Intention is the power of the experience.
Cynthia Gale, ceremonial artist
Why am I going on retreat?
What will I actually do?
How can I possibly take the time and go?
If you answer the first question, you will find it much easier to answer the others.
Retreat is not about a statement, it’s about a question. Most of the work of giving yourself a fruitful retreat is in understanding what your question is. That question is an articulation of an inarticulate longing.
So says Christina Baldwin, author of Calling the Circle and teacher of Peer Spirit Circle workshops. “Understand what the longing is.” Investigate the yearning.
I knew that intention was crucial to creating the container of retreat, but I envisioned intention as a statement. For instance, you might state your intention as “For the next twenty-four hours I intend to be kind to myself.” Through a very helpful conversation with Christina, I learned the more fertile route, better suited to the essence of a woman’s retreat: forming your intention by identifying the most passionate, heartrending, or irritating longing in your life and then placing that longing in the context of a question. Now imagine a retreat in which you state your intention as “For the next twenty-four hours I intend to ask myself, How can I be kinder to myself?” Can you feel a difference? The first intention feels positive but closed, almost a should, and it doesn’t inspire the imagination nearly as much as the second intention, which feels open-ended, expansive, encouraging, even tantalizing. An intent in the form of a question gives form to your needs and longings, yet remains open to the unknowable, the feelings and experiences that will arise during your retreat. Ultimately, a retreat takes on a life of its own, and its own direction. When you remain flexible, open, and yet focused, that direction will lead you to priceless treasures and marvelous interior visions.
A loving, questioning intention gives your inner knowing something precious to gaze on, the illuminated essence of your retreat. “Why am I on retreat? Oh, yes, because of this yearning, because of this question.” Your intention is a still point of purpose to refer back to when you feel lost, unmoored from your ordinary life, or anxious or selfish or guilty. It helps you to concentrate your time in a way that has heart and meaning, which is especially important on mini-retreats. Whether you have five minutes or five days, intention helps you make the most of that time.
Intention can also be a catalyst, prodding you to overcome all the reasons you shouldn’t retreat. It can provide a cover, an “excuse” of a purpose when you need to wave something around someone’s nosy nose. It eases fear of the void, the fear that arises when you leave behind the rituals and distractions of daily life and face the raw possibility of time with yourself. You can hold on to your intention question as if it’s a personal constellation helping you navigate home across a dark ocean.
What an Intention Is Not
An intention is not a goal, although you may present it to others as one. Intention is an aim that guides action. A goal, by contrast, is the purpose or objective toward which an endeavor is directed. Intention is gentle and keeps you in the moment, focused on unfoldment. Goal is driven and keeps you in the future, focused on finishing, on doing it all, doing it right. Forming an intention in the shape of a goal would defeat the purpose because it would take you out of being and into doing. The word intention comes from the Latin root intendere, meaning “to stretch toward something.” Say Woodman and Dickson in Dancing in the Flames,
Intentionality in itself does not lead to an enlightened heart. It is better thought of as a way of giving meaning to experience. It is open to both conscious and unconscious information.
Your intention should not foster lavish expectations or rigid agendas. Both of these can hog-tie your intuition, exhaust your creative juices, and fuel your chattering self. E. A. Miller, in her essay “Equipment and Pretense” in Solo, thought that “to prove my solitude, I had to experience a miracle—hear the voice of my mother (dead for five years now) laud me for my independence; wake to write an inspired masterpiece by sunrise; remember, in the light of the campfire, a long-forgotten commitment to dedicate my life to the poor.” Bound up in expectations, you will be hounded by a voice asking, “Am I doing it right?” “Is anything happening yet?” “Why hasn’t anything happened yet?” Such questions will block the sweet unfoldment of going within, of trusting your experience to be exactly what you need. As author and anthropologist Angeles Arrien elegantly states, “Be open to outcome, not attached to outcome.” By crafting a simple intention as a question, one that invites outcome but doesn’t force it or encourage expectations, you sidestep disappointment and are more able to receive the gifts of your retreat.
Movement in the spirit or inner realm is subtle and can sometimes take years to fully apprehend and appreciate. A shift always happens when you retreat, there are always insights and blessings, but they can sometimes seem, at first glance, extraordinarily delicate and amorphous. Can you accept that retreating is essential for your well-being and that the meaning of your retreat lies in the unfoldment of the time itself, in living the questions, in turning within, not in any outcome you might be anticipating?
I struggle with this one, especially as a mother, when time away is so precious, so infrequent and short. Will I arrange the right retreat? Will I pick the right place to go? Will I be enough? These worried rumblings are static that I must tune out before I can truly allow myself to retreat. I suspect these expectations are just smoke screens to prevent me from being present with my feelings and open to my experience. It is easier and more familiar to be worried and disappointed than it is to be open and alive. If I listen to my expectations, I hear the voices of other people or the parts of myself that are damaged, critical, mean. If I listen to these voices telling me what I should be doing with my time, I become externally instead of internally referenced, and I lose the essence of the retreat. I end up feeling exhausted and anxious instead of rested and rejuvenated.
See Uncomfortable Beginnings, Middles, and In-Betweens.
Keep it simple and light. Hoping for a particular result is fine. Demanding, planning, or expecting one is not. Try to remain open to the mystery.
Forming Your Intention
Explore the statements below. Jot down whatever occurs to you. Take plenty of time. Don’t edit. It helps me to set a timer for two minutes and to keep my pen moving, exploring a statement at a time. Do this exercise even though you may have no idea whether you even want to retreat or when or for how long or what you would do. This is the realm of pure possibility. It doesn’t matter that you believe you have no time because you are the mother of three children under five or that you have never done anything remotely like this before. It also doesn’t matter if you sit zazen every day and have been on two hundred retreats. This is about imagining what you need right now, in this moment. Fresh mind. Complete possibility. Spend five minutes right now.
Use these statements at the beginning of a mini-retreat to calm down and focus.
Imagine these sentences as a net. At first you cast it out wide and fast, hoping to snare many fishes, but as you pull it in, only the biggest fish remains: your question, your intent.
Read over what you wrote. What jumps out at you? What terrifies you in a thrilling, positive way? What ideas are repeated? As you read, ask yourself, “What is the question of my life right now?” Or “What is most vital to me right now?” Or, as Angeles Arrien asks in The Four-Fold Way, “What has heart and meaning for me right now?” Try circling the words that tug, leap, beg you. Can you winnow out a theme? Do you want to?
Scan the words you circled. How do they want to arrange themselves into a positive, compelling, simple question? Completing this sentence may help:
What happens now? What do you do with your intention? It all depends on how you feel. You may feel exhilarated, sure of what you need to do. Asking sharpened what you already knew. Then keep going through the next chapters. Perhaps you are surprised by this exercise, by the ideas that emerged. That’s excellent. You have an inspiring road ahead.
Or maybe you are feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, or angry because the yearning to retreat has been awakened but you know it is impossible to ever get time for yourself for the next million or so years. If this is how you feel right now, stop reading and do something to thoroughly, healthily, totally nurture yourself like ride that forgotten bike in the back of your closet or string white lights around your bathroom and then soak in the tub as they twinkle above you.
See For How Long Will You Retreat?
What if you did this exercise and nothing came to you? Few rules apply to a woman’s retreat, but this is one: don’t stress. An intention is solely for you. If you can’t quite get one, forget it for a while. It is not uncommon to begin a retreat not knowing what your intention is and to grab hold of it a few minutes or hours into your experience. In some retreat traditions, intention is eschewed altogether and is thought to be counterproductive to encountering spiritual guidance. Would it be more appropriate for you to have no purpose on this retreat? When retreating without an intention, it is even more vital to construct a strong physical and emotional container for yourself through solitude and ritual.
See Opening Ceremony and Where Will You Retreat?
If you don’t want to do this exercise, fine. If you hate the idea of following directions, invent your own. They certainly will be as valid. If you hate exercises, form your intention by deciding what you want to do first. Page through the book; see what practices appeal to you and what intention they suggest. Or check out the chart in the middle of the book. Look at What Will You Do?: Ways to Choose What to Do. If you live alone and can’t figure out why anyone would want to go on a retreat to be alone, look at For How Long Will You Retreat?: The Four Seasons of Retreat and Retreating with Others. There is no one way to form intention; of that I am positive. I am also positive that the most important thing is to have the time apart to listen to yourself. If an intention won’t help you do that, then forget it.
It is comforting to remember you are going on retreat to contemplate this question. You are not supposed to know the answer yet or the means by which you will explore your intention. It is comforting to remember that no one else need know what your intention is. When forming her intention, Rhonda wrote, “What if my intention isn’t good enough?” No intention is better, grander, more spiritual, or more transformative than any other. We were all raised in a competitive society. It is so easy to compare ourselves to others, even on a retreat. If those kinds of feelings come up, ask yourself, “Good enough for whom?” and “Who is watching me?” Your intention is a starting place, not a measuring stick. Neither is it about fulfilling or completing or answering your intention. Remember: it’s an aim, not a goal. You can’t fail at this.
Nor is your intent written in stone. It is very common to begin a retreat with one intention and to find it changing, being refined, during your retreat. The night before Sandy was planning a Saturday retreat, she set the intention “How can I anchor my inner strength and come together with my true self?” During the retreat, her intention changed to “How can I deepen my self-love and learn how to nurture and honor myself?” The difference may seem slight, but this process of refining can be an epiphany, a bright light turning on in your heart. Susan formed these intentions, using clustering: “What new directions do I need in my life?” and “What do I need to do next in my life?” However, early in her one-day retreat she realized, “My intention is about doing or fixing something, exactly the opposite of what I said I yearned for. I needed to be quiet first to see the true intention for this retreat is ‘How can I find quiet and stay connected to my inner self or Higher Being?’”
Try referring back to your intention from time to time during your retreat. Ask yourself, “Does this question still have heart and meaning for me?” You might do some spontaneous writing or drawing with regard to your question to help you discover what your retreat is really about. Sometimes, the process of retreating reveals your true intention—it isn’t until the end of your experience that you know what you have been up to! That is part of the spiral nature of retreats, coming back, again and again, to the same territory. Pay attention to where you end up: it may reveal a fertile path for future retreats.
See Good Ways to Listen and Uncomfortable Beginnings, Middles, and In-Betweens.
You may also find you have more than one intention. While “Keep it simple” is definitely my retreat motto, if you want more than one intention, then, by all means, go for it. On longer retreats you might name an overall intention and then experiment with forming an intention for each day, to help you maintain your focus. Or you may form two intentions that complement each other, like “How can I practice deeper listening with myself and others?” and “How can I love the dark, jagged parts of myself?”
Use this exercise as a stick to stir your imagination. Use intention to point the way but not as a should, as a straitjacket on your wisdom.
Other Women’s Intentions
It might help to read some intentions formed by other women, both women who have gone on retreats and those who never have.
The question I intend to ask myself is…
Can I allow myself to relax and be?
How can I love myself more?
What do I need to do next in the area of spiritual growth?
How can I bring the fullness of me into my work life?
Is this the right place for me to live?
Is this the right relationship for me?
How can I make time for myself in my life?
How can I be more me as well as mother, wife, employee?
What can I do to make peace with my body?
How can I be a mother and an artist, too?
How can I recharge my creativity?
How can I create more health and lightness in my life?
Why is my chronic illness in my life?
How can I begin to accept my imperfections and the imperfections of others?
What is the best way to lift this sadness I feel?
Why can’t I get on with my life?
What is my relationship with God right now?
What is appropriate for me in the next third of my life?
How can I live with cancer?
How can I let go of this relationship that has ended?
How can I heal from exhaustion?
How can I grieve not being able to become pregnant?
How can I stop overcommitting to everyone but me?
How can I celebrate turning thirty-three, forty-five, fifty, sixty-one, eighty?
How can I be comfortable alone?
What do I love about myself, and how can I celebrate what I do love?
Should I commit to this relationship through marriage?
How can I listen to and honor my own inner wisdom?
How can I live my own life, inhabit my own center?
How can I create structure/organization in my life that will help me to love and respect myself?
How can I change the direction I am going?
How can I get comfortable with aloneness?
See Retreat Plans for ideas.
You can see that the number of reasons for going on a retreat are as varied as the women who go on them. Some questions lend themselves to long retreats, others to one or several mini-retreats. If you haven’t yet done so, take a few minutes to form your intent. Let it speak to your heart’s desire. Don’t kill an idea because you think it is impossible. Dare to hope. And dare to keep it simple. “How can I relax and simply be?” is a wonderful intention and a great place both to start and to return to again and again.
Be realistic about how your intention fits with the amount of time you are willing to take. You may covet a month alone to ask yourself, “How can I begin my first novel?,” but you may be able to retreat only for a long weekend. You might want to tighten the focus of your intention. On the other hand, be aware of cutting off possibilities because you feel fearful and out of control. Setting an intention is a give-and-take process between what is realistic and attainable and what is open and expansive. If you yearn to live with a bigger intention even if you don’t feel you have enough time, trust yourself. In archetypal time, three hours, one day, two days can feel like a lifetime and can deliver the images, feelings, and epiphanies you need.
If you are feeling pressured or disappointed because where or what you are going to do doesn’t seem grand enough to fulfill your intention, check out your expectations and remind yourself, “There will always be time for another retreat.” Remind yourself also, “I am where I need to be, doing what I need to be doing.”
You can live with a retreat intention for years. Some intentions require many retreats to explore fully. There may be one retreat intention that you return to again and again over your life.
Stories
I worked on this intention when I was considering how to spend a few days away from my daughter, Lily, for the first time in her life.
I read over what I wrote, asking myself, “What feels most vital for me right now?” My intuitive mind takes over, I try to get out of the way, not to force or control. I can feel the answer emerging, not really in words, but as a longing…. I yearn to be truly, deeply cared for with lots of unbroken time to meander…. I yearn for solitude and nature…. Hmm…I slowly form my question:
On this retreat, I intend to ask myself, How can I take profound, loving care of myself?
Notice my intention is doable but also very expansive. It doesn’t scare me with harsh expectations but invites me to fulfill it and be fulfilled in the process. It invites inquiry and brainstorming—how can I satisfy this yearning? It makes me feel curious, excited, a little nervous, a nice blend of challenge and reassurance. Notice, too, that I could have formed any number of intentions from my first writing. I kept looking for, sensing, what I most yearn for right now.
Notice, too, that the last two questions help me know both what to avoid and where I want to come out, but they also point out the fears I need to address and possible expectations to let go of.
Here is an example from Pam, a mother of two in her late thirties and an owner of a small business. She had no idea where, how, or when she would retreat.
Now it is your turn. Articulate your inarticulate longing. Mold the process to you. It doesn’t take long. There is absolute magic in naming what you wish to find. Things begin to fall into place, helpers appear, insights shoot down from the night sky. Come along. Now is as good a time as any.
For Experienced Retreatants
Your task in setting a retreat intention is to be very aware of your razor’s edge, neither choosing one that is too comfortable (doing again what you have done before) nor pushing yourself overly hard because you do have experience, because you survived a three-day vision fast, or because you did a silent meditation retreat for ten days. You must come back to what has heart and meaning for you right now. Also, if you are an experienced retreatant who has never conducted a self-led retreat, be extra aware of your assumptions and expectations based on the container or support other people or retreat centers have provided for you in the past. It is one thing to show up at a monastery and be enveloped in a cloud of calm. It is quite another to create that calm at home. Both are equally valuable but very different.