake Are­nal, near a lit­tle town called Tronadora.

The third month is a bit up for grabs, but it looks like we’ll be stay­ing near Domini­cal, which is 20 min­utes North of our property.

Some of our friends have already said they want to come down to visit. We hope they do!

The places we’re stay­ing are both houses, both with 2 bed­rooms and we are open to “work­ing” while in Costa Rica. If you’d like to come for a week, and do some work, let us know and we’ll make arrange­ments with you directly. Once we have a bit more expe­ri­ence with this, we’ll post the details on the website.

Dates

We fly to Costa Rica on 30 Octo­ber. We are per­ma­nently leav­ing our present home. Our mail­ing address stays the same:

324–55 North­field Drive East, Water­loo, On N2K3T6.

Our busi­ness num­ber, 800.220.7749 is set as an answer­ing machine. While our present, “rogers.com” e-mail addresses will remain, these two are the NEW ones we’re using while in Costa Rica:

Dar­bella: dar­bel­la­mac at gmail dot com
Wayne: waynecallen at gmail dot com
We’re also on Skype: waynephoenix

We have high speed inter­net, so we’re good to go. The blog will con­tinue dur­ing the three months, com­bin­ing our nor­mal top­ics and updates on Costa Rica. We’ll also let you know if we end up teach­ing in Costa Rica.

We fly home 26 Jan­u­ary, 2012.

At that point, we’ll have a car, and no home! For­tu­nately, we have friends. Start­ing the end of Jan­u­ary, we’ll start look­ing for a place to hang our hats, a place I can work, and we can live. Likely, a com­mer­cial place, with a residence.

We’ll also be set­ting up some work­shops, sem­i­nars, and train­ing events. We trust we’ll have a sense of whether we can actu­ally live and work both in Canada and Costa Rica.

So, that’s what’s up for us.

Guaro Fresca greetings

Excit­ing, a bit scary, weird, different.

We’re look­ing for­ward to the adven­ture — and given where the first house is (there’s a micro town 2 miles away, green-space and jun­gle for an hour in three direc­tions, a lake in view out the front door…) I’m expect­ing to fin­ish the Rela­tion­ships book I’ve been work­ing on, and maybe tackle a re-write of a novel and a graphic novel…

Down-time, pretty much 3 months of it, for the first time, ever!

So, that’s the update. Do keep in touch dur­ing our transition!