As I wrote about last week, for 10 days in late December and early January I gave myself the gift of a personal retreat. While I have done many meditation retreats at places like Upaya Zen Center, this is the first time that I’ve taken myself through a solo retreat process of my own design. It was one of the most powerful experiences of my life.

Many of you have asked how I set this up and what I actually did during those days. I thought I’d share with you the six ingredients that made the retreat work for me in case you’re thinking of doing something similar.

1. Set intentions

The inspiration for this retreat came to me during the summer, when I listened to a soft but insistent voice inside of me. That voice kept telling me that this was a critical time to create space in my life to pay attention to some recurring patterns, and to do some deep healing work around those patterns.

My gut feeling was that it would be great to take three months to do a retreat like this. That didn’t seem possible given the obligations of my life. But when I thought about it, 10 days seemed like a stretch and yet realistic.

So step number one was to commit that time to myself, to write it down in my calendar just like I would for an appointment with someone else, and then to protect those 10 days and not schedule anything else during that time. That was a challenge! In fact, just being able to stick with that intention and promise to myself felt like one of the most powerful pieces of the process.

Your retreat doesn’t need to be 10 days long… I was pretty lucky to be able to set that much time aside. I think even dedicating one day for this purpose can be powerful — it’s more about quality than quantity.

I spent a good deal of time thinking about why I was doing this retreat and what I hoped to get out of it. In my case, I focused my intentions around Inner Child work that I wrote about in last week’s post.

(If this is an area you’re interested in learning more about, the book Inner Bonding by Margaret Paul is a very good resource. Another book that was highly recommended to me after last week’s post is Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child by Thich Nhat Hanh.)

Within that theme, I set several specific intentions. One was to get to know the various dimensions of my Inner Child and to build a strong relationship with her. Another was to look at false beliefs that had developed over my life and to release them.

Your intentions will be unique to you but the important thing is to spend some time and get clear on them before beginning your retreat. These intentions will inform the schedule and kinds of activities that you design for yourself.

Here are a few questions that may be helpful to you in uncovering your deepest intentions for this retreat time:

• What is missing from my life that would truly nourish me?
• Where do I notice myself falling back into old, unhealthy patterns that I would like to transform, once and for all?
• What energy would I like to call into my life?
• What promises do I need to make to myself in order to live life to the fullest?

2. Remove distractions

One of the biggest reasons that retreats can have such an impact on our lives is that we take ourselves out of the flow of our usual tasks and become responsible for just one thing: being present to ourselves.

To support this process, it’s important that we remove distracting elements during retreat time. This might mean letting people know that you won’t be checking phone messages or emails (and giving them a way to reach you in case there is a bonafide emergency).

In my case, it also meant staying off of computer and social media. While I did go online once during the first few days to check on an appointment I had made for later that week, I was pretty strict with myself about staying away from Facebook. By the end of the 10 days, I was amazed at the level of clarity that I experienced. I am certain that had to do with keeping myself in a distraction-free container.

3. Create a sacred space

I’m lucky to have a home space that lends itself perfectly to a personal retreat. The centerpiece of my space was an altar that I created on the first day, and then continued to add to as the retreat progressed.

I designed the altar around the four directions. Each direction has an element associated with it: water for the South, earth for the West, air for the North, and fire for the east. I made sure that each direction on my altar had that element or at least a symbol of that element included in that quadrant. So, for example, there was a candle in the east, and a photo of a bird in the north, a cup of water in the south, and a stone in the west.

My altar was also populated with photos of special people in my life, feathers, tarot cards, and various other sacred objects. Ganesha, the Hindu elephant god, is a personal favorite of mine so I had a couple of Ganesha statues protecting the whole altar.

Throughout each day of my retreat, I would come back to this altar to sit in meditation, to write in my journal, to create collages, and to simply dwell in the beauty of what I had created. It became my focal point and it helped me to collect and express my energy throughout the 10 days.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to establish a sacred space as part of your retreat. Even if you do your retreat somewhere else besides  your home, you can still bring altar supplies with you and create a space wherever you are.

4. Create a structure and schedule

One thing I quickly discovered was that I needed to give myself a clear structure for each day and not be in a freefall about how to spend the time.

While my schedule was more spacious and flexible than might have been the case if I had gone to a retreat center, it was still very important to have some kind of structure to follow.

I drafted a schedule and taped it to the wall of my living room. Here’s what it looked like:

6:30            wake up

7 am            Zazen

7:30            Gentle stretching with music

8:00           Walk Lucy (my dog!)

8:45            Shower/body time

9:00           Breakfast

10:00         Session I

12 noon     Lunch

2:00            Session II

3:30            Nap, reading, friend check-ins, bodywork

5:30            Dinner

7:00            Journaling

End of night…. Zazen before bed

I’ll tell you more about those morning and afternoon sessions in a bit. But I will say that having a visual reminder of my daily schedule really helped to ground me when things felt a bit “out there.”

 

5. Rites and rituals

So what did I do during those morning and afternoon sessions?

One thing I discovered was how essential ritual is. A ritual is a set of actions that we do in the same way each time. It is the repetitive nature of ritual that imbues it with power and meaning. Just like we create a sacred space through constructing an altar, we create sacred time by engaging in rituals such as lighting candles at a certain time or in a certain order.

Rituals are a vehicle for us to express our gratitude, to ask for more guidance on questions that we are holding, or to mark a life transition we may be going through.

I like what Elizabeth Gilbert writes:

“This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping.” 

I started every morning session by bowing 9 times in front of my altar and taking refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Then I lit a candle in the candleholder at the head of the altar. Because this candleholder had a ladder type of design, I started with a small votive candle in the lowest rung on day 1 and then moved the candle to the next rung on the next day, and so forth. This visual representation of progressing along a journey became very important as the days went on.

The importance of ritual also played out in the other kinds of activities I engaged in during those morning and afternoon sessions. For the first four days, I did a lot of shamanic journeying work, which has its own particular form. At the end of each journey, I would create a collage or a visual “soul card” for myself.

In the afternoons, I would walk to the top of a hill behind my house. At the start of the trail, I’d leave an offering of a stone or shell to thank the mountain spirits for whatever they had to give me that day. I’d bring tarot cards with me and do a reading, based on questions that had emerged for me earlier in the day.

I also got into a practice of writing down the “false beliefs” that began to reveal themselves to me through the shamanic journeys and the tarot card readings. I had a pile of blank slips of paper and would jot these beliefs down as I noticed them. Near the end of the week, after I had done a good deal of examining each of those beliefs to see where they had come from and how they had impacted my life, I had a ceremony to burn them in my fireplace. That felt great!

As you design your retreat, consider what kinds of rituals you can build into your daily schedule. These will become anchors of awareness as you go deeper into the process.

6. Create a support system

Depending on your intentions, you may want to bring some more people into the design of your retreat to support you.

In my case, I set up the first four days to have a lot of solo time, as that felt like an important time to uncover some old beliefs through dreamwork and shamanic journeying.

During the last six days of the retreat, though, I planned in check-ins with trusted friends and healers, usually once a day. Sometimes I did these via Skype calls, one day my massage therapist came to give me some in-home energy work, and one day I went out for an appointment with my therapist.

You may choose to do your retreat entirely on your own, which is a wonderful thing. But if you have an intuition that it might help to invite the support of some dear friends, that is a great thing too. Again, take a look at your intentions and see what will best serve them in your retreat time.

 

If you want to learn more about designing a personal retreat, another great resource is Jennifer Louden’s Women’s Retreat Book: A Guide to Restoring, Rediscovering and Reawakening Your True Self –In a Moment, An Hour, Or a Weekend.

Have you done a personal retreat? If so, I’d love to hear any tips that you have to offer other Team Liberation members.

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