“I don’t want to be heading home. I’m not ready.” The sun had slipped below the horizon. The white, leading edges of the predicted storm, wispy trails of clouds I call mare’s tails, had turned magenta and orange. The day was done. My old life was not. It was somewhere at the base of that beautiful sunset. Same house, same people, same patterns waiting for me to rejoin them. But I was not the same, I had no intention of simply slipping back into the old routines…. This second half of the trip had to be about preparing and rebuilding.
Ann Linnea, Deep Water Passage
What will it be like when I go home? If you’ve been gone for several days or a week or more, you may feel fear and dread at this question. Will I still love my partner? Will I hate my house? Will I despise being a mom? Will I refuse to go to work on Monday morning? Will I decide to radically alter my life? How can everything seem the same when I feel so different? How will I make time for me, for more retreats, for what I like to do, now that I have tapped into this hunger? Will I lose everything I learned, gained, and found on retreat, especially my sense of self, my center?
Paired with these questions might be an incredible hunger, an ache, to see and touch the people or place you love. I often find myself on the drive or flight home from a long retreat literally straining forward in my seat, I’m so eager to get home. These two reactions, dread and eagerness, can mix together to form a perplexing ambiguity. You can end up feeling like you are waiting for a thunderstorm to break on a still, humid August afternoon in an Indiana cornfield. If you’ve been retreating for only a few minutes or hours, the feeling about going home may be “So soon?” You may feel sudden, immense tiredness, irritability, or an attitude of “Why bother? What did ten minutes accomplish?”
The unadorned fact is that returning to your everyday life is always a little rough. It is always a letdown—a bigger letdown the longer you were gone or the richer your experience. Either you didn’t have enough time or you fear losing what you found. It may seem that everything from the weather to your boss to your six-year-old is in league to rip every shred of peace and self-knowledge you just gained away from you. “I like to come home to a clean house and the kids asleep, then start the next day as normal as possible. If I come home to chaos, I want to kill myself. The whole experience gets diminished,” recounts Diane, a business owner and mother of two. Frankie said a few days after her retreat, “I already need to go again.” You may see your renewed peacefulness draining away at an alarming rate. If you have a particularly bad reentry, you may use it as a reason not to retreat again.
The fruits of your retreat, unprotected, cannot withstand the onslaught of profane space and ordinary life. Preparing to return home and performing a closing ceremony offer some protection and will help make your return easier and keep the spirit of your retreat alive longer. On mini-retreats, this preparation, no matter how brief, will strengthen your resolve to retreat again and, over time, will forge a conduit of peace and perspective running from your retreats into your daily life.
Prepare
Read this chapter before or during your retreat.
Preparing for Reentry
What will make it easier for you to return to your ordinary life after your retreat? What situations, distractions, problems, habits, or people is it good to avoid for a while? What will rob you of your restored good nature faster than anything? For Diana after a night away, it is a dirty house. For Loni after an hour alone at the park, it is getting stuck in traffic. For Jackie, after visiting her best friend in a seaside town, it is coming home to an empty house. Before and/or on your retreat, spend a few moments considering how you can make your return home more pleasant and self-nurturing. What will make it easier? Asking your partner to take the kids out for pizza so that you can return to an empty house? Scheduling a massage or other treat for the day after you return? Making dinner plans with friends you love and feel safe with? Avoiding high-traffic routes or rush hour?
Consider:
One coming-home-from-a-long-retreat strategy that works for me is giving myself mini-retreats over the next couple of days. Examples are a massage, a yoga class, a walk alone, and a hot bath. Taking even more retreat time is, of course, very difficult to do because I feel I have already been selfish to my family and taken too much time off from work. But if I can allow myself a little more pleasure, to truly take it in and enjoy it, I have something to look forward to, and it helps prevent the Puritan backlash syndrome (see below).
If you live alone or if your children have recently moved out, you may need to reenter by connecting with a friend or partner. Take care of yourself. Don’t wait to make plans until after you return; call or write a friend before you leave or, if you didn’t have time before, then call during your retreat.
If you are doing a mini-retreat or a retreat in the world and you feel every time you return the benefits of your retreat are wiped out within two minutes, set aside a bit of your retreat time for a leisurely reentry. If you have an hour and your retreat is going to be in the park, come back fifteen minutes early and putter around your home or office without engaging with others. You might have to hide in your bedroom or behind a closed door, and be sure not to answer the phone. Ease back into life.
Backlash Remedy
After you have given yourself a retreat lasting longer than a few hours, you may sometimes experience the backlash effect, also called the Puritan backlash syndrome. This is a feeling of guilt that presents itself as goody-goody or overcaretaking behavior. You may decide to stay up all night writing every person you have neglected to keep in touch with. You may start a strict new diet, composed primarily of soy cheese and wheat grass juice. You may be drawn to wear a hair shirt and carry a small leather whip.
This is behavior to be wary of.
Sometimes on retreat you get a brilliant idea, some new project you want to do so badly you can’t wait to get started. You don’t want to waste the inspiration. The new behavior or project you are starting feels powerfully self-affirming. This is good. It doesn’t involve hair shirts. But the opposite reaction, feeling guilty that you’ve had a good time, that you have done something for yourself, can throw you into wanting to make up for having been gone. You restrict, push, and even punish yourself, often by doing really nice but rather over-the-top things for others (making every item for a giant school bake sale). Then, like a pendulum, you swing (more like careen) in the other direction (for example, eating every item you just baked). If you find yourself in this self-punishing or overdoing-for-others mode, immediately give yourself a treat. Ask yourself, “What do I really, really want right now?” Whatever the answer (okay, sex with Sean Connery might not be possible right this minute), give it to yourself. No substitutes. If you want a banana split, don’t have a low-fat banana muffin. If you want a massage, don’t go for a run. If you need to be alone again, sit down with your partner and your kids and tell them you are struggling. Remind them it has nothing to do with them. Tell whomever you share your life with that by keeping the good stuff of retreat fresh, you will be a more pleasant person to live with.
Coming Home to Your Relations
It is almost always threatening to an intimate partnership to consciously take time away from each other. Even in the most egalitarian of relationships, a ripple is registered on both of your unconscious minds. You have gone somewhere where he or she can never follow. What happens on your retreat is a secret. It cannot be told. It is beyond words. Yes, this is true even when it doesn’t seem like very much happened or when you were gone for only an hour. Great care must be taken to reenter the relationship after a retreat, especially an extended retreat. You will need to communicate in a way that brings the retreat into your relationship and reassures both of you of your connection, without diminishing the privacy and sacredness of your experience.
“What did you do all that time? Did you miss me? Do you still love me? Why do you need so much time alone?” These are the questions (said and unsaid) that might greet you at home. These questions are not paranoid attempts to control your every move but rather are signs of your partner’s fears. Be prepared to reassure your partner in a way that he or she can hear. Ask yourself, “What is my partner’s greatest fear in our relationship? How does my leaving exacerbate that fear?” We fear being abandoned, sold at a garage sale like last year’s Thigh Master or ginzu gadget. We fear our lover’s discovering that being away is better than being with us. We fear change. Even though we may consciously want the best for our lover, the infant in us wants everything to stay the same.
Prepare your homecoming. If you’ve been gone for a weekend or longer, meet outside your home. This is an especially good idea if you have kids or work together. Take a few moments outside your shared habitat to connect before you are sucked back into the whirlwind. Start by thanking your partner not only for managing the practical while you were gone but for supporting you in deepening your inner life. Ask what he or she has been doing in life and has been feeling about your being gone. When the time comes to talk about your experience, have a metaphor handy to convey the spirit of your time apart. “It was liking hitting a home run with all the bases loaded.” “I felt as powerful as that day we hiked Mount Shasta.” “It was like church when the meditation time makes you feel really calm.” Remember to mention missing your partner. Mention any anxiety, loneliness, or fears you had. The ones at home like to know it wasn’t all cake and roses.
You may feel like warning the one you love that you may be irritable for a while. Reassure him or her that it isn’t because you don’t want to be there but that making the transition from sacred time to profane time is jolting. Strive to keep the communication lines open. Some couples and families with older children find that using a shared journal or notes to communicate allows things to be said that would otherwise be forgotten. Whatever you do, don’t avoid talking about your experience. If you come in the door, even after a retreat of a few hours, and your partner asks, “What was it like?” and you say, “Oh, nothing much; we can talk about it later,” and then later never comes, you are going to find that the next time you want to retreat, you will meet resistance or hurt.
If you have retreated to contemplate a troubled relationship, you must be extra gentle with yourself as you return. If you’ve come to a painful decision, take it slow. Get some sage outside advice before proceeding. If you didn’t come to any earth-shattering conclusions and are exasperated or disappointed by that, read over Being, in Good Ways to Listen. Hold the tension of not being sure for a while longer. If you have ideas for change that you need to share with your partner, consider carefully when and where to do so. Pick a time when you are both rested and will not be interrupted. One of the quickest roads to disaster is to come home from a retreat bursting with hopeful ideas for big changes and to dump them on your partner. Resist doing that!
See Transforming Fear of Coming Home, below, and also Courage: Softening Fear.
If your partner knows you have gone away for this reason, you owe it to him or her to set aside time to discuss what you learned or decided.
Children, parents, and friends tend to be a little less threatened and less curious about your retreat, although young children need special reassurance. Making time to be alone with each child soon after you return is always smart. Prepare for a temper tantrum or general whininess for an hour or day after your return if you have younger children. They express their dismay at being left by saving their intense feelings for you. It is a sign that they love you and feel bonded to you, so frame it as a positive sign, breathe, and remind yourself it won’t last.
What if you have taken a retreat without telling anyone that it was one? What if you believe the idea would be too weird or threatening to your family or friends? Or what if you’ve simply been using your lunch hour or the time when the children are at school, without any fanfare? In this case, trust yourself to let others in on your experience when you are ready. Be clear why you are keeping this to yourself. Ask yourself, “What do I fear happening if I share this experience with _____?” Sometimes our beliefs about how another person will react are fabricated to protect ourselves from true intimacy and vulnerability. Other times our reluctance to talk about our experience is excellent advice from our authentic self to protect us from insensitive or shallow reactions. Investigate instead of blindly reacting.
One of the saddest things that can happen upon returning from a retreat is that when you tell someone what you’ve been doing, he or she derides or minimizes your experience or criticizes you for going. In spite of yourself, you can feel doubt, guilt, and shame as well as anger and resentment. You could explain to this person how precious this time was for you, or you could explain how utterly stupid, asinine, off base, unasked for, and a waste of air those comments are. However, if you are married to this person or if he is your boss, you might need to keep your choice comments to yourself. Get away from this person as soon as possible, take a few deep breaths, and recall a centered feeling or image from your retreat. If you have a talisman or a snapshot of the heart, grab on to that. If the encounter continues to rankle you, arrange another retreat, even for ten minutes, ASAP. Do not let parsimonious, narrow, uninformed monkey minds ruin your faith in your own way, your own power, and your own wisdom. Remember Audre Lorde’s words, “We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves…our deepest cravings. And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for or accept many facets of our own oppression.” Not us, no way.
See Closing Ceremony.
Transforming Fear of Coming Home
If you find yourself putting off returning home, not planning a closing ceremony, or feeling angry, resentful, and irritable or clumsy and out of your body as your retreat draws to a close, or if you find you’re spending much of your retreat obsessing on returning, you must put a little conscious attention into working with your fears now.
Finish this sentence:
Make a list, either in writing or in your head. Sit with what you discover. Literally sit still and get as close to your fear as you can. Perhaps ask your fear:
This fear of returning home should not be minimized. Sometimes exploring and facing your fear becomes the focus of your retreat. You may realize on retreat that what your retreat is truly about is prying yourself out of your life so that you cannot return to business as usual.
If you start to feel you cannot return to some aspect of your life (a relationship, job, home), don’t panic. Assure yourself that you won’t do anything or change anything before you are completely ready. Calm your body by inhaling deeply and repeating to yourself, “I am strong.” As you exhale slowly, say to yourself, “I am calm.” Do the trust list in Courting Yourself: Suggestions for Wooing. Dialogue with your fear. If a question or decision emerges (having a baby as a single mother, leaving my marriage, quitting my job, moving to Australia) that you wish to resolve now, explore the practice One Who Chooses. If you are on a mini-retreat or a retreat in the world and must be somewhere soon, spend the time you do have becoming calm and gaining perspective instead of forcing a decision or biting your nails in a panic. Make a firm date to do another retreat as soon as possible. Don’t put it off! Be sure to end your retreat with a firm closing ceremony. This will allow you to leave your questions, agitation, or fear on the retreat instead of dragging it home to pollute your life.
See Courage: Softening Fear.
“All will be revealed” is a comforting mantra, as are “One day at a time” and “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” Prayer, meditation, breathing into your anxiety and pain, and spontaneous writing and drawing about the proposed change are excellent ways to remain present and avoid complications that arise from burying feelings. Once you go home, seek out someone wise to talk to about your conflict. Whatever you do, don’t beat yourself up, and don’t buy into the idea that if you had just stayed busy, if you had just avoided this retreat, you would be better off.
Emerging
The first few minutes, hours, or days after a retreat often have an altered quality to them. Patricia Hart Clifford in Sitting Still, her account of a one-week Christian Zen meditation retreat, writes,
After the retreat, I was in the flow. The air smelled fresher, foliage looked greener, food tasted better. There was a synchronicity to the events of my existence that I had never experienced before. Everything seemed to be in the right place at the right time. I was filled with tremendous joy.
I remember walking into the tiny rail town of Moosenee in Quebec after three weeks on a wilderness retreat. I felt like a visitor from Mars. Everything, from the twenty-four-dollar cheese pizza to Inuit teenage girls dressed in Guess jeans, was a source of astonishment. Everything seemed bigger, louder, faster than before. I felt like I was moving underwater. The reaction is less intense after mini-retreats, when I tend to feel a little slow, solid, centered. It is a wonderful feeling, and I wish it lasted longer.
Observe how you emerge. That’s all. No need for preparation, no need to change or share what you feel. Be in it. Don’t cling to it. It will dissipate. Enjoy it while it is here; such is the gift of being present.