This Summer, Consider Going on a Retreat
Imagine a jar filled with water and baking soda. Shake the jar, and the water becomes cloudy with swirls of white powder. Set the jar down and let it sit for a few minutes. Slowly, the waters calm, the baking soda floats down and settles at the bottom, leaving the water clear. Likewise, when we go on a spiritual retreat and sit quietly, after a few days our agitated self begins to calm, thoughts settle down, and the mind becomes clear.
Summer, and this time in young adult life, provides a rare opportunity to go on a multi-day or even multi-week spiritual retreat. Unlike the minutes for soda to settle in a jar, it takes at least a few days for the body and mind to catch up on lost sleep and for the nervous system to come back into balance. After that restoration period though, one can use the remaining days for contemplation, communion, prayer, meditation, mindfulness, letting go of compulsion, and releasing neurotic states of mind to find greater inner freedom and insight. Five days is a good minimum. There are countless retreat centers among all the faith traditions, as well as non-religious contemplative centers and
programs. Not all centers offer the same quality, and there are indeed bad places and teachers, so please feel free to check with us in the Chaplain’s Office about the standing of a center or teacher before registering. Generally speaking, if a retreat center is either free or extremely expensive, be skeptical. Good centers have reasonable rates and provide scholarships. “Reasonable” means roughly how much you would pay for a decent hotel in that area per night.
A few other notes: Ideally, the center or monastery is removed from urban life and set in nature, creates a container of silence and stillness, keeps the environment simple, and
provides a schedule and guidance. I don’t recommend true solitude for beginners; a community and teachers deeply support the inner journey. To reduce stimulation and
therefore agitation, all devices need to go. It’s a good idea to let someone in your family, such as a parent or adult sibling residing domestically, know that you will be at a retreat, away from email and cell phone access, so that your absence doesn’t cause them to worry. If you’re in the care of a therapist, make sure they know you’re going on a retreat, and don’t stop taking medications without guidance from your mental health provider.
Retreat is rarely easy. You get bored as your system adjusts to lower levels of stimulation. But in the stillness, the mind becomes clear and calm, giving us the opportunity to look into ourselves, look at our lives, and look at the world around us. What will we understand anew? What insights? What self-knowledge might arise that could help us find greater alignment with our true place in the world? Many people say, on the other side of retreat, that what they learned in retreat changed the course of their lives.