Living Your Retreat Every Day

You have a solemn obligation to take care of yourself because you never know when the world will need you.

Rabbi Hillel

You have been changed. Now comes the task of living with and integrating that change.

But you may say, “I don’t feel changed. My retreats have all been too short or too shallow or not spiritual enough to matter.”

I repeat, you have been changed. You have entered into a relationship with yourself through intentional sacred solitude. You have paused. Something has shifted.

You may turn your retreat talisman over in your hand during a demented day at work and a slowness, a calmness blankets you, and a new way to look at the problem at hand occurs to you. Or a cherished habit drops away, seemingly without effort (I pretty much stopped watching TV after one long retreat). You may be compelled to take up the violin again, make a quilt, join the church choir, become a vegetarian, look up an old beau, or get up early and step outside to watch the sky for a moment. Your honest, gentle efforts and your resolution of purpose will provide nourishment for your daily activities for some time to come.

The question becomes, How do I bring this retreat into my daily life? How do I plant it and keep it alive?

Pay Attention

You must watch for the effects of your retreat, for they can easily be dismissed. You must pay attention to the small alterations and conversions that take place. How you have been changed will not declare itself as a full-page ad in the New York Times or as a guardian rabbit who accompanies you everywhere (but whom no one else can see). As someone I deeply respect once said, “Life is a spiral. You keep coming back to the same place, only you have taken one step up the staircase.” These steps can be hard to discern, especially if you are enjoying primarily mini-retreats.

Each time you act from your deep self, each time you remember to be still and listen, each time you take a step toward something you wish to change or you forgive yourself for making a mistake, pause and take it in. Offer thanksgiving. Notice these ripples of change.

Specific ripples to watch for:

• Being more self-referenced. Asking yourself, “What do I think, feel, need, or want?” before considering what others think, feel, need, or want.
• Feeling more centered, less affected by the criticism of others, by bad news, or by minor irritations.
• Being more open and flexible. Finding that changing your plans, letting the house get messy, or being fifteen minutes late to a party somehow doesn’t irritate you as much.
• Feeling less at the mercy of your inner critic, pusher, or judge. Feeling more able to tolerate, dialogue with, or love her presence. Experiencing less guilt and shame and fewer shoulds and hurry-up-you-are-not-doing-enough-fast-enough thoughts.
• Feeling lighter. Seeing a subtle shift in your daily attitude—a little more hopeful, up, or easygoing.
• Becoming able to say no when you need to without excessive guilt or excuses.
• Finding yourself able to carve out time for what you enjoy and for more retreats.
• Becoming more aware of your body and what it needs. Drinking enough water, going to the bathroom when you need to instead of holding it, eating when you are hungry, stretching and breathing when you are tense.
• Engaging in a spiritually nourishing practice more often.
• Reconnecting with your spiritual discipline. Finding renewed faith.
• Staying more current with uncomfortable feelings. Allowing yourself to feel them in private and/or express them when appropriate.
• Experiencing more energy and/or direction in your work or parenting.
• Feeling more at one with others and with nature.
• Getting less caught up in crisis, either by maintaining perspective, by refusing to engage, or through better preparation.
• Becoming more at peace with your past choices.

Nobody, even after ten years of standing on one foot on a thirty-foot-tall pillar in the middle of the desert eating nothing but locusts and drinking nothing but ant blood while reciting the Buddhist heart sutras, could fully embody this list. I have compiled it only to help you notice what you might otherwise dismiss. If it makes you feel inferior or goal-oriented about retreating, tear it out, burn it, and mail me the ashes. I’ll wear them in penance.

Bring Your Retreat into the World

The renowned scholar of mysticism Evelyn Underhill wrote, “The spiritual life of individuals has to be extended both vertically to God and horizontally to other souls; and the more it grows in both directions, the less merely individual and therefore the more truly personal it will be.” Writer Patricia Hart Clifford believes:

At some point for all, spiritual insight must turn into action if it is not to become hollow. On a retreat, silence functions as a cocoon in which attention can develop. Silence protects the spirit from external assaults so that the wings of freedom can grow. But while silence can nurture the budding soul, the real test comes in the flight. No breakthrough on retreat is as important as the resulting actions in the world.

What if you were asked by your God, a child, or a stranger on the street, “How will you bring your retreat home?” Without making it a should, a goal, or a have-to, how will your experience, or your experiences over time with mini-retreats, take root and grow?

The possibilities are as varied as the women reading this. Perhaps working with your critical voice spirals into being a daily example of a woman who practices self-loving kindness in front of her children. Or discussing “What is enough?” with your retreat group becomes a desire to live a simpler life, consuming fewer unnecessary goods and less energy. Perhaps a weekend retreat in your home grows into helping one homeless woman and child get off the streets. Grieving a rape that happened to you ten years ago heals into offering your services at a rape crisis center.

Let it become. We are often too trapped by cynicism, denial, and survival to make a difference yet are exhausted by our own harsh standards of what a good woman should do. Somewhere between these two unhappy extremes lies an oasis where service feeds balance and meaning rather than a false sense of perfection or martyrdom. Let the process grow “vertically to God and horizontally to other souls.” Keep listening to your inner voice to determine when and what you should do.

Daily Practice

Your retreat springs from and is guided by your inner knowing. But how do you maintain some kind of communication with that inner knowing between retreats? Without this communication, it will be much harder to hear the call to retreat when it comes again. You need simple, daily ways to stay in touch with your authentic self.

My favorites are:

• A daily check-in using the questions from What Will You Do?: Check-In. Writer and therapist Gunilla Norris does this by figuratively attaching a thought she wants to integrate into her life to a clothespin. It might be “Listen” or “Remember the world” or “It’s okay to rest.” She dangles the clothespin from a string in a doorway. Each time she walks through that doorway, the clothespin nudges her. She stops, breathes, and remembers. “Having it be at the level that I had to actually bump into it seemed to help,” she says on her audio tape Being Home. I like to use sachets instead of clothespins, and instead of repeating a word, I ask myself a check-in question. “What am I feeling?” and “How can I slow down?” are my current favorites. Another way that I teach in my workshops is to stick gold stars throughout your life. Paste them inside the bathroom medicine cabinet, on the bottom of the refrigerator door, inside your closet, on the rearview mirror and visor in your car, anywhere slightly out of the way or on the edge of your peripheral vision. Place them out in the world, too, on the way into the dry cleaner’s, on a bathroom stall at work, on your child’s stroller. Each time you see one of these stars, physically pause, breathe, and repeat an affirmation like “I can choose to make time for my inner life” or a check-in question like “Is this how I choose to spend my time?” Or write your favorite check-in questions and affirmations on index cards and hide them in your purse, wallet, files, books, coat pockets, junk drawer, freezer, and spice jars, and wrapped up with the hidden emergency chocolate. Or set your watch or kitchen timer to go off a few times a day. When it does, ask yourself, “What do I need to do to nurture myself today?,” and then do it for yourself as soon as you are able.
• I stay centered by writing about anything for three pages in my journal first thing every morning.
• Sitting meditation is one of the most ancient ways to become and remain awake. While there are as many ways to meditate as there are ways to smile, my favorite is to sit, early in the morning before anyone else is awake, on a cushion with my spine erect. I set a timer for twenty minutes and close my eyes. I breathe and focus either on a word (peace, om, God, Goddess, Divine Source, Jesus) or on my breath. When my attention wanders, as it will countless times, I bring it back to my focus.
• Yoga has been another practice for me, even if that means three half–sun salutations or half a yoga video. Another regular practice for me, often as part of my opening ceremony, is walking. Although I have never practiced formal walking meditation, when I walk I try to put my focus on the outside world, on the sensation of the breeze on my skin, on the sun and shade on the mountains, on the sound of the wind in the trees, instead of on my little worried mind.
• Sometimes I end the day by doing a spontaneous painting on how I feel about today, what I learned, or what I wish to let go of. I do this in bed, not with paints but with colored water pencils (to protect the sheets).
• Creating and tending a shrine has waxed and waned as a spiritual practice in my life. Thomas Moore in The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life writes, “Above all, a shrine gives presence to a felt but not always visible sentiment or realization. Significant intuitions and emotions about finding a place for the holy urge themselves toward some kind of expression, and a shrine comes into being.” My friend Diane has a shrine in her bedroom built around a plaster cast of her body when she was pregnant. On it are feathers, pictures, a bell. Anna’s shrine has a chime, photos of herself and her godchildren, incense, all sorts of little boxes, angels, a Buddha. Each woman sees her shrine every day and perhaps lights a candle on it or adds flowers to it, bringing the sacred into her consciousness.

I almost always resist doing any of these practices. I always enjoy them once I start and stick with them longer than I thought I would. To get started I say, “I’ll draw (or meditate, walk, whatever) for five minutes. If I don’t feel like continuing after that, I give myself full-hearted permission to stop without feeling guilty.”

A Retreat Practice

It is impossible to retain the luster of a retreat forever. Preparation and a closing ceremony offer some protection from the onslaught of life—but only some. There is no magic pair of boots with which you can stride through the shit of life without becoming dirty. You will lose some of what you found, whether that is energy, creative inspiration, perspective, or self-love. You will “work your hind legs off” again or find yourself “half a bubble off plumb.” Such is life. You die a thousand tiny psychic deaths. And a few big ones, too. But you can also be reborn a thousand times. Like the resurrection stories found in most cultures, you can find your self again. Historically, that has been through commitment to a spiritual practice. One aspect of this spiritual practice can be a regular commitment to retreat.

Your commitment might look any number of ways, the constant being your commitment to listen and honor your own rhythms. “If one sets aside time for a business appointment, a trip to the hairdresser, a social engagement, or a shopping expedition, that time is accepted as inviolable. But if one says: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone, one is considered rude, egotistical, or strange,” Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote in Gift from the Sea. She made time once a year, even with five children and her own notoriety, for three weeks at the beach. Regularly scheduled retreats are immensely reassuring to the parts of your psyche that believe you will give in to what Lindbergh describes, that you will once again place the incessant demands of life or what others think over your need to reconnect.

Through any retreat you do, you prove to yourself that you value yourself. Now if you can convince yourself that you will continue to listen and value yourself, you’ve found the secret door. This trusting commitment will lessen the disappointment, fear, irritability, and clumsy awfulness that can arise as you watch your retreat become buried under an avalanche of making dinner, meeting deadlines, balancing checkbooks, and nursing sick babies. By committing to returning, you will not have to close yourself off from others because you fear giving up what you have reclaimed. You can embrace giving because you know you will go home to your self, again and again, whenever you must.

Pat retreats once a year with old friends over a long weekend. She feels she has maintained her marriage through retreating four times a year with her husband. Randi celebrates her birthday on a yearly retreat. Mary retreats with the women at her church once a year, as does Carol. It is the promise to yourself that seals the deal. “For quite a while, I had planned on retreating alone for one month to mark my fortieth birthday. Then my husband’s eighteen-year-old niece came to stay with us. She was severely depressed and learning disabled, and neither of us knew her very well. It was really tempting to say, ‘I won’t take my retreat.’ Instead, we enlisted support from friends, family, and community so she didn’t feel abandoned, so my husband didn’t feel abandoned, and so I could still go.” Make a commitment to yourself for a day once a month, a weekend once a year, two hours every Saturday.

Ask yourself:

• Do I truly long for and need more retreats?
• What would my ideal retreat practice look like?
• What would be too much? What would feel like a burden, another should? What commitment feels right and doable (start small) yet does not feel like I’m shortchanging myself?

Keep It Simple

Of course, all of these practices will get consumed by overcommitment, by illness, by forgetfulness, by the need to tune out for a while, by any number of life snafus. But the combination of commitment to retreating and daily mindfulness will form such a strong channel among your authentic self, your instinctual rhythms, and your conscious mind that you won’t stay gone for long.