What is a Retreat, Why Does It Matter and How Do I Find One that Fits Me?
Burnt out.
Overwhelmed.
Disconnected from ourself and from others.
Impatient.
Irritable.
Greatly fatigued.
Emotionally numb.
A lifetime of denying our needs results in the opposite of what we want.
We want connection.
We want relief.
We want release.
We want to be loving to those we love.
We want the energy to work and to play.
We want to FEEL more rather than less.
We want to smile and to mean the smile, to have it come from our heart’s joy.
Here’s the thing:
Because we’ve learned to deny what we want;
because we were taught to not trust ourself;
because we’ve learned to never say no even when it meant
we were at the absolute end of our rope;
because we’ve learned to feel guilty when we even thought about
giving ourself a moment of care…
we don’t have the connection or the relief that we seek,
that we crave.
We don’t have the the patience or even the awareness of
why we’re feeling so irritable.
And we feel great guilt at the impatience and the irritability.
We feel great responsibility for the burn out and the overwhelm…
as though it’s our fault that we experience any or all of this.
As though we made it happen this way.
As though we didn’t live in a world where it’s been expected
that we put everyone first all the time at the expense of our own
health and well-being.
We often feel…invisible.
As though we don’t matter.
As though we aren’t worthy of the connection, the relief, the release, the love, the feeling.
As though it’s our fault that we feel so disconnected from ourself.
As though we are totally disbombobulated.
As though life is speeding by us and we’re running after it and around it.
As though there’s no changing and no hope of changing.
Sigh.
I so understand
how it feels to feel unseen, unheard, unappreciated, unrecognized.
And without hope.
By the end of this essay,
I intend to show you how NOT caring for yourself is far more costly than you know
or want to believe.
I intend to show you how meaningful and necessary retreats are to your health and well-being.
And I intend to show you how you can incorporate retreats into your everyday life
so that you CAN feel ease, energy and joy in everyday.
So that you CAN feel the beauty that you are as well as the beauty that’s around you.
So that you CAN trust yourself first, not exclusively, but first.
So that you CAN remember and believe in who you are.
So that you CAN make space in you for you.
It is a gift to feel the natural inclinations to care for others.
At the same time, this gift of a natural inclination to care for others becomes a horrific burden when it undermines our health and well-being.
We forget (if we ever knew!) that—
“We are here to take care of each other; to do so, we must first take care of ourself.”
I believe that my own personal transformation began when I found Thich Nhat Han’s words and began parading them in front of my face and into my ears everywhere—on my mirror, in my classes, in my workshops, on my phone. I put his words everywhere to remind me that I am part of the system. I am a member of the family, the friends, the community and therefore, if I am to serve as I want to serve, I MUST take care of myself.
Statistics—the ones we can measure—tell us that burnout among women is harsher and with longer-term consequences than perhaps any other group of people (46% of women report feeling burned out versus 37% of men).
Are you plagued by any or all of these symptoms of stress burnout?
*exhaustion
*fatigue
*sleep disturbances
*headaches
*muscle tension
*frequent illness (lower immunity)
*appetite changes
*cynicism
*detachment
*emotional numbness
*emotional exhaustion
*anxiety
*irritability
*self-doubt
*helplessness
*loss of motivation
*loss of a sense of purpose
*withdrawal/isolation
*difficulty concentrating
*brain fog
*aggression
*outbursts
*increased use of alcohol or drugs
*changes in behavior
*lack of satisfaction
*difficulty remembering
*negative self-talk
Yes, it’s a long list. Made even longer by our incessant use of and reliance on technology.
How do we cope?
How can we manage?
What must we do to not sink into the hellhole that beckons
from all around us?
Radical circumstances such as those we currently live in
require radical responses.
At the same time,
our nervous system isn’t wired to make radical changes over night.
It resists when we insist.
Huge changes can send us into spirals of despair,
inaction, complacency, numbness, depression…
All the things we already are feeling and want to change.
Monstrous changes all at once, especially those without support,
are unsustainable.
So?
What CAN we do to shift this pattern of longing and despair?
What can we do to alter our path without launching our nervous system into unbending opposition?
What can we do to change?
The word “patience” stirs up all kinds of turmoil in me
but there it is…
“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” was one of my Dad’s favorite sayings
to encourage me to just keep swimming in the directions I wanted to go.
And yet…
My impatience with how I felt led me to try something new.
That “something new”
is what I’m sharing with you.
First came Thich Nhat Han’s words:
“We are here to take care of each other; to do so we must first take care of ourself.”
They stirred some sort of rebellion in me,
made me sit up and pay attention to what was happening—
I was feeling overwhelmed, being incredibly crabby to those I love,
unable to think clearly, physically spent no matter how much sleep I got or didn’t get.
Thich Nhat Han’s words brought home to me that I was contributing
to my feelings by denying them and that I needed to become aware
so that I could be curious about and explore
what might be next,
what I might WANT to be next.
So, first, there was this flash of inspiration.
Then, after much stumbling around,
not knowing where to go,
where to begin, how to begin,
I landed on this:
Make a commitment to myself to feel,
to look, to be curious, to acquire the ability to move beyond judging myself,
to practice self love and self compassion and self trust,
to move in the direction(s) I wanted to go,
to practice patience with myself,
to pretend, if necessary, so that I could develop
the practices that would lead me…
…to me.
This was very scary.
My vision of myself was that of a monster,
an ogre, an incorrigible and messy container of ugliness.
I didn’t want to look.
I refused for many years to look…
until, in a very dark, dark moment,
I determined that I wanted something different
and this something required me to look.
I created and adopted all kinds of rituals and practices and postures
to feed my intentions.
I looked for people outside of my immediate circle
to support me on this journey.
I stepped and fell
and stepped and fell
over and over again
as I reached for what I wanted.
As I ALLOWED myself to reach for what I wanted.
As I ALLOWED myself to want!
It’s impossible for me to say—because they all converged
and seemed to happen at the same time (one of my favorite ayurveda principles—
at the same time!)—
which led me to the next thing.
The jumble contains all of the elements
and I believe that accepting the notion of “at the same time”
and learning to hold the contradictions instead of insisting on
isolating them
has helped me integrate them,
has helped me become them.
The commitment: I promise myself to look at myself with loving eyes…no matter what.
The intention: I intend to look at myself with loving eyes…no matter what.
The actions were many and scattered.
I tried whatever came to mind or came into view that felt at least ok.
YOU know that when you live your life not trusting yourself,
it is challenging at least
to learn to trust yourself first,
not exclusively, but first.
It helped me that, as a Teacher,
I’d been encouraging my students for years
to speak to themselves encouragingly,
to reframe their thoughts,
selecting words that reflected a more positive perspective.
Those words bubbled up in me,
reminding me to apply them to me.
Some examples?
“I get to” instead of “I have to.” Making an obligation into a pleasure, a privilege.
Starting my day by setting an intention for how I want to feel this day.
Committing to check in with how my body felt about a choice. I started with something simple (or so it seemed it would be!): What to have for dinner? What color to wear today?
On a very stressful, overloaded-with-things-to-do day, saying out loud, “I have all the time in the world” as many times as I remembered to say it!
Catching myself judging myself and simply acknowledging, “Judging myself.”
Saying to myself as many times as I remembered throughout the day, “I love myself.” and/or “I love you.”
Reframing some of my nastiest perceptions of myself to reflect a more loving view: “I’m doing the best I know how” instead of “How stupid of me” and saying to myself “How human of me” instead of “I am a bad Mom/friend/wife/daughter/person.”
Incorporating periods of pausing during my day—sometimes, 20 minutes of restful breathing; sometimes 5 minutes.
Granting myself permission to feel, to trust myself, to rest, to NOT do when it didn’t feel right in my body-mind-spirit.
I devoted myself to seeing myself with loving eyes, the same eyes I wanted to see my sons, my friends, my husband, the world with.
Some practices worked for a while. I felt their success.
And then, being human, I dropped them, forgot them, neglected them.
It happens, doesn’t it?
Other practices have stayed with me for years now.
Even though I still catch myself saying, “I have to…”
I am less likely to judge and more likely to remind myself,
“How human of me.”
Little by little,
step by teeny step,
rung by rung,
I have climbed the ladder out of the darker sides of my soul
so that I could begin to feel more in my body rather than less (rather than ignore my body as I’d done for decades),
so that I could live in greater joy,
so that I could experience deeper ease,
so that my energy was a wellspring rather than a spurt, quickly extinguished,
so that I could live in love with life and in love with my family and friends, unapologetically.
Over the course of many years,
I began to notice and to appreciate my creativity.
I began to take notice and do for myself what I saw needed to be done.
For example,
at some point along this road,
I began to offer myself weekend retreats.
My sons were young still and so,
I would be late and have to rush off, rush there,
rush into.
By the time my nervous system had been soothed enough to participate,
the retreat was over.
And I was back into my rushing world.
The retreat was a thing of the past.
It came to me one day as I walked in the woods
that THIS feeling in the woods—at ease, at one with, at peace in, wholly right here and right now—
was what I sought at the retreats
and that I wanted to experience this feeling
from before I arrived and then into my daily life.
So I began looking at and thinking of ways to “retreat”
during my days…withOUT adding to my to-do list.
A breath here,
A breath there,
A hesitation before I began a walk to set the intention that this walk was my retreat for the day.
A retreat is a deliberate and intentional withdrawal in order to reflect.
Any moment in our day can be an intentional withdrawal from the noise around us and in us.
Intention gives direction to our awareness so setting the intention to withdraw (retreat) even for a breath tells our body-mind-spirit that this is what we seek, this is what we’re doing. And so our awareness settles into the action as a retreat, as it was intended to be.
I found this approach to be incredibly helpful to my being able to integrate the ease and softness of the retreat—whether or a moment or a week—into my everyday life!
When I host and guide retreats now,
I share with my retreat-ers that we begin the retreat the moment we say “Yes” to ourself.
Before we meet in person or online,
I share inspirational practices that create space in you for you
to expand the retreat from a day or a week to your life before and after the retreat.
It is a remarkable gift we give to ourself—this increasing capacity to love ourself,
respect ourself, honor ourself, trust ourself.
Giving ourself permission to withdraw—for a moment, for a day, for a week—
soothes our nervous system,
rebuilds our immune system,
fortifies our abilities to be wholly present in this moment with ourself, with our loved ones, with our colleagues, with the world.
Granting ourself this permission to withdraw reduces the impacts of stress, reduces the symptoms of stress and burnout.
Fifty years ago,
Dr. Herbert Benson wrote, “The Relaxation Response” after he’d studied how people’s body-mind-spirit responded to 20 minutes of deep, soft breathing and stillness—reduced anxiety, reduced cortisol (the stress hormone), lowered blood pressure, improved immune system, improved digestion…all in, surprisingly rather short amounts of time.) It’s taken 50 years for many medical communities to embrace this body-mind-spirit entity that we call the human being.
Ayurveda (the ancient approach to health and well-being) tells us that the body, the mind, the spirit are one. They are inseparable. What we do for (or to) the body, we do for (or to) the mind and spirit and vice versa.
All that you do matters. Because you matter.
Teeny tiny things reduce the incidence of, the potential resistance of the nervous system to what you’re working on doing.
All that you do counts.
Even if your moment of stillness is interrupted by a needy child, a loud spouse,
an even louder co-worker, it counts. Even if you make only one pause in your day to breathe slowly, evenly, deeply in and out, it counts.
Because YOU count.
NOT offering and NOT receiving retreats of any nature in your day
undermines your health and well-being in every way.
Short and sweet retreats of a breath or a walk or a day
open the portals to your capacity to a receive a more sustained retreat.
The teeny tiny steps you take every day
expand your nervous system’s ability to walk into the deeper waters of a weekend or a weeklong retreat.
And, at the same time (don’t you love this phrase? It so encapsulates our human experience!),
the weekend and weeklong retreat jumpstarts our ability to integrate the retreat mentality into our daily life. The longer retreat nourishes our soul in ways that a moment here and there cannot—An extended period of profound stillness and unequivocated calm, of unrehearsed laughter and feeling seen—release the stranglehold that stress has on our body-mind-spirit. The moments here and there of our in-our-day retreats sprinkle stardust on our nervous system and make possible the magic of the weeklong retreat.
We are transformed and upheld by both, by all.
When we allow ourselves to be.
We are the key.
We must grant ourself the permission and the grace little by little,
teeny tiny step by teeny tiny step.
All that we do works together with our intention to open our eyes to our Beauty.
All that we do works together to open our eyes to acknowledge that the Beauty we are brings Beauty to the world we’re in.
All that we do matters because all that we are matters.
Ayurveda invites us to open to the possibilities of “all that we are matters,” and to embrace this approach: All that you do, do it with joy.
I invite you to embrace yourself in all of this, to open your eyes and heart to the possibilities that “all of you”—the good, the bad, the ugly— are responsible for your Beauty.
They all—at the same time—make you unique in this world, make your voice sing your own song.
“All of you” is worthy of note!
“All of you” deserves that break, that retreat.
“All of you” merits creating and designing a retreat or two or ten in your everyday life!
“All of you” deserves that longer retreat moment that opens your heart and soul deeper and wider to you.
There is NOTHING you need to DO to earn this retreat, this respite, this refuge. You are enough as you are.
And “all of you” is welcome!
Blessings,
Paula.
