Close to the bone, there had to be an inner stratum, formed and cultivated in solitude, where the essence of what I was, am now, and will be, perhaps, until the end of my days, hides itself and waits to be found by my lasting silence.
Doris Grumbach, 50 Days of Solitude
What was your first thought when you picked up this book?
I need this!
This sounds great, but I’m too busy.
What is a retreat exactly?
Sounds too extravagant and expensive. I’m too practical.
I’ve been on retreats before, but I’m looking for something deeper.
I’d consider it, as long as I’m not just sitting around. I need to be accomplishing something.
Sounds scary. I don’t know if I could be alone.
Name your reaction(s) right now. This is the beginning, the process of asking and listening. Write them down or speak them aloud.
The call to retreat is your signal to go. You’ve been in the doing cycle of your life long enough (way too long, you may be muttering). It is time to turn within.
Can you hear the call? It may be very distant and weak at first, but it is there. It may be a small voice begging you to attend to your inner life. It may be images of nourishing moments in nature. It may be a snatch of a poem or song. Take a moment to sit quietly. Right now. Make no effort to do anything. Only breathe slowly and deeply and listen.
What did you hear? Sometimes you will hear a bellow, a clear “yes” or “no” or “soon.” Your voice may be loud, telling you exactly what you should do. “Jump off this gerbil wheel of a life for a moment, for pity’s sake. You need a breather! You need fresh air and solitude.” Great. Respect what you hear. Too often, we get clear messages from our inner selves about what we need to do, silvery treasure maps with the location of the treasure marked in fire engine red, but we don’t act on what we hear. When you hear, listen. To retreat doesn’t have to mean a week at an ashram; it may mean an afternoon alone. Listen.
Sometimes sitting quietly and listening makes us ache. It feels like returning home, déjà vu, “Oh I remember this! I haven’t done this since ______ (you fill in the blank: since I was seven or since I was in college or since the last time I was sick).” You might remember the promises you made to yourself in the past, all your well-intentioned plans to take better care of yourself. You wonder how you got distracted. Again. It feels good but scary to make another promise to honor your needs.
See Living Your Retreat Every Day.
Do you dare risk it again? Yes, you must. For the cycle of being-doing is also the cycle of remembering-forgetting. Like Persephone in the myth of Demeter and Persephone, you blossom, you die, you are reborn again and again. You contact the knowledge of who you are and what you need, and then slowly, bit by bit, you forget, eaten up by life again. Then you descend and reconnect with yourself. You come back from a week’s retreat full of love for yourself, your life, and your relationships, and for a few weeks you meditate every morning, you eat well, you take a few hours once a month to be alone, do yoga, and write in your journal. But then you forget, get lost, lose consciousness. That does not make retreating worthless, nor does it mean you have failed. It is an organic spiraling process, and each time you retreat you retain another piece of knowledge, courage, and purpose, slowly honing your life into what you want. It literally takes a lifetime. It is the process of life.
Sometimes when you listen for the call to retreat, it is very hard to sit still. You sense nothing. That is okay. I have been there. Most of us have. It is still possible to discern your invitation. You just may need to listen for other languages, such as the language of perpetual fatigue or recurring minor illnesses. Perhaps the message will come as piles of resentments blocking the doorway to your heart, like so much junk mail, as in, “If I just didn’t have so much work to do” or “If my kids were just older, then….” The summons might come in the form of feeling like you are “living just for next month, just till this semester is past, can’t wait till winter is finally over…waiting for a mystically assigned date somewhere in the future when [you] will be free to do some wondrous thing,” as Estés writes in Women Who Run with the Wolves. I call this the “when-then whine”: “When I’m done with my Ph.D., then I’ll take some time off,” or “When the kids graduate from high school, then I’ll go on a retreat.” The call to attend your deepest self speaks in the tongues of yearning—how you drive yearningly by the dance center or obsessively read the adult education class schedule or stare at the patch of woods you can see from your office window. What are you waiting for? Ask yourself. Stop reading, close your eyes, and ask yourself, “What am I waiting for?”
One of the questions or fears that often arises after you hear your call to retreat is, “Won’t I want to retreat all the time? Won’t I want to quit work, abandon my children, go live in a hut in Tibet?” Another reaction can be, “This feels like another should. I don’t need one more should to cause me guilt.” Both are valid. It can be comforting to know the different cycles of retreating, cycles that vary from person to person and also through the different stages of life.
Extroverts need fewer and shorter retreats and may find being alone, especially in the beginning, the most difficult part of retreating. Extroverts may find themselves getting more and more tired as they move deeper into their retreat, for they are making the switch from projecting their energy out to turning their energy inward. Extroverts may find themselves feeling trapped and anxious. Having support on your retreat, in the form of a friend or group, is another good choice.
Courage and Uncomfortable Beginnings, Middles, and In-Betweens will help an extrovert slip more easily into a solitary retreat.
Introverts, on the other hand, may find themselves wishing they could retreat half of every month, preferably to someplace remote like the Galapagos Islands. Introverts struggle less with the fear of being alone and more with the need to go often and for longer periods of time. Of course, most women are a blend of introvert and extrovert, and your experience will lie somewhere along this continuum.
See For How Long Will You Retreat?: Seasons of Retreat and Retreating with Others.
Your age also influences how you respond to your call to retreat. In Jubilee Time, Maria Harris takes the biblical Sabbath of the Jubilee—a two-year period from the forty-ninth through the fiftieth year known as the “Sabbath of Sabbath”—and uses it as a model for older women. Through it, she says, we can both reclaim the wisdom and dignity of age and fill our ache for stillness and quiet. In her sixtieth year, poet, teacher, and therapist Deena Metzger took four retreats. On the winter solstice, she spent ten days at the Arctic Circle. The spring equinox found her near a cove in Hawaii where dolphins swim. Back to the Arctic for the summer solstice, and she then spent the autumnal equinox on Mount Sinai.
In each corner of the circle, I’m addressing a question I spent a lot of time formulating: “What is appropriate for me in the next third of my life?” I don’t want to try to relive the first or second half of my life, I want to know how I can live my life right in this time.
In Dancing in the Flames, Woodman and Dickson note,
In the first half of life we live mainly in terms of doing. We find out who we are through going to school, pursuing a career, marrying, having children and raising them. In the second half of life, we are pushed toward a deeper consciousness of who we are, an identity in terms of being, an identity based not on the ego but on the soul.
This is not to say that young women can’t or don’t need to go on retreat. In an interview, Woodman said,
Most young women go on retreat because they are so driven by their jobs, and so busy, that they yearn for some kind of peace. They may find it harder to be quiet than an older woman. Young women who choose to go on a retreat want being, they want to know their own reality.
In the doing stage of your life, the need to withdraw may feel sporadic, easy to dismiss as not as important as moving up the career ladder or finding the right relationship, and yet your need for sacred time may be the greatest.
Whether young or old, if you have neglected your inner life for too many years, you may find retreating a terrifying prospect. Start small by scheduling mini-retreats, retreating with a friend or a group, and gradually learning to listen to your inner knowing.
See Courage and Retreat Plans.
Intertwined with our personal rhythms are the universal cycles of retreat, rhythms that run through each woman but are mediated by your own personality. The most familiar cycle may be the daily or circadian cycle, a sometimes subtle, sometimes screaming need to be quiet, to be alone, to sift through the emotional impressions of the day, to catch up with yourself. You may be honoring this cycle now by taking a long bath or shower, exercising alone in nature or with headphones on at the gym, napping when your baby does, or reading before bed while not really concentrating on the words. Some of us need (but rarely take) several retreats within a day, especially if we are under a lot of stress or working at a job we dislike.
See For How Long Will You Retreat?: Mini-Retreats.
There is a monthly need for retreat, which in younger women may be linked to menstruation or premenstrual syndrome. This cycle may call for a longer retreat, an afternoon or a day. You might be meeting this need now by escaping to do errands alone or shopping alone (the car is a popular refuge), watching a movie alone in a dark theater, or getting just sick enough to let yourself stay home in bed for a day.
Then there are yearly cycles, a yearning to go within that might recur every winter or at the anniversary of the death of a parent or on your birthday. Perhaps there is a pilgrimage built into your life, like a trip home to see your parents and swim in the quarry of your childhood or a hike to the same peak each year with your best friend from college.
Beyond these are once-in-a-lifetime cycles, which may occur during periods of crisis or transition, like a “big” birthday or the passage from one stage of life to another. At these times you feel a need to look at where you’ve been and decide where you want to go. Grieving the death of someone you love, the offer of a new job, or a divorce will create a strong need to separate and look within.
When these cycles are noted and treated with respect, without creating another should in your life, when you recognize your call to retreat and answer it in a way that truly nourishes you, you invite balance, contentment, health, and inner simplicity to inhabit you. By consciously setting aside time, forming an intention, and moving through a few simple steps that help you to wholeheartedly declare yes, you drink from your own inner spring of water, the water of life.
Stories
In The Feminine Face of God is a story of Patricia’s call to retreat. It movingly illustrates the need to listen to your inner voice, even after you have decided you will retreat. Patricia had already planned her retreat for the week before Easter at a retreat center run by a French order of nuns.
Then a month before I was to go, something unusual started to happen during my regular meditations. Every few days I would hear an inner voice say, “You need to do the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius.” Not being Catholic, I was not familiar with these exercises…. But the message persisted. So the first thing I did when I got to the center was to ask Sister Mary W., who was in charge of my stay, if we could somehow incorporate these exercises into my retreat.
She seemed both pleased and surprised by my request…. Then, looking me straight in the eye, she asked if there was a particular problem I wanted to work on. The question caught me off guard. I had certainly not come with any problem in mind. In fact my life had been going along pretty smoothly, I thought. Yet after only a brief hesitation I heard myself say, “Yes, there is. You see, I had an abortion twelve years ago, and I have come here to be healed.”
Patricia went on to do active imagination with the story of the paralyzed man who was carried by his friends to Jesus to be healed.
As my meditation deepened I actually experienced the sensation of being borne along on a gurney by three very close friends, one on either side of my head and the third at my right foot. Although I knew someone had to be holding up the left end of the gurney, I could not make out who it was. Then raising my head up in order to see better, I made a startling discovery: it was not “someone” who was holding me up but a delicate gold cord which seemed to be attached to something in the sky. As I followed the cord upward I could see that the end of it was being held in the hand of the tiniest yet most perfectly formed infant I had ever seen. And hovering behind this ethereal cherub, protecting and enfolding it in outstretched wings, was an exquisite angel.
Suspended in this timeless moment…[I] heard a voice speak these words: “The light of this unborn child is leading you home. This is a deep mystery which you cannot penetrate, but know that you are healed.”
Later that afternoon as I waited in the dappled sunlight beneath the leafy branches of a graceful oak for Sister Mary W., the truth of those words vibrated through my entire being. I had found my soul. I was well again, whole again, and through this healing I was awakened to the power of prayer and the meaning of grace.
See Contemplations.