Wondering how this international yearly event got started?  Here’s the story:

Nearly twenty years ago, an American meditation practitioner in the Sufi tradition, Valerie Skonie, was moved by a poem by Rumi, the 13th-century Persian mystic:

A new moon teaches gradualness and deliberation,
and how one gives birth to oneself slowly.
Patience with small details makes perfect a large work, like the universe.
What nine months of attention does for an embryo,
forty early mornings alone will do for your gradually growing wholeness.

Those lines planted a seed. Valerie began inviting a few friends into her living room to meditate together each day for 40 days. Over time, that simple gathering grew into what we now know as Feast for the Soul—a forty-day journey of meditation and reflection in service of cultivating one’s inner growth, peace, and compassion.

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
Jack Kornfield

For almost everyone who practices, cycles of awakening and openness are followed by periods of fear and contraction. Times of profound peace and newfound love are often overtaken by periods of loss, by closing up, fear, or the discovery of betrayal, only to be followed again by equanimity or joy. In mysterious ways the heart reveals itself to be like a flower that opens and closes. This is our nature.

The only surprising thing is how unexpected this truth can be. It is as if deep down we all hope that some experience, some great realization, enough years of dedicated practice, might finally lift us beyond the touch of life, beyond the mundane struggles of the world. We cling to some hope that in spiritual life we can rise above the wounds of our human pain, never to have to suffer them again. We expect some experience to last. But permanence is not true freedom, not the sure heart’s release.

Every wise voyager learns that we cannot hold on to the last port of call, no matter how beautiful. To do so would be like holding our breath, creating a prison from our past. As one Zen master puts it:

“Enlightenment is only the beginning, is only a step of the journey. You can’t cling to that as a new identity or you’re in immediate trouble. You have to get back down into the messy business of life, to engage with life for years afterward. Only then can you integrate what you have learned. Only then can you learn perfect trust.”