The leisure of the monks is not the privilege of those who can afford to take the time; it is the virtue of those who give to everything they do the time it deserves to take.
David Steindl-Rast
When your thoughts turn to when and for how long you might retreat, consider the words above and also these from Kathleen Norris, a Benedictine oblate (associate) and poet who spent two nine-month terms living at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. She writes in The Cloister Walk,
In our culture, time can seem like an enemy: it chews us up and spits us out with appalling ease. But the monastic perspective welcomes time as a gift from God, and seeks to put it to good use rather than allowing us to be used up by it. A friend who was educated by the Benedictines has told me that she owes to them her sanity with regard to time. “You never really finish anything in life,” she says, “and while that’s humbling, and frustrating, it’s all right.”
What if, instead of approaching this experience saying, “I have this amount of time, what can I do in it?,” you approach it asking, “How much time do I need to live my intention?” Yes, it may be an unanswerable question, but it is one that begs to be considered. We spend a lot of our lives cramming what has to get done into the amount of time available. We joke that work expands to fill the space available. Is that true? Or are we afraid of what might happen if we gave a task our full attention and all the time it needed? Our lives might change, our perspectives might shift, we might become angry or sad over how little time we spend in a meaningful way. What might happen if you considered, just this once, putting your yearnings first and the time constraints second?
Entertain the idea for a moment: “If I had all the time in the world to retreat, to explore my intention, for how long would I retreat?” Let yourself hear the answer.
Before you panic, consider this paradoxical thought: if you can enter into the kind of time that T. S. Eliot describes, you don’t need much linear time at all.
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts….
When you are betwixt and between, time no longer matters. You pass into that mystical place of timelessness, kairos, as the Greeks named it, where you are no longer just listening to your innermost self but living, being, your innermost self. Once you are there, it doesn’t matter how long you have because you are unaware of time.
Length of time is not synonymous with depth of experience. However long you choose to retreat is long enough if you say yes with your full being.
Ask yourself, If someone walked in the room right now and informed you that you have one year to live, would you still go on retreat?
This is your litmus test. Don’t let it be hackneyed, for it isn’t.
Yes or no: Would you go on retreat? No qualifiers.
If the answer is no, you may want to go back and spend more time with your intention, going back to the question “What has heart and meaning for me right now?” Or you may wish to get your feet wet with mini-retreats, or you may want to put this book away for a while. Or perhaps you want to expand your idea of retreat to include friends, children, family, or your partner.
If the answer is yes, you certainly would go on retreat even if you had only a year to live, you are now charged to make it happen. You will find ways to make it happen.
Before you throw down this book in disgust, thinking I am the Martha Stewart of retreats and am assuming you have unlimited time and energy for this, please realize that out of the four seasons of retreat discussed below, you will take more mini-retreats and retreats in the world than long retreats. Long retreats are indispensable, and I’m encouraging you (begging you on my knees) to make time for them. But when a half hour waiting in the car for soccer practice to end, an hour alone in the house on a Saturday afternoon, or ten minutes away from work is all you have, a retreat can be wedged in. Please, please know that a retreat doesn’t have to be difficult, doesn’t have to be a big deal, to nourish you or to shift your perspective. Nor are you warped if this isn’t a struggle for you. At certain times and for certain women, it is easy to find time for retreating. If this isn’t difficult for you, rejoice! If it is a struggle or daunting, know that getting started, doing your first retreat, is by far the biggest obstacle. It will become a self-loving habit soon.
The Four Seasons of Retreat
Over your lifetime, you will retreat in many ways. You will retreat with teachers, with groups, in ways that challenge you, in ways that soothe you. There are four ways in which to retreat: long retreats, mini-retreats, retreats with others, and retreats in the world.
Long Retreats
This is the place that is reclaimed each time I retreat. I recognize the space based on a childhood experience…. It was Easter, my birthday. My dad held me up to the sky and said, “Look at the world.” It is this moment I look for in all retreats. The deep, deep place of being held. I recognize my littleness in all the bigness and feel great joy.
Marcie Telandar, therapist, writer, and ritualist
See Retreat Plans.
Two to three days is the classic layperson’s container for a retreat. Two of our most ancient female myths, the Sumerian myth of Inanna’s descent into the underworld and the Greek ritual of the Thesmophoria, are both three-day journeys. The two-day weekend and the one-day Sabbath as retreats are embedded in our psyche, perhaps woven into our DNA.
The advantage here is time: time to unwind, time to venture deep, time to get some distance from your life. It will amaze you how long two or three days will seem when you are untethered from clocks and responsibilities, adrift in your own universe. Time stretches like it did when you were a child and threatens when you dig into areas you have resisted looking at. True magic can happen when you “have been out awhile,” as wilderness guides put it, even if “being out” is two days of silence in your home.
The disadvantage of a long retreat is the same: time. Making the time. The other disadvantage is the danger of going too deep on your own. This danger can be allayed by arranging self-led retreats that are appropriate to where you are in your life. If this is your first retreat or your first self-guided retreat, avoid biting off more than you can chew. A week alone in the wilderness with no phone, no running water, and no way home may be too much. It might be gentler to start with a day or two at home, with the phone turned off. Scrupulously avoid harsh or overly rigorous requirements. The inner voice guiding you must speak with self-love and self-respect, not a self-hatred that tries to drive you faster, harder, better. If you are experiencing a lot of fear of being alone, attend a retreat center or share your retreat with a friend. If you feel experienced or strong, then venture out alone and longer. The kind of retreat you choose has much to do with your intention. The more intense the issues you are working with, the more you need some kind of support or check-in person nearby.
See Courage: Support on Retreat.
See Retreat Plans.
Longer retreats are better suited to certain intentions or purposes than others. Gaining perspective, making a decision, healing utter exhaustion, or merging with the rhythms of nature often need the spaciousness and luxury of more time.
Stories
This is Saral’s story from a one-month retreat.
For my fortieth birthday I wanted to take an entire month off, no work or social obligations. My husband and friends were wonderful about it, even though not one of them quite understands my need for solitude. Turning forty felt like a big deal to me because part of it was deciding not to have children, knowing that probably was not going to happen.
When I started my month at the retreat center, I talked to my retreat coordinator. “Should I be silent? What kind of structure should I have for a month?” She was really great about saying “Don’t have structure, or have very little structure, don’t be silent. See what happens every day, stay in the moment.” Because of that guidance, I had two relationships, particularly one, that were perfect. I helped a man (another retreatant) begin to deal with his childhood abuse. I was a mother to this man. I got to experience mother-love in a way I never had before in my life. I wouldn’t have been available if I had been silent, and so what ended up being the most important part of that retreat only happened because I stayed open to anything happening.
Each week of the retreat had a kind of subcontainer. I spent the first week rereading fifteen years of journals and reflecting on my life, where I had come from and where I wanted to go. Then I spent the next couple of weeks reading books that I had chosen carefully. I also worked on the land and counseled other retreatants.
I had many days of silence, but I also spent some mornings at a coffee house in town talking to strangers and meeting new friends. Even though a coffee house and time spent socializing wasn’t part of my original picture for my retreat, both ended up being important. I wrote loads of letters in that coffee house, which helped me to feel the wealth of my friendships.
The last week was spent preparing for a vision fast, three days of silent meditation, then twenty-four hours alone in the woods using a medicine wheel, no sleep, just wonder and reflection. After my silent retreat I had my best friends come up, one a day for three days, to spend an afternoon. It was a way to integrate myself back into my life.
The last day of my retreat was Halloween, Samhain. I sat by the fire and had a ritual end to my month. I walked down the mountain and back into my regular life, enriched beyond words, knowing that solitude will always be a vital and necessary part of my life.
Mini-Retreats
Stop looking for the sabbatical—or even the weekend when everyone is out of the house. Solitude is wonderful, but vast swaths of it can be like bolts of vintage silk—so lovely, so hard to come by we are reluctant to cut into them, and so they sit unused while we say we “could.”
Julia Cameron, The Vein of Gold
For many women, going away for even a day can be next to impossible or can feel too uncomfortable. Yet the busier you are and the more you are giving to others, the more you must replenish yourself. That’s where mini-retreats come in.
A mini-retreat can be ten minutes waiting in the dentist’s office, a half hour baking bread, your lunch hour spent in a park, a car trip alone with no destination in mind, a bike ride, a yoga class. A mini-retreat can look like just about anything if it is embedded within the archetypal structure of retreat: ritual withdrawal from the ordinary, a way to be in and maintain liminal space as you listen to your deepest self, and a conscious return to ordinary life.
Mini-retreats can enrich your retreat practice in many ways. They can be life-savers during a crisis such as a vigil in a hospital for a sick family member when you can get away for only a few moments or hours at a time. They are indispensable during a frantic time such as a deadline at work, at the holidays, or when you have a new baby. Mini-retreats can serve as reminders, weaving the fruits of retreat into your daily life. You might find yourself attending an organized retreat once a year, conducting your own self-led retreat on another long weekend, and practicing mini-retreats once every few weeks. Mini-retreats can be done consecutively, using the same intention again and again. If you do this, try repeating the same opening and closing ceremony each time.
See Living Your Retreat Every Day.
See Where Will You Retreat?: Retreating at Home.
Can a mini-retreat be as meaningful as an extended retreat? Of course! But having less time to unwind and shift your perceptions can present a challenge. However, sometimes mini-retreats actually work better because the stress of leaving for a long period of time, the discomfort of being away from family for long, and the comfort you take in your own home can make a mini-retreat remarkably fruitful.
Stories
This story is from Jasmine, a second-grade teacher:
I have had to visit doctors a lot lately. I love it when I find myself stuck waiting alone in a waiting room. Instead of reading People I do a little retreat. I slip off my shoes, pull my special sweater around me, and imagine I’m at a place I visited years ago in Bermuda on a day I felt great. I use the same check-in question each time: “What am I feeling?” I find something to focus on, like a picture of dolphins in a National Geographic magazine, and I let my mind drift with my question. Sometimes I also write or read my daily prayer book. I am always careful to return consciously, because once I didn’t and I found myself feeling very spacey and not driving carefully. My signal is when I hear the nurse coming. I put on my shoes, take off my sweater, and say to myself, “I am in so-and-so’s office, but I am in a different place.” I acknowledge my retreat time as holy.
See Retreating with Others and Retreat Plans: A One-Day Retreat with a Friend.
Retreats with Others
An important distinction can be made between working with a group and working with others who support you in your solitary venture. During a group retreat, you concentrate on learning from a teacher and learning about yourself through your interactions with the group. This can be invaluable for reaching a new level in your spiritual practice or as a way to let go of stale beliefs about yourself. But during the kind of retreat outlined in this book, you spend the majority of time alone. A friend or small group provides support and mirroring at different times or when needed, but being and learning from others is not the main focus of your retreat. Instead, being with and listening to yourself is central. You use the other(s) for support in your solitary undertaking. As Margaret Mead said, “Groups help hold each other together, they help to hold each other’s dreams.”
See Retreating with Others: Dream Circle.
An example would be three friends going off together to a small inn or remote campground for the weekend. Each has her own room or tent. They do a dream circle together in the morning, meditate in the afternoon, then come together for dinner. The rest of the time they spend alone. This style of retreat is a good choice for extroverts, giving you something in between total solitude and becoming lost in group dynamics. The group provides a gentle structure, a chance to goof off (perhaps during dinner), and a useful way to reflect on the experience (dream circle), yet the focus of each woman’s retreat is up to her. You make few concessions to the needs of the group and can follow your own way most of the time. Yet if you start to feel lonely or restless or afraid of the time alone or you need to discuss your insights, you know you have like-minded companions nearby.
Why take a friend or small group along? Because if you don’t feel safe, physically and emotionally, on retreat, nothing will happen. If you are afraid to be alone or if you want to spend time in a secluded place, it is often a good idea to have someone along. Anna and Sandy often retreat together at Big Sur, California, where they hike within whistling distance of each other but without speaking or interacting. If you are working out tough or scary emotional issues or are planning an extended retreat, having someone nearby is wise. If you need help with your motivation, a small group can make a difference (meditation retreats often work in this way, although the presence of an experienced teacher is usually an important addition). A tremendous sense of shared purpose and energy can be created when two or more people do retreat work together. In addition, you have someone to check in with when you are back home and your retreat experience begins to fade or you doubt a new path or decision. If you are doing a self-led retreat for the first time, having someone beside you who is doing the same thing can be very reassuring.
What are the disadvantages? Chatter. As women, we often distract ourselves through polite conversation. Chitchat. We take care of others through small talk. The pitfall in retreating with a group, with a friend, or even alone at a retreat center is that you will displace your inward focus and lose insight by chattering about unimportant things at the wrong time. Meals are a prime place to do so; it is easy to start chopping garlic together and end up talking about your weight or your old relationship instead of staying inwardly focused, in sacred space. It isn’t always the act of talking that is depleting; it is more often the subject matter or getting caught up in “helping” another woman.
Another disadvantage of retreating with others is that when you are trying to regain a sense of your own rhythm, fitting into any kind of schedule and compromising with other women may feel too restrictive. You can waste time and energy taking care of the group or your friend instead of tending to your needs. When retreating with others, you must be constantly aware of where your attention and help are directed. Remaining aware in this way can provide a fantastic opportunity to learn about your own process, your moment-to-moment choices and self-talk, but it can also be incredibly tricky.
Stories
One of my favorite shared retreats was with my dear friend Barbra. We set aside one day to sit on the beach from nine to five. We chose an undeveloped beach where there were few people. We spontaneously created an opening ceremony together, drawing a circle in the sand, outlining it with shells and stones, making a sand shrine covered with things that represented our inner and outer lives, burning sage, and praying together. We called a deep listening circle to discuss our friendship, made sand sculptures, napped, swam, walked together and alone, and caught up with each other and ourselves. The time went too fast and we did not do a strong enough closing ceremony, but the feeling of being honest and reconnected persists.
The questions we used are in Retreat Plans: A Friendship Retreat.
This story is from Turning the Wheel: American Women Recreating the New Buddhism by Sandy Boucher:
In Marin County, California, on a summer weekend, thirty women who have come from Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco as well as Marin gather in a secluded house to meditate together. They sit in the large open living room of the house, they do walking meditation in the yard. Silence is strictly observed. There is no formally designated teacher present.
The Women’s Sangha [the first independent, teacherless group of women meditating in the United States] had asked each participant to bring an item of food for the meals. Everyone signed up for chores on a job sheet on the wall.
For two days, the women sit and walk. Shinma Dhammadinna, visiting from Taungpulu Monastery, sits at the front of the room during the meditation periods. A movement session is led by a meditator who is also a dancer and performer. A Theravadin meditation teacher from Insight Meditation Society, who happens to live down the road, drops by to give a short, respectful talk.
At night, the women unroll their sleeping bags on the living room floor and go to sleep. On Sunday they take a silent hike up into the yellow foothills of Mount Tamalpais and sit for an hour in a high meadow. In the afternoon a woman leads some instructions in Vipassana meditation. To end the retreat, another woman guides the loving-kindness or metta meditation.
It is a peaceful, concentrated weekend in which women meditate and are silent together, prepare food, do other chores, each taking responsibility for some aspect of the retreat. On leaving, many women express their gratitude for this opportunity.
Retreats in the World
See Retreat Plans.
By far, my happiest memories when I was a teenager were when I was in the ocean. It was the ultimate retreat for me, the container that was bigger than anything I could put into it. The ocean became my solace no matter what I was going through, something vaster than my particulars. I have never been in one frame of mind, gone in the ocean, and stayed the same. It is a continual baptism.
Jennifer Freed, therapist and educator
Because our lives as women demand that most of us be embedded in a nourishing and sometimes debilitating maze of relationship, work, and commitments, we often find it impossible to carve out enough time for even a mini-retreat. At these times, we need a way to retreat in the midst of crying children, deadlines, and the subway. “Go on retreat with what you’ve got” is what writer and Peer Spirit Circle originator Christina Baldwin believes. If what you’ve got is the drive from home to work, a walk through your neighborhood with your infant nestled on your chest, a half hour stolen from a family holiday dinner to go to the market, or your lunch hour, then, as the saying goes, “Work it, girl.”
Writes Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women Who Run with the Wolves,
For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need. I sit at the feet of the great old trees of my childhood. From that vantage point, I ask my questions, receive my answers, then coalesce my woodland back down to the size of a love note till next time. The experience is immediate, brief, informative.
Last summer, walking on a crowded beach, I realized I could be open to and invaded by the presence of others, or I could draw into myself and be alone with the sound of surf. Wearing sunglasses and a hat helped, but my intention was what gave me solitude. Who hasn’t had the experience of being deliciously alone in a crowd, of feeling that your seat on a darkened plane was a private chamber, of eating alone in a restaurant while the other diners receded out of your consciousness? Or of strolling through a museum, each person caught up in an individual, hushed reverence? The social constraints of most societies collaborate with you: you are not expected to talk to strangers, to share your table, to smile on a busy street. Lunch time, commuter time, even shower time can become retreat time if you conjure the retreat archetype, if you have intentionality.
These kinds of retreats work as a catch-your-emotional-breath time, a time to sift through your recent experiences. They sustain you on your spiritual path. They can enable you to work or to create. I try to approach my writing time as a retreat.
Some women carry talismans to help them feel that these retreats in the world are real. Fingering worry or rosary beads, writing in a purse-sized journal, reading a daily meditation book, wrapping a shawl around your shoulders, slipping on personal stereo headphones while playing soothing music—all these can signal to your heart, “This is a retreat, and no matter how brief, it is important.”
These brief visits to the land of self and solitude feed our quest for richness of meaning and purpose. The creating of such unions between our outer persona and our inner life allows us to hear what our soul needs. Now that may sound grand, but in fact it is very simple. Who hasn’t forgotten what her soul truly needed? When we don’t listen to our authenticity, we become women who believe their souls are found in Melrose Place reruns, Macy’s half-price sales, a child getting into Harvard, or becoming vice president in charge of production. Retreats in the world, for all their lack of romance and bravada, give us a chance to listen to our own souls. We may hear “You need to move your body” or “You are running away from something. If you don’t start dealing with it, you are going to get sick” or “Way to go! Keep up the good work!” Without these regular conversations, we are lost. When we open our lives a sliver for these mundane yet incandescent moments to blossom, we risk becoming the women we want to be, our inner lives blazing on the outside for all to behold.
Stories
This is Christina’s story.
One of my favorite retreats is to get in the car and drive eight hours in an unknown direction. It is a tremendously fruitful time. Either I do it alone or with someone who is very trusted, like my friend Ann. When we have to drive somewhere, we don’t listen to the radio, we just have quiet time and talking time. It is a deep retreat. But if you did it alone, you could take that set of eight tapes on how to be a totally enlightened human being that you’ve never had time to listen to and just listen to it. Take along a little portable tape recorder and talk to yourself; make notes to yourself as insights occur. Don’t listen to anything in the car that is polluting your mind. Silence, driving with the windows open and the wind roaring in, that white noise can be very amazing.
I had an experience about ten years ago when I was driving through Minnesota in July going from one conference to another. Even though I had air conditioning, I didn’t turn it on. I just sat in the roar of this white wind—heat, summer—and I just let my hair blow, and it was as if this breath was in the car with me. I drove through those high corn-fields and rolling hills, drenched in summer. About halfway to my destination I said, “Here is what I am going to do.” I just spoke it out into the day. My intention was so purposeful that I do not remember one word of the actual promise; it was more like a transmission. But when I clicked back in to myself, I had lined up blocks inside of me somewhere, and I followed those blocks. And every now and then, I would do something and find myself saying, “Oh, this must have been one of the things I promised myself.”
What style of retreat you choose, how long you retreat for, and even what you do on retreat doesn’t really matter. All that really matters is the simple act of committing. Of going with a big “Yes, I deserve this, I need this” in your heart. Of trusting yourself enough to get quiet and listen to your wisdom. All the rest is icing on the proverbial cake.