YOUR INVITATION TO REFINER'S PLAYGROUND
April 10-11, 2025
LAKE LAWN RESORT
2400 E GENEVA STREET, DELAVAN, WI 53115
TEL: 1-800-338-5253
Here is the online booking link: https://res.lakelawnresort.com/ibe/details.aspx?propertyid=16427&nights=3&checkin=04/09/2025&group=11C3EY&lang=en-us
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SPEAK TO ME FROM EVERYWHERE
Refiner’s Prayer
Only in our doing can we grasp you.
Only with our hands can we illumine you.
The mind is but a visitor;
it thinks us out of our world.
Each mind fabricates itself.
We sense its limits, for we have made them…
I don’t want to think a place for you.
Speak to me from everywhere…
Your truth can be comprehended
without looking for its source.
When I go toward you
it is with my whole life.
( Rainier Maria Rilke, Book of Hours, 1905 )
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There are so many distractions with news and this rapidly changing world, but often the biggest distraction is our own own mind, the visitor. That challenge is to quiet ourselves and allow our inner guidance emerge. It’s one thing to turn off the news or stay away from friends whose noise and chatter distract. But how do we turn off our own minds?
From our ‘Refining Fire’ premise we were each given a gift, possibly even before we were born. Our essential nature comes with these unique gifts embedded within it. The dross that is burned off throughout our lives is an intelligent process, i.e., the gods know what they’re doing. They’re pointing us to our original gifts. ( What is your earliest memory of the presence of your giftedness? When and how did it first show up? ) The Refiners Playground is not so much about discovering our true nature or creating our gifts to offer the world — it is a place of remembrance, of coming back into relationship with what has always been true. Ironically, this unchanging center is most easily remembered in times of disruptive change.
For all we know, our gifts and essential nature are looking for us. The gods are endlessly creative about bringing us back to ourselves. This is not a concept to be understood, or a process that can be explained in a PowerPoint. We are as easily guided by a street lamp, a fallen tree or a rusty license plate that grabs our attention as we are by watching a TED talk. We don’t have to understand anything — The (conditioned) mind is but a visitor, it thinks us out of our world. Direct knowing is a much better route ( if only because we didn’t invent it ourselves ).
I don’t want to think a place for you.
Speak to me from everywhere…
Your truth can be comprehended
without looking for its source.
The call here is for radical aliveness and curiosity. If all of nature is alive and speaking to us from everywhere all the time, then allowing all experience in and paying attention is the appropriate stance. Amazement and wonder seem more important than understanding the source and knowing why. Right action can then follow.
We are eager to be with you in the Lake House at Lake Lawn Resort in Delavan, WI. We wish to explore these matters in our typically rich, intimate and occasionally irreverent way.
Much love,
Jim, Lisa, Dan
WHAT IS THE REFINER'S PLAYGROUND?
We are an open community of spiritual explorers who meet on a quarterly basis to share our current learning, questions about and experiments on the nature of reality. In particular, we seek to know the True Self directly while examining all of the hilarious ways we try to be something other than this! Our two day retreats are typically attended by 18-20 people from around the country. The dialogue is rich, at times profound, always compassionate and frequently hilarious. Come as frequently as you like and stay for as long as you like.
WHAT HAPPENS IN A TYPICAL GATHERING?
We meet in groups that range from 18-20 people. We share our stories of what we understand through direct experience and/or are currently learning through our own active experiments on the nature of being. There are no long-winded speeches or dazzling intellectual discourses. We tend not to agree or disagree with each other and seldom give others advice. We have no front of the room instructors or teachers as we all serve this role. We find that when we share our experiences with one another, as co-explorers- we each become more clear and confident about taking our next steps.
WHAT WE CURRENTLY KNOW
People who most benefit from the "Playground" are those who have:
A life long yearning to know what is true about themselves and the universe.
Grown tired of the typical self-help menu with its implied assumption there is some "defect" in us that requires improvement.
Believed more licenses, degrees or certifications will leave them finally and forever feeling "enough".
Many years' experience feeling alone, judged, misunderstood and have simply grown tired of this. And even more tired at having contributed to or led the charge themselves!
If you have experience with any of the above, welcome to the club! You will likely enjoy the solid food of the "Playground". The hard truth is that no amount of suffering or achievement can satisfy the deeper longing tugging at our soul. Our secret desire is wholeness and only our essential nature knows how to weave the fragments we present it into a coherent whole. Our hard work and effort to fix ourselves usually make matters worse, or at least continues the entertainment.
There is another way.
WELCOME
You are welcomed to come for as many sessions as you like and can leave whenever you like. Regardless of how much experience you have with deeper work, you will likely find in the Refiner's Playground a quality of dialogue and loving presence unlike anything you have ever experienced before.
INVESTMENT
$695 per session (includes breakfast and lunch). $2,495 when you sign up for the next four events. A savings of $285!
Bring a family member, partner, significant other at no additional cost!
Your Trusted Guides
Jim and Dan bring a half-century of experience wading around the inner landscape of human experience in ways that result in greater light, buoyancy, presence and power. We each have our unique spiritual path. We come in not as experts or even as facilitators who speak from the front of the room but as guides who walk alongside. We're aware of the terrain but cannot predict what will happen. Hence, the focus on playful experimentation.
The Refiner's Playground is:
“Time to lay down the armaments we use to fix ourselves and to come home. There is an un-changing center within us that isn’t concerned with anything other than NOW. I often see and recognize the Essential that lurks beneath those moments we naturally resist. I speak directly to it and am learning how to move with it and allow it more play in myself and in us. I am here to usher in an intimate, liberating partnership with the Essential in each all of us! We ARE this!” - Dan Holden
The Refiner's Playground offers us:
“A unique opportunity to embrace the perfection each life experience offers in burning away the dross of our deluded self perceptions, allowing the true, infinite, essential beings that we are to find fuller creative expression now. I am here to playfully master the art of finding, mining and refining the very best in us, allowing it to creatively express itself in response to the perfect challenge or opportunity that presents itself in each moment.” - Jim Anderson