Courage

Listening to your heart is not simple. Finding out who you are is not simple. It takes a lot of hard work and courage to get to know who you are and what you want.

Sue Bender, quoted in The Feminine Face of God

When I interviewed women for this book, I asked, “What would you most want to see in a book about retreating for women?” Interestingly, most said, “Permission.” Permission to go. Permission to enjoy. Permission to descend. Permission to get wild. Permission to rage. Permission to be. Permission to move on. Permission to wallow. Permission to be ecstatic. I thought, “Yes, I am good at giving permission.” But permission implies getting consent from someone. The only person’s consent you need is your own, for if you place the power of going on retreat in someone else’s hands, you are sunk. My encouragement, your best friend’s prod out the door, or your partner’s help taking care of the dog or the kids is useful; it can open the door. But only you can walk through it.

Do you hear a loud sucking noise? That’s you pulling yourself out of your life. Nature abhors a vacuum. Something or someone will rush in to take your place.

Giving Yourself Support

Learning to support yourself is an essential retreat tool, the way you come to say yes to your time apart. There are many ways to give yourself support. You undoubtedly have ways of doing this already or you wouldn’t continue to survive. Read over my favorite methods below, recall your own, use whatever works. The method you choose doesn’t matter, as long as the way you support yourself is with kindness and honesty. Support never sounds like browbeating, never produces guilt, never threatens. Support can push you, excite you, even cause a healthy frisson of fear, but it never brings on heart-stopping anxiety. Here are two exercises for giving yourself support.

• When you are having doubts about retreating, whether at the very beginning of articulating your desire or in the middle of your retreat, grab a piece of paper and a pen and write down everything that you are saying to yourself about why you can’t go, can’t stay, or can’t be present. Drag the doubts, the naysayers, the critics, the guilt, the shame into the light. You must write down your doubt or speak it aloud. Keeping it in your head lets the demons continue to feed on their own vitriol. Seeing it on the page or hearing it aloud allows you to see it for what it is: nothing useful. Sometimes this calms you enough to enjoy yourself. Other times, you will need the aid of a supportive voice that encourages you to retreat or loves you into staying with your retreat.
  
  To conjure this supportive voice, close your eyes and imagine someone you love very much—a child, your best friend, a sibling, your partner. Recall a time in which you supported this beloved one to be kind to himself or herself, to risk a new adventure, or to recover from a heartbreak. Hear yourself giving candid, sincere encouragement; really listen to your words. Then recall how your body felt when you were talking—righteous, determined, hopeful.
  
  Pick up your pen. Using the same sincere, encouraging voice you just recalled, holding the good feeling in your body, write why you can retreat, why you can enjoy yourself, why you can stick with it. Talk to yourself the same way you would talk to someone you love.
  
  Of course, what often happens when you start to talk to yourself this way is that the negative, harsh voices simply chorus louder. Write down or speak aloud their kvetching. Then respond with your encouraging voice. You will find yourself dialoguing back and forth between the encouraging voice and the critical voice. You want to avoid power struggles and shouting matches between these two selves. Your kind voice can use active listening skills with your critical voice, encouraging new information by saying, “Tell me more about how you feel,” and asking for clarification: “What made you feel this way?” or “What do you need now to feel better?” This might sound like Sybil taking a class in communication skills, but, hey, it works.
  
  If at any point you feel lost or stuck, close your eyes, relax your body by breathing deeply and slowly, then recall another time in which you loved and supported someone. Again, turn that attention to yourself.
  
  You can use this technique anytime. It doesn’t take long. It is always a tender way to clear up mind static.
• This exercise was drawn from Stephanie Dowrick’s inspiring Intimacy and Solitude Workbook. Choose a word that expresses a quality you need to help you retreat. It might be courage, spirit, energy, aliveness, determination, self-respect, self-worth, tenacity, clarity, perspective, insight, or stubbornness. Write it in the middle of a sheet of paper. Close your eyes and hold that word in your imagination. Reflect on its meaning for you. What associations come to mind? Jot down any thoughts you have.
  
  Close your eyes again. Go deeper into the word. Praise it in your mind. Desire it. Reach out to it. Remember times you have seen that quality in yourself, in others. Write down further associations, allowing them to radiate out from your seed word, weaving around the page.
  
  Close your eyes again and assume a physical pose that reflects your word. Be, for a moment, this quality. Express it with your body, your posture, your energy, your breathing, your facial muscles. Be the quality for a few moments, then write down any additional thoughts while maintaining your physical pose.
  
  End by reading over what you have written and summarizing what you learned by writing a few lines finishing the sentence “What I now see with regard to this quality is….”

Ease into the Idea

If the idea of retreating gives you the shakes but you still feel a desire to try it, experiment with one of these practices. They can also act as little “warm-ups to self” when you do them in the hours or days before a retreat.

• Ask yourself first thing in the morning, before you even get out of bed, “What can I do to nurture myself today?” It may take a few days before you get answers, but ideas will bubble to the surface. You may want to jot them down in your journal; these are great clues to what you can do on your retreat.
• Visualize yourself on retreat. Do this in bed in the morning, at night before you slip off into sleep, in the shower, or on your lunch break. Take just a minute or two. See the place you will retreat. If you don’t know what it looks like, fantasize. If you are retreating at home, see the room you will spend the most time in arranged just the way you want. Smell the air. What scents do you wish to inhale? Pine air? Roses? Bread baking? The tangy pungency of chaparral? See yourself in this wondrous setting. See yourself relishing a particular retreat activity, perhaps something you feel shy about or afraid of doing. Feel yourself relaxing and deepening into yourself. Perhaps you drink a tart lemonade, sip a steaming cup of mint tea, or mindfully eat a crisp apple. What are you wearing? What textures caress your skin? Feel the muscles in your face and neck softening. Hear the silence or exquisite music or the sharp cry of a hawk. Say to yourself, “I can do this. I can enjoy this.”
  
  Notice what fantasies arise as you visualize. Before I went on a two-day retreat, I noticed that when I visualized myself sitting in morning meditation practice, tears were streaming down my face. I imagined that I was finally letting go of all the grief I was carrying. Then I stepped back and considered what a high expectation that was—letting go of all the grief. Noticing the fantasy helped me recognize the wish that lay behind it—to attend to grief I was carrying—and helped me open myself to grieving on this retreat. Making room for these thoughts deepened my experience considerably.
• Recall a moment when you felt authentically alive, very you, very centered and relaxed. It could be a moment from today, last week, ten years ago—a moment when making love, when holding your child, when working in your garden. Whatever first comes to your mind is perfect. Fully enter this moment. Recall how enthralled you felt, how comfortable you were in your own skin. Recall details: how your body felt, what you were wearing, who you were with, what your surroundings were. Take a minute or two to recall what each of your senses, including your heart, felt.

Getting Support from Others

While being able to support yourself internally is vital, often we also need outside help. Many of us need someone to care for our children, our pets, our businesses. We may need someone to bounce ideas off of or to give us emotional support. We may need someone to check in with so we feel connected and safe. When Diana went on a mini-retreat, she wanted her husband Herb’s support. “His first reaction was to roll his eyes. But when he saw how hurt I was and really wanted his support in this, he came around and made space for it. He knows I would do this whether he approved or not; I think it was a matter of relating how important the resignation and preparation for the retreat are to me.” Diana learned two important things about asking for support: make it clear how important the support is to you, and don’t ask for permission. We can’t expect our partners and friends to read our minds. We have to risk being vulnerable by showing them how much we need their help. We have to be willing to give them time to adjust to what can seem like a strange or threatening idea. But if your partner can’t get with the program, be certain you aren’t asking for a blessing. To ask for support and be denied it is to know you can go elsewhere. To ask for a blessing is to know that if it doesn’t come, you may not go. You may dry up and blow away waiting for it. Ask for baby-sitting, ask for emotional succor, perhaps ask for a reality check, but do not ask for permission.

Be conscious of whom you do ask for help. Don’t sabotage yourself by asking for help from someone who will make you feel frivolous, selfish, or guilty. Your support person must be someone who is both responsible (she isn’t going to encourage you to take a month off when you’ve been working at your job only two weeks) and imaginative (he sees past obstacles you think are insurmountable). Most of all, she or he must believe in your right to retreat. And if you think you know no one to help you, consider asking a therapist, a spiritual director, or a retreat coordinator or even calling someone at a crisis intervention line; there are options for everyone.

After you ask someone for their support, you must let the support in. I know very few women who don’t have trouble receiving emotional support, whether in the form of compliments, offers of help, or emotional sustenance. Yet when we block emotional support, we reinforce the idea that we are unlovable and unworthy. Let’s say you ask your partner to support you in going away for a weekend retreat, and he or she says, “Yes! Honey, you deserve this. You need this. What can I do?” What if, instead of feeling supported, you pick a fight? “You could never do it. I’ll have to cook and freeze casseroles, catch up on the laundry, and leave you a printed schedule for the kids’ weekend activities. By the time I get ready to go on this retreat, I’ll be too exhausted. Forget it.” Or what if you suddenly find yourself losing interest in going? Of course, this is all hypothetical. None of us would sabotage the emotional support that a partner offered or block the help that is needed to make a retreat a reality. No way, not us.

When we ask for help, we reveal ourselves as frail human beings with needs instead of invincible mythical combinations of Mother Teresa, Jane Fonda, Oprah Winfrey, and Martha Stewart. When we ask for help, we may also have to face how much we have been doing for others that they could have been doing for themselves. We may be brought face-to-face with how isolated we have become and the reality that there may be no one with whom we feel close enough to ask for help. All of this can be enough to stop us cold. It can simply feel too frightening to ask for help or to let it in. Work with your fear. Dare to ask for help. Dare to accept the offers of dog-sitting and casseroles. Dare to have your reality confirmed: “Yes, you do need a retreat. Go for it!”

See Softening Fear, below.

Support on Retreat

On certain retreats, you need to be held. You need another soul to be thinking about you, sending you good thoughts and energy. Or you may need to know someone who can contact you in case of an emergency. If you are retreating in the middle of a busy household, you may need someone outside your room fielding phone calls, keeping kids quiet, leaving meals. Or you may need someone you can contact if you need specific help (for example, your meditation teacher for help with your meditation practice) or emotional support (a close friend to talk over grief about losing your job). Or you may simply need someone close by during your retreat, reassuring you that you are connected to the world and safe.

Needing support on a retreat can puzzle some women, as in, “But I thought I was retreating to be by myself. Why would I want to have anyone near?” For others, support on a retreat can be a very welcome notion, one that makes retreating a comforting and exciting possibility instead of a lonely, daunting impossibility. The most important thing about arranging support on retreat is that if you want it, get it. If your heart whispers for a little companionship or reassurance and you don’t heed that whisper, your retreat may be compromised. As I’ve already said, if you don’t feel safe (physically and emotionally) on retreat, little will happen. You can’t be guided by your inner knowing because the static of fear or worry will be too loud. When in doubt, arrange for support.

If you are going on a retreat of longer than a day or two, consider designating a check-in person. A mind game that can happen on longer retreats is that you become convinced something awful has happened at home. Your child has contracted malaria, your colleague at work has gone schizoid and is telling everyone you are embezzling millions, or you left the iron, stove, and blow dryer on and your house is engulfed in a five-alarm fire. Knowing that you have a check-in person who knows how to reach you, and that everyone important in your life knows how to reach that person in an emergency, creates an effective anxiety buster. Your check-in person interrupts you only in an emergency. (Define emergency before you leave; it is not running out of toilet paper, getting stood up by some jerk, or losing car keys.)

Another kind of support you can arrange for is asking someone to think about, pray for, or visualize or meditate on behalf of you during your retreat. You can even set aside certain times of the day for both of you to sit in meditation or pray. When someone does this for you, you feel connected and remembered, and it reinforces your sense that your retreat is valuable and worthwhile.

Having someone who is skilled in matters of the psyche or spirit available to you, either in person or by phone, is an excellent idea if you are feeling particularly anxious about retreating, if you are retreating to deal with strong, heavy subjects, or if you are practicing a spiritual discipline in which you need guidance from time to time. Choose an experienced retreat coordinator (available at retreat centers, churches, temples), a spiritual director, or a therapist as your support person. In some instances, a very balanced and loving friend can also fulfill this kind of support, but choose wisely and don’t settle for a friend when you want more professional help because you don’t think you are worth it.

See Retreating with Others for more options and Retreat Plans: A One-Day Retreat with a Friend.

Not that support from friends and spouses isn’t valuable. When retreating in the middle of a busy home, spouses and roommates can be invaluable in keeping others away from your room or rooms, in preparing meals, perhaps even in silently meeting you for meditation once or twice a day. You might also ask a friend to be your retreat partner; the two of you retreat at the same time although alone in your own homes, with certain times set aside to talk on the phone or walk silently in nature together. Sharing your solitary experiences in this way can also enhance your retreat.

As you form your plans for retreat, listen if you need to be sustained by others. Too often we are more comfortable doing the sustaining than asking to be sustained. Asking for support and allowing yourself to need could prove to be the central teaching of your retreat.

Softening Fear

Many of us fear being alone. May Sarton captured this in Journal of a Solitude when she wrote, “My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there…. It may be outwardly silent here but in the back of my mind is a clamor of human voices, too many needs, hopes, fears.” On retreat, everything you ordinarily do is gone: answering phones, wiping noses, entertaining clients, carpooling, writing reports, scrubbing the bathroom tile. When you’re in the middle of your crazy, repetitive life you think, “If I could just get a break.” But when you finally get that break, you may feel unmoored, anxious, frightened by the open stretch, the field of possibility. Life’s busyness dries us out, but it also provides a fabulous escape, allowing us to fend off disturbing questions and feelings, enabling us to keep from looking too closely at ourselves or our relationships. Some of your fear may be fear of change, of the unknown. This is a fear that I believe is hardwired into our brains; it is inescapable. So notice it, give yourself room to feel it, and then keep moving forward toward your intention. You may be afraid of feeling a bottomless rage, a floating sadness, a wild joy, an intimacy with the Divine. You may be afraid of losing your connection to others, for who are you if you aren’t a wife, mother, lover, daughter, friend, success or failure, baker or writer? Mostly, I believe, fear arises because we are afraid of seeing our truth, of getting to know the bare bones of who we are and what we feel, with no busyness or relationship to distract us.

Mary Beth Holleman recounts in her essay “The Wind in My Face” in Solo:

This is among the safest places to camp in Prince William sound…. I’ve got plenty of water and food, a dry tent, a hand-held radio…. I know I am safe. My fear of being alone is a fear of finding out what I’m feeling.

Alone we have no distractions to invoke. On retreat, when you start to feel sorrow about something that happened five years ago, you can’t turn on the TV or start a conversation with a roommate. When you have set aside time to reflect on a decision, you are forced to look at past choices you may regret and be honest with yourself about what you truly want.

Fear is good. It is the first step toward waking up from the deadening trance of modern life. It can sharpen your senses, engage your interest, widen your vision, light a fire under your kettle, clarify your intention, and glue you to it until you come out the other side having turned fear into knowledge.

When we are alone, we may worry about being disconnected, missing something, being abandoned, never being chosen again. When you choose solitude, you are forced to remember all the times you had it and didn’t want it and all the times you wanted it and couldn’t get it. Memories of riding home from a bar in the back seat because your date ran into his old girlfriend and had to give her a ride home (but why are you sitting in the back seat?) may flood your mind during a meditation session. Or you may find yourself obsessing over a meeting you know is taking place while you are gone. “How many comments will be made about my absence?” Or worse, “What if no one even notices I’m gone?”

Any retreat outside your home, even an afternoon stroll in a park, brings up physical safety issues. This fear is real. Women alone are often women in danger. Women alone are women vulnerable to assault. You must provide for your safety. Take only acceptable risks. Yet be aware that fear can very effectively oppress us. It is a fine line between acting responsibly and letting fear for your physical safety turn you into a prisoner.

Here are some practices you can use when you feel fearful.

• Before you retreat, talk with your fear. It is less frightening to have this conversation while you are still ensconced in your life, although talking with your fear is a very useful practice to use on retreat as well.
  
  Read over what you wrote in Intention in response to “What I fear happening on a retreat is….” Sit at a table with two chairs. Become your fear. Do it with your posture, your face, your breath. (Yes, you may feel silly. No one will see you or know what you are doing, and anyway, stopping because you feel silly is as effective as stopping because you are afraid.) Now, spontaneously write as fear, answering the question “Fear, what do you want?” After you have explored that question thoroughly, move to the other chair and be yourself. What do you want to ask your fear? Do so, in writing or aloud. Physically move back and forth between chairs and roles until you feel done. If you feel stuck, use these additional questions to keep your dialogue going:

See Good Ways to Listen for a definition of spontaneous writing.

Fear, what are you hiding?

Fear, what gifts do you bring me?

Fear, how can we work together on this retreat?

After doing this, can you pinpoint one or two simple actions you can take to help you work with your fear so that you can continue? Concentrate especially on satisfying fears about your physical safety.

• Remind yourself your solitude is chosen. “I must trust that if I choose to spend time alone, the rest of the world, my world, will still be there for me when I am ready to return. I must trust that my friends will not abandon me if I choose to spend time by myself; I must trust that I will not lose control or power by being alone, apart for awhile,” writes Mara Sapon-Shevin in “Reclaiming the Safety of Solitude” in Women and Solitude. She ends her essay with

I can choose to be alone.

I can be alone and still be fully connected.

I can be alone and completely powerful.

I can be alone with myself, not hiding from others.

I can be alone and safe, alone and strong.

Make up your own mantra, your own poem of strength that addresses your fears. Recite it whenever you feel the need.

• If your level of anxiety about retreating feels too high or if your mood swings are very wide, from anxiety to elation, start with a mini-retreat of a few hours or a half-day.
• Remember that experiencing fear, confusion, loneliness, boredom, anger, or other uncomfortable feelings during your retreat is a normal, even unavoidable, response. Staying with your feelings is the only way to transform them into something more whole.

See Uncomfortable Beginnings, Middles, and In-Betweens and Gathering the Whole: The Feeling Spiral

Sabotage

Getting ready to retreat can sometimes feel like launching an international spy mission: people are out to get you. Your child suddenly needs you. Your dog has to go to the vet. Your mother can’t be left alone. Every weekend is filled with houseguests and parties. You get a bad chest cold.

When sabotage strikes, your courage and resolve are desperately needed, along with the negotiation skills of a United Nations executive.

To go on a retreat is to invite change. Change provokes anxiety. You and the people you are in relationship with have a lot invested in things staying the way they are. When you say, “I am taking some time for myself,” the alarm bells go off. Inevitably, you will encounter resistance, both from within yourself and from others.

The trickiest kind of sabotage is self-induced. Sometimes a cold is just a cold, sometimes it is a ruse you produce to trick yourself out of going, and sometimes getting a cold before a retreat is your psyche and body’s way of saying, “I’m not ready to do this. Hold up.”

How do you know the difference between self-sabotage that springs from fear and what appears to be self-sabotage but is instead a well-founded message of caution from your psyche? When are you are creating obstacles out of fear of being intimate with yourself, resistance to getting what you truly want, and fear of what others might think, and when do you need to slow down, alter your plans, or listen to your worries?

See Stuck in the Airport of Life.

Ask yourself. Be quiet and check in with yourself. “Why am I dragging my feet about retreating?” Look at your behavior. Does it feel self-protective, like you just can’t get the energy together to plan your retreat or nothing interests you much? Perhaps you are trying to slow yourself down and need to wait a few days. When I am procrastinating, if I stop relentlessly pushing myself and simply wait, after a few days or weeks something shifts, and suddenly, easily, I am able to move forward. I work at differentiating between resistance that needs to be honored because the time is not ripe, and resistance that springs from self-loathing or fear.

Self-sabotage that does spring from fear feels suspiciously self-damaging, like when you keep “forgetting” to call the retreat center. When every day after you have shared another bitch fest lunch with colleagues, on the walk back to work, you look longingly at a tucked away cafe where you know resides the sweetest, privatest little corner window seat, just perfect for a retreat in the world.

How can you help yourself and discern when to move forward and when to change tactics? Scan this list to see which suggestions resonate.

See Courting Yourself.

• Do you feel you need more love and nurturance? Resistance grows when you hate yourself for having it. Always, always listen to your resistance. Talk to her—ask her why she is hanging around. Take her out to eat. Give her little gifts. Have faith in yourself that you will go when you are ready. Faith and self-kindness create trust.
• Look for the family messages. Are you challenging family myths by taking time alone? Did your mother retreat? Your grandmother? What would your sister, cousin, brother, father say about this venture of yours? Do you feel guilty that you are giving yourself something that other women in your family could not give themselves? What role has the work ethic played in your history? What messages about self-care and leisure time did you imbibe while growing up? What beliefs do you hold now?
• Take a mini-retreat or a retreat in the world instead, or scale back your plans.
• Use positive self-talk to get some energy going.
• Ask, “Is there something I need to alter in my plan that will make me feel better about going?” Perhaps you are challenging yourself without proper preparation. Perhaps you have consented to go with others when you really want to be alone.
• Retreat with someone else, reserve a room or cabin and put down a nonrefundable deposit, or engage in plans that are difficult to extract yourself from.
• Recognize the beliefs you hold about taking time for yourself. Are you having a hard time going because you don’t think you are worth it? Do you feel it might be dangerous to declare yourself separate? Perhaps you are experiencing “an underlying discomfort with separateness and individuality that has its roots in our early family experience, where the unspoken expectation may have been that we keep a lid on our expressions of self,” writes psychotherapist Harriet Lerner in her classic The Dance of Anger. It can help to remember that you are choosing your solitude and to make plans for connecting with people you love upon your return. This is especially true for women who live alone.
• Ask yourself, “How will I feel if I don’t retreat?” If the answer is “Good” or “Relieved,” you may want to put this off for a while or try a short mini-retreat or talk with someone who knows your life and personality. If the answer is “Sad,” “Bereft,” “I need to go,” then you must work with your resistance and go.

See Courage.

See Returning Home.

What about when others are resisting your desire to have some time alone? Partners, children, parents, and friends can be threatened when you say, “I need some time alone.” We may encounter hurt feelings: “What’s wrong with our relationship? Aren’t you happy? Why do you want to spend your free time alone when you could spend it with me? Don’t you love me, mommy?” We may be accused of being selfish, self-centered, or spoiled, as “In my day, women never did that.” Doris Grumbach wrote in 50 Days of Solitude,

I had told people of my intention to be alone for a time. At once I realized they looked upon this declaration as a rejection of them and their company. I felt apologetic, even ashamed, that I would have wanted such a curious thing as solitude, and then sorry that I had made a point of announcing my desire for it. I should have hidden the fact that I wished to be alone, “like a secret vice,” as Anne Morrow Lindbergh described it in Gift from the Sea.

What can you do?

• Be ready for opposition. When you are doing mini-retreats, the cries of “I need you” will be less. The longer and larger your retreats, the more resistance or “countermoves” you will encounter. Your job is “to keep clear about [your] own position in the face of a countermove—not to prevent it from happening or to tell the other person that he or she should not be reacting this way,” writes Harriet Lerner. She goes on to say that to control the reactions of people around us is impossible. “We not only want to make a change; we want the other person to like the change that we make.” Doesn’t that sound familiar? Realize you can be sympathetic to others’ negative reactions, but you can neither control those reactions nor let them stop you.
• Clarify your position. Why are you retreating? Information can dispel anxiety. Tell your child. Tell your partner. Sometimes we create trouble by acting fishy because we don’t believe what we are doing is worthwhile. When we are confident and sure, we communicate a cleaner, clearer message. If necessary, pretend you are confident, for acting confident can inspire true confidence.
• If you are feeling guilty about leaving your family, partner, or job, use that guilt to show yourself what you need to do before you leave. If I am feeling guilty about leaving my daughter for a weekend, I can examine that guilt. What part feels real and what part feels ancient and compulsive? Maybe I can skip yoga for one week to spend more time with my daughter and concentrate on being truly present when I am with her. I can wrap up a little present for my partner, Chris, to give to her while I am gone. I can affirm to myself that she will be with Chris, her father and an equal partner in raising her. Of course, there is danger in this approach, for you may overfunction, doing for others what they could do for themselves and burning out before you get away.
• Saral, a massage therapist and longtime retreatant, feels that it is important to take responsibility for taking a retreat. Before a three-month retreat, she “wrote a hundred cards for my husband, each for a different reason. ‘If you miss my body,’ ‘If you miss my hands,’ ‘If you are angry with me,’ etc. On each card I wrote him a little note or a quote. This way it didn’t feel all about me. It’s important not to blow off the people you are in relationship with.” Jan left hidden notes for her nine-year-old daughter, including one wrapped around the toothpaste (“You remembered without me nagging. You’re the best!”). On retreat, Alice found two fire stones, which, when struck together, make sparks. She gave these to her partner and told him they symbolized her experience. “Sometimes I literally felt like I was on fire. Other times I felt like I was flickering out.”

Use Check-In to prevent this from happening.

When You Retreat, You Retreat for the World

When you retreat, you are retreating for everyone in your life. Your retreat affects others. Benefits are felt by the people around you. Picture the medieval anchoress in her cell. She inspired and influenced an entire city by her example. You may only set out for a drive or a walk, but your example will affect others, too. You are showing the people in your world that women can value time for themselves. Taking time away to affirm your values may lead you to make better decisions in the world or to parent better or to remember someone old and forgotten in your community. When you retreat, you refuel, and this allows you to return able to give more authentically. Away from the world, you will find that ideas on how to enrich the lives of others will occur to you spontaneously, along with the energy to implement those ideas. You are not being selfish in going on a retreat, for the definition of the word selfish is a “total disregard for others.” When you retreat, you are showing how much you value the people you love, because when you return you will be able to give from your abundance of energy and love instead of scraping the bottom of the barrel for a few leftover dregs. You replenish the energies of others on a psychic level and can shift stuck relationships to new ground. On Buddhist retreats, the benefits of the retreat are dedicated to someone, often “for the benefit of all sentient beings.” Remember that any retreat, any conscious time you take for yourself with an open heart, creates change.

Stories

This is McKenna’s story of her first retreat.

I was looking for a way to connect to that something that I describe as the center energy of the universe (or of all the universes). I believe all of nature comes from that source, and I have wanted to connect to it and be in rhythm with it in some way.

My intention was, “How could I be alone in nature as a first step in trusting nature and trusting myself?” As much as I have wanted to connect with nature, I have become increasingly and paralyzingly fearful of it. I wanted to shift out of my comfort zone and take a risk.

I started out for my retreat on a drizzling morning. I planned to spend about two hours alone on some undeveloped oceanfront acreage but when I got there and looked into its rugged terrain, a huge wave of fear came over me and I said out loud, “I can’t go in there.” I headed off to find another trail I knew of, but when I got there, I saw a small clearing, no trail, and dense forest beyond. I couldn’t head into that wilderness either.

By now I felt like a failure. I was ready to go home. I persevered because I didn’t want to disappoint myself. I drove to the botanical gardens (a large outside garden) and gave myself permission to take my first steps into nature there.

At the beginning of the trail, I had my opening ceremony. It was a moment when I breathed deeply and repeated to myself several times, “I am completely safe.” As I walked along the trail for the first ten minutes I encountered a few people, all of whom were a great comfort to me. During the second ten minutes I encountered no one. I felt isolated and vulnerable, and a wave of fear came over me. I turned around and headed back, so I could be near people. During my forty-five minutes in nature I had moments of taking in the awesome majesty of life, this planet, this universe. I also had great moments of fear. My closing ceremony was thanking the space where I had been and the universe for protecting me. I also made a promise to come back and take another baby step “into the wild”!