What’s Cooking?
What’s cooking? That’s how the mat trips always began. What’s cooking?
When I think about my Shalom story, I have to start with Robert Close. Robert was my minister, and we had this amazing Sunday school class that he was often leading like it was a Shalom retreat. There were a whole bunch of us, probably at least a dozen or so, who eventually went to the Mountain.
Robert Close and the Call to the Mountain
Robert kept counseling me, “You really need to go to Shalom Mountain. You need to go to Shalom Mountain.”
He said, “A weekend on the Mountain is worth a year’s worth of therapy.”
So I took him up on it. I think he probably helped pay my way because I certainly didn’t have much money at that point.
And when I got back, I said, “Robert, you were wrong about that Shalom retreat. It wasn’t worth a year of therapy. It was worth two years of therapy!”
The First Retreat
That first retreat was in 1998 with Joy and Lawrence. I signed up to work with Joy, and I remember lying out on the front porch couch just sobbing and sobbing, saying, “I can’t do this. I can’t do this. This is too hard.”
And when I got on the mat, Joy said to me, “You know, you’re really an angry woman.”
And I said, “Me? What have I got to be angry about?”
Compared to all the other stuff people around me were sharing, I thought I had had a pretty decent upbringing. I had liberal parents. I had been doing personal growth work since I was twenty-one. My parents had sent me off to do a two-week personal growth retreat as a college graduation gift.
Learning the Container
Since that time, twenty years earlier, I had been studying group processes. So, as much as I was doing my own work on the Mountain, I was also fascinated by what was happening in the room. How did the leaders build the container that quickly? How did the group become so safe in under twenty-four hours?
That blew me away.
I kept looking around, thinking, How are they doing this? This is crazy. This is incredible.
That first retreat also opened my eyes to man’s inhumanity to man. I had never really understood it at that level. I was pretty naive. I had no idea how cruel people could be, or how deeply wounds could live in the cells of a person. I was shocked at a lot of what I was experiencing on others’ mat trips.
A Place Where I Didn’t Have to Lead
Another piece came up for me in those early retreats. I realized with delight, “Wow, here’s a place where I don’t have to be a leader.”
I have been a leader everywhere in my life. I’m the oldest child. There were five kids in my family within six years of each other, and I was always Mom’s helper. I led in Girl Scouts, in school, at church, and in jobs in every position I had ever held.
So when I came to Shalom, I thought, this is finally going to be the place where I am not going to be a leader. Phew!
Women Loving Women
That was also around the same time my partner and I were working with Vyana and Helen to help create the Women Loving Women retreats. We wanted to expand who felt welcome on the Mountain to bring in more LGBTQ folks and more people of color and to make sure the space reflected a broader, more inclusive community.
Once WLW got started, Helen said, “I really think you should continue with your leadership training here and start to think about leading the Women Loving Women retreats.”
So there I was, having to deal with being a leader again. I did the training and began working with Vyana and Helen. I was set to lead a retreat with Helen, and two weeks before the retreat, she collapsed into a coma from which she would never recover. Lots of folks stepped up, and got LJ, and I prepared to lead a retreat with our large and devastated community. Helen died two hours after the retreat ended.
Naughty Nancy
Another big part of my Shalom experience was working with my Naughty Nancy self.
Naughty Nancy had been a very big part of my life, but nobody really knew about her. She was a secret. A big secret. Because every Goody Two-Shoes has to have the opposite hanging out there somewhere. And golly was I ever a Goody Two-Shoes!
I had known about the Naughty Nancy part of me since I was really young. Being the oldest, being Mom’s helper, being the responsible one, there were times when I just needed not to be a goody-two-shoes. I snuck off. I was sneaky. I did things that little five-, six-, seven-, eight-, and nine-year-old girls were not supposed to be doing.
I loved that part of me. I really did. I loved my Naughty Nancy. But nobody knew about her. She was only mine.
So in those early years at Shalom, part of my work was getting to know her, letting other people know her, and realizing that she wasn’t someone to be ashamed of. She was part of me. She had energy. She had life. She had longing. She had passion.
Wanting to Love and Be Loved
And as I learned the Principles and Skills of Loving, the first principle hit me especially hard: more than anything else, we want to love and be loved.
It hit me like a slap in the face.
Yes. That is why I do the things that I do.
I reflected on my twenties, when I was really into sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and I thought, Gosh, I sure did a lot of crazy-ass things trying to get loved.
My Naughty Nancy was alive and well. And really struggling. She wanted to be loved.
Coming Out and Living with Integrity
I had dated both men and women in my twenties, but didn’t get married until I was thirty. I married the seventh man who asked me to marry him.
Yes, I was keeping count. I just kept saying no. Until I didn’t.
I wanted children. I really wanted sons. I didn’t have any idea how to do the girl-mom thing, but I wanted to be a mother. I married a good Pentagon bureaucrat and eventually had two wonderful sons.
The marriage lasted ten years, but I kept falling in love with women, so to live with integrity, I came out of the closet at forty.
Goody Two-Shoes Meets Naughty Nancy
Years later, in January of 2011, on a mat trip, I finally got Naughty Nancy and Goody Two-Shoes to kind of get married. To be with each other. I had been working on integrating those two parts of myself for years, and in that work that day, something huge finally shifted for me.
Three months later, I met the woman who would become my wife. Her name was Nancy. Of course it was.
All of Me Can Show Up
When I look at what Shalom has given me, I would say I didn’t have access to all of who I am before I came there. I was aware of Goody Two-Shoes and Naughty Nancy, but I wasn’t aware of all my other sub-personalities. I wasn’t aware of the depth of emotion in me. The depth of passion.
The other personal growth work I had done prior was more about “Who am I in a group?” It was more corporate, more interpersonal. Shalom was different. Shalom went all the way into my core.
And it allowed all of me to show up.
That is still the best part about going to the Mountain. It is the one place where all of me can show up. Where all of me is welcomed.
Beauty, Embodiment, and Belonging
It is also the place where I feel more beautiful than anywhere else in the universe. I feel so beautiful there. So embodied. That kind of embodiment is not something I had known anywhere else.
I have done dozens and dozens of mat trips over the past twenty-eight years. It has been a long time since I went to the Mountain twelve times a year. Not always to do mat work, but to lead, to attend work weekends, to help build the WLW community, to do my own work.
Going to the Mountain was just my life.
The Music of Shalom
I also love Shalom music. The music at Shalom feeds my soul and makes me happy.
One of my favorite roles on the Mountain is to be in the Choir of Angels. I love that. I’m an early riser anyway, and I love belting out great songs and waking people up. I used to come home from the Mountain and sing my sons awake every morning before school. I’m not sure they appreciated it, but I did it and had fun.
I love the recording Stephanie and Meg put together with all the Shalom chants. I listen to that a lot. I have it on my playlists, and my children learned a lot of those songs too.
Songs That Hold the Work
When I was leading WLW(Women Loving Women), the hardest part for me was finding the perfect song to end a mat trip with. I still have an old iPod with my playlists: mat trip love songs, mat trip couples work, mat trip first-timers, mat trip grief, mat trip anger, mat trip joy. I had all these playlists organized so that when I was leading a mat trip, I could go right to that playlist and have fifteen or twenty songs to choose from instead of trying to wrack my brain in the moment.
And still, when I hear certain songs, I remember particular mat trips. The room, the person, the work, the way we were all held, the miracles we shared.
Not Afraid to Go Anywhere
That is one of the things Shalom taught me: how to go to very deep and dark places with people and not be afraid.
These days, I tell my coaching clients, “I’m not a therapist, but we can go anywhere. I am not afraid to go anywhere with you.”
And they do.
I want to thank Joy and Lawrence for the Shalom retreat leadership training, for putting together the pieces that enabled us to go deeply with people and help them relive their old stories toward different and new conclusions.
A Place Where All of Us Are Welcomed
When I send people to Shalom, I don’t want to tell them too much, but I do tell them this: it is a place where you can bring all of who you are to the party. Whatever is keeping you from being able to love and be loved, you can work with those blocks there. You can lean into love and into being loved.
It is a place where we are loved as we have never been loved. Where all of us are welcomed.
Scribe’s Reflection
What stays with me in Barb’s story is the way Shalom became a place where the hidden parts of her life were not only allowed to emerge, but welcomed home.
There is such beauty in the honesty of her telling. The Goody Two-Shoes. Naughty Nancy. The leader who came to the Mountain relieved that maybe, finally, she would not have to lead. The woman who had spent a lifetime being responsible, capable, helpful, and good, slowly discovering that there was so much more of her waiting underneath those roles.
Barb’s story reminds me that healing is not always about becoming someone new. Sometimes it is about making room for all the selves we had to hide, protect, exile, or keep secret in order to belong.
At Shalom, Barb found a place where her anger could be named, where her longing could be felt, where her leadership could be challenged, where her grief could be held, and where the full range of her aliveness could come forward. She found a place where love was not just talked about, but practiced in the body, in the room, in the music, in the mat work, and in the willingness to go with one another into the places we are often most afraid to go alone.
I was especially moved by the way her story circles back to the first principle: more than anything else, we want to love and be loved. In Barb’s telling, that truth is not sentimental. It is human. It is messy. It is sexual, relational, spiritual, embodied, and real. It is the longing underneath the choices we make, the risks we take, the places we hide, and the parts of ourselves we are finally ready to bring into the light.
And then there is the music.
The Choir of Angels. The songs that wake people up. The playlists for grief, anger, joy, first-timers, couples work, and love. The way a song can hold a mat trip, a person, a room, a miracle. Barb’s story carries the sound of Shalom as much as the memory of it.
For me, this story is about integration. It is about the sacred work of allowing the divided parts of a life to come into relationship with one another. It is about the courage to live with integrity. It is about leadership that is born not from performance, but from lived experience. And it is about the kind of community that can hold a person long enough for them to become more fully themselves.
Barb says Shalom is the place where all of her can show up.
That may be the deepest medicine of this story.
Not that Shalom fixed her. Not that it made her perfect. But that it gave her a field of love strong enough, safe enough, and honest enough to welcome the whole of her life.
All of Barb. All of us. Welcomed.
Jennifer Mark, Scribe
Voices That Matter
Storytelling as legacy. Listening as medicine
This story is part of Voices That Matter: Shalom’s 50th Anniversary
There is no cost to participate. Only a willingness to share a story.
This project, like all community offerings within Voices That Matter – The Scribe Project, is sustained through the support of those who feel called to be part of it, by sharing stories, spreading the word, or contributing to its creation and ongoing life.
If you feel moved, you are welcome to contribute in whatever way feels right.
If you’re part of the Shalom community, this is an open invitation.
Shalom holds 50 years of stories.
I would love to include yours as part of this growing living archive.