Your Physical and Emotional Containers
That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and the house and I resume the old conversations.
May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
Where will you retreat? What kind of container do you need? Why do I keep using that word container? Am I secretly running a Tupperware racket?
A retreat container holds and carries the energy of your experience. It is your means of enclosing yourself and maintaining liminal space. Without a container, your retreat will either never come alive or never feel like a true retreat, or the energy will slowly leak away, like air escaping a leaky tire. Your container also helps you feel safe, and safety is the precursor to inner work.
A container can be created in several ways. A convincing opening ceremony creates a strong emotional container. Choosing a physical place where you feel sustained and comforted, like your home or a place in nature, creates a container. Solitude creates a container. Support from another person, either before or during your retreat, creates a container. Prayer, visualization, a beloved cape or hat, even your car can create a container. What is important is that you feel physically and psychically enclosed, in a cocoon, set apart, betwixt and between. The boundaries of your container enable you to hold the tension of waiting for your authentic self to communicate, to stick with the work at hand, to journey deeper into your insights and feelings, to be comforted when you are buffeted by raw emotions, and to exult when joy blooms in your heart.
How do you create a strong container?
Choose the Right Physical Setting
Your retreat surroundings are hallowed ground. I have retreated at retreat centers. I have retreated at home. I have retreated at my friend Anna’s cottage. I have retreated in a canoe in the New Mexico desert and the Canadian wilderness. I have retreated in motel rooms, cars, trains, creeks, easy chairs. As Jack Zimmerman, a therapist and retreat coordinator at the Ojai Foundation, says, “The land shapes the retreat. Attunement to place brings shape.” Some places fit some intentions and not others. Choosing or creating your container depends on what you want out of your retreat and what is available to you.
Consider a retreat center. Retreats I have done at the Ojai Foundation were informed by living in a yurt close to the land and by doing much of the retreat outdoors. While there, I know no one can reach me except in a true emergency. I participate in a morning meditation practice and talk with a retreat coordinator. I feel emotionally safe because I know if I become too lonely or unstrung, someone is nearby to reassure me. I am also comforted by feeling the energy of all those who have come to the land before me. That, too, adds to the emotional container.
See Resources: Books Listing Retreat Centers, Leaders, and Adventures.
Thousands of retreat centers around the world offer an amazing diversity of programs. Many are inexpensive or request a donation. Some are available for day use (good for a mini-retreat if you are nearby). When is a retreat center the right fit for you? When you would flourish away from your life; when you need something a particular retreat center offers; when you feel support would be emotionally helpful; when the newness of a place will help you gain perspective; when it feels like a retreat center offers the safest way to be in nature as a woman alone.
When isn’t a retreat center a good fit? If being away from home creates more stress than you need; if being in a new environment or participating in a program is too frightening; if you might sabotage yourself by obsessing over finding the perfect retreat center and therefore wait three years to retreat because you don’t have the money to fly to Thailand; if you are doing only mini-retreats or retreats in the world right now; or if your intention would not be served by peace and quiet. For example, if your retreat intention is “How can I live through my husband’s leaving me?,” you might not want to be welcomed by smiling nuns who envelop you in silence and kindness. You instead may need space to mourn, cry, shriek. Perhaps you want to be at home where you can make all the noise you want, or perhaps you want to stay at your friend’s house in the woods.
What about a retreat at home? Home is free, familiar, and hopefully a comfortable place imbued with your spirit. It will require less energy to prepare, and there is no traveling time. Home is the perfect choice for mini-retreats. For many women, retreating at home is the ultimate in safety and comfort, and it supports intentions that spring from a need to nurture yourself, to make your home a retreat center, to bring your spiritual practice into your ordinary life, to slow down and shed stress, to face grief or disappointment. Home is the only choice when you wish to retreat in the few hours during your child’s nap or on a weekend afternoon when the house is suddenly yours.
Retreating at home is more of a challenge if you are easily distracted, if you will answer the phone, if you have neighbors or family who will drop in, if your children, partner, or roommates will be in the house at the same time and their presence will inhibit or disturb you, or if you live alone and being alone in your home feels too mundane or depresses you. Retreating at home won’t work well if you need outside help sticking to your retreat plan or staying away from energy dilutors like junk food, TV, phone calls, or work around the house. Also, if asking your housemates, partner, or children to leave the house will bring on waves of guilt, you must factor in the added stress. If you are going to end up waxing your dining room table or getting a jump on your taxes and then regret doing so, you need to go somewhere, or you need to let yourself wax while observing your process. Maybe you needed to use this time to get organized. Skip feelings of failure. And next time, take a retreat away from home.
See Retreating at Home, below, and What Will You Do?: Check-In.
A friend’s house can provide a good middle ground between a retreat center and your own home. You (hopefully) won’t feel compelled to wax her table. You’ve left home, so there is a feeling of separation from everyday life. A friend’s home can offer wonderful features, like my friend Anna’s cottage, an utterly feminine, pink place filled with candles, flowers, a garden with a hammock, and a view of the ocean. Retreating at a friend’s house works well if there is something you want to learn or absorb from her space, if you are clear about what the distractions will be, if you can relax and not feel like you are walking on eggshells because you might track mud on the carpet, and if you need to get away from home.
Retreating at a friend’s house might not work well if, as Christina Baldwin joked,
Someone lends you their lake cabin and you think, oh this is wonderful. There is no phone, no TV, and you walk in and there are twenty years of Good Housekeeping magazines piled up. I don’t know what you would do in that situation but I would have to take all that stuff and stick it in a corner because I’m an addict about browsing through reading material. I have to do something to remind me that my intention is not to read 20 years of Good Housekeeping magazines. It’s a foible many of us have, macramé of the mind.
Christina goes on to detail a wonderful way women can support one another.
Say you have a friend who lives in a house with an apartment over the garage and she says you can hide out over the weekend. And you say, “Here’s what I need. I need to know if you would bring me a tray of food that you leave at the back door. I need to know if it is okay if I do some screaming and crying and nobody comes to get me. I need you to remove any reading material.” What if women could learn to provide this space for each other?
Massage therapist Saral Burdette has done just that, setting up a retreat for a friend, drawing a bath, giving her a massage, providing a beautiful place and a little structure. What if you did this for a friend and she reciprocated the favor a few weekends later? This is a loving way to support each other in creating time for retreat.
See Good Ways to Listen: Divine Landscape.
Retreats in nature have shaped my life. From camping alone for the first time on Anacapa Island off the coast of southern California to sitting in my backyard watching crows, the natural world restores me. I feel more emotionally held in nature than anywhere. Reading Annie Dillard, Terry Tempest Williams, Ann Linnea, Valerie Andrews, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, among others, tells me I am not alone. Women in my workshops list nature and water as their best restorers. My first wilderness retreat introduced me to a whole new world. It was the first step in articulating my longing for solitude, sacred space, and making peace with my feminine self. A few years after that retreat, a friend asked, “When did you first feel you were a woman?” I named that retreat, even though I was twenty-five at the time of that retreat. It was my first experience of instinctual femininity, unconstrained by being a lady.
There are many ways to retreat in nature, from a trip led by someone else to a cabin in the woods to a tent on a friend’s wilderness property to a visit to one of the more remote and simple retreat centers. Often, nature will be just one aspect of your retreat. Meandering down a country road listening to the trees, biking in the mountains, roller-blading through your neighborhood, wading in a creek, plucking brown leaves off your houseplants on your city terrace—each can renew you.
When is a nature foray best? When you are stuck in your life, dried out from the pace, sick of noise and pollution and despair. When there is a piece of nature, no matter where or how small—a park, a creek, a hollow—near you that you love (Annie Dillard’s famous Tinker Creek is near a highway). When a wilderness adventure is a lifetime dream. When you can tend your houseplants, terrace garden, or Japanese Zen rock garden.
When isn’t a nature retreat appropriate? When the weather is too harsh. If you, as many women do, feel unsafe being alone in nature. If your physical comfort is an important part of your ability to relax and venture inward. For most women, being too cold and feeling unsafe are the two things that block the ability to settle inward. Watch for these in your planning, but don’t let them stop you from doing something you yearn to do.
See Courage: Support from Others for ideas to make being alone in nature safer.
Another set of retreat locations to consider is bed-and-breakfast inns, hotels, resorts, and spas. The cost of these settings makes retreating in them a rarity or impossibility for most of us. And in this kind of physical container, it can be hard to maintain discipline. You tend to feel you are more on a vacation than on a retreat. Everything is arranged to make you comfortable, pampered, waited on. For exhausted women, this may sound divine. But does it fit your intention? If you need luxury, quiet, breakfast in bed, or a variety of exercise classes, or are afraid to be totally alone, consider these comfy sanctuaries. If seeing people sipping wine at four on the terrace will distract you from your intention, choose a retreat center, call your friends, or rearrange your home.
Please don’t neglect the places you can do a retreat in the world. Find a spot near your work or home that you can slip away to when you need to get out of your house for a mini-retreat or as part of a longer retreat. A rooftop garden, a window seat in your favorite cafe, a carrel in a library, a museum, your car, a fountain, a nature preserve, a historical home, a secluded paseo off a main street, a coffee shop, a seat at the back of the bus, a sleeping compartment on a train, a carriage ride in a park (ever done that alone?), a tennis court, an aquarium, a pier, a church, even the bathroom at work can offer refuge. Once you start looking for these places, you will be amazed at the nooks and niches that beckon to you. Almost anywhere can be a place to withdraw into yourself. If you are doing a lot of retreats in the world (say, to get away from a horrible job), retreat to the same place each time. This will make it easier to slip into an altered, interior state more quickly.
Create Emotional Containment
Emotional containment grows out of two things: your physical container (which often provides most of it) and your opening ceremony. On retreats in the world, when retreating at home, or when you just need to be emotionally held, you can strengthen your container with one or more of these ideas:
See A Woman’s Retreat: Archetypal Herstory.
See Resources.
See Courage: Getting Support from Others.
In the end, creating your container evolves from your intention, your choice of where you will retreat, and your opening ceremony. Give just a little thought to how you will enclose yourself, and the container will take care of itself as your retreat takes on a life of its own.
Questions to Consider When Preparing Your Place
If you need help choosing a place, reflect on these questions:
Deciding where you will retreat may take you five seconds, or it may require a bit of research. To find places, buy or borrow a book listing retreat centers in your area, brainstorm with a friend to think of places close by where you could go, and survey your home with a retreatant’s eye.
All that aside, avoid getting caught up in where you retreat, because in the end the place isn’t what matters. To be on retreat means to take time to step away from your ordinary life to focus on your inner life. It is the interior landscape you are most concerned with. Trust that wherever you retreat will be the perfect place with its own gifts and challenges.
Retreating at Home
Home is the place where you will probably retreat most often. It is also the most challenging place to retreat because it is inextricably entwined with your ordinary life. At home it can be more difficult to alter or transcend your ordinary perceptions—something you want to do on retreat—as well as to gain enough privacy and avoid distractions like cleaning or talking on the phone. Home can simply feel too ordinary a place for a retreat. If this is the case, it helps to transform your retreat area in your home into sacred space.
Food
When preparing to retreat, ask yourself:
For some women, food is a no-stress subject. What you eat and how you eat on your retreat don’t matter a whole lot. You could enjoy creating a three-course meal for yourself, or you could eat only raw carrots and drink rice milk. You don’t need to spend much time on this topic, except to be sure the food on your retreat will be adequate, nurturing, and easy to prepare. You can just prepare a robust soup, rice and beans, steamed veggies, a fresh fruit salad, or a casserole before your retreat.
For the rest of us, food is a big subject. Some of us don’t have issues with food, but we crave to be released from the nightly cry of “What’s for dinner?” and from having to compromise with other people’s tastes. It helps to consider:
Stories
Stories abound of special places that women have discovered and developed in their searches for spiritual solitude. Here are two of them.
During the very stressful and prolonged proceedings to receive tenure, Professor Elizabeth Ellsworth experienced a health crisis that helped her to see both the value of self-care and the importance of retreat and solitude in that self-care. This is from her essay “Claiming the Tenured Body” in The Center of the Web: Women and Solitude edited by Delese Wear:
There is an old pasture close to the farmhouse that I live in (but out of sight and sound). I had saved six straight, ten-foot-long beams out from the bundles of slab wood that we cut into 18-inch lengths for burning in the wood stove. In April, I tied the beams, one by one, to the hitch on the beat-up orange John Deere garden tractor, and dragged them to the top of the pasture. I lined them up in the place I had begun to go to last October, where I sat on a straw mat intending to read or write, but mostly found myself listening to the wind that sounded like the sea and watching the leaves turn red or yellow at the end of each day of the new semester. Everything stirred and breathed.
By April, I knew I wanted to spend much time in that place. I stacked the beams like Lincoln logs to make a low and level foundation under the eight-foot by eight-foot floor of bare cedar logs that I wanted there. I pounded nails to the thunder, lightning, rain, mud, sun, and wind that flew through the pasture all within the same half hour’s time—urgent and enthusiastic visitations by each of the four elements to this tiny platform retreat….
…Casting a space in the world where I would go to hear my breath and my heart. Where I would choose to retire in solitude—a very different form and meaning of solitude than the isolation expected by the tenure track. I sat alone with my journal, in the sun, with pens, pencils, a box of craypas, and asked: What versions of myself-in-the-academy were literally and symbolically killing me—and what versions of myself-in-the-academy might sustain my life and support my passion for learning and teaching?
Writer Valerie Andrews, in her book A Passion for the Earth, writes about her retreat place as a child, beautifully depicting the instinctual nature of retreat and the role of place in it:
As a child I had a secret place. Every day at sunset I visited a grove of birch trees surrounded by a hedge of sweet-smelling privet. At the center was a mound where I would lie down and listen to the steady rhythmic heartbeat of the earth. For seven years I performed this daily ritual; even in the winter I could feel this pulse as though I were connected by a rootlike umbilicus to the dark core of the land.
The grove faced west and formed a kind of kiva or womb-like container. This enclosure had all the power of an ancient shrine; it was a place of dying and becoming. As the light intensified and left the sky awash in crimson flames, I learned a way of being in the world and in transition. Something within me changed as the earth underwent its own transfiguration and as the day’s activity gave way to the long, slow respiration of the night.