YOUR INVITATION TO REFINER'S PLAYGROUND
October 9-10, 2025
Lake Lawn Resort, Delavan, WI 53115
262.728.7950
Please use this phone number or link below to book your rooms. Ask for the Refiner’s Playground Group Rate of $159/night.
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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SUFFICIENCY 2.0 -
GO FORTH AND MAKE A MESS
LEAVE YOUR SHOES
Leave your shoes
and your old concepts of God at the door.
Hang your heavy identities
on the coat rack—
you simply don’t need those things in here!
It’s much too warm in this house
for all the facade you’ve been bundling up in.
If you come with pain
let’s use it to light a fire in this old hearth.
Sharing this flame
puts it in its rightful place
where our humanity can gather
around it together and sing!
Leave your shoes
and your old concepts of God
at the door
and let’s see what wonders emerge
when we let our souls and our feet free
to finally begin to dance!
( From Susceptible to Light, Chelan Harkin, 2020 )
This is a season for breaking stuff. Begin with the inner stuff — ideas, assumptions, beliefs about God, spirituality and about who we think we are. It is time to drop our ideas of duality and wholeness and the countless books and articles that come out each year about these topics. Drop those beliefs about positive psychology and which emotions are ok and which need to be sent off in exile. ’The facade we’ve been bundled up in’ has become too warm. Let’s not build more pretty figurines out of old storylines. This is a time to un-learn, a time to be faithless, as the poet said, so we can be trustworthy. This is a time of returning.
Vastness is who and what we actually are and always have been. This inner wreckage has everything to do with returning to who we are without the masks and the hidden resistance to life as it is. Sourced from vastness, we are invited to experience how life is enough, how we ourselves are enough. We might taste the expanded possibilities that exist when we stop defending, arguing with, and pushing against our own lives. Instead, we become more aware of and able to rest in what IS. Contrary to some beliefs, this is anything but a passive stance.
True, there are tough days and sometimes longer periods that are un-figure-out-able. Even in moments like these — or perhaps especially in moments like these — when we drop our resistance we are likely to discover new levels of resourcefulness, new capacities for healing within and without, and undiscovered sufficiencies that have been there all along. We just need to mess things up a bit and source our lives and challenges from this vast sufficiency.
Stripped of our old, small stories, our sufficiency is what remains. It has never left us and infiltrates each moment as we allow ourselves the quiet stillness to sense into it. Our mind, our heart and our gut can now serve their real purpose: portals serving the soul.
In this Fall version of the Refiners Playground we want to explore more deeply sufficiency and what it means in day-to-day living. What experiments are we involved in and where is the edge of our own current learning? We expect this to be a rich, intimate and at times outrageous time together as a community.
Hope to see you in a few weeks.
❤️ 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