Your Perfect Retreat

When you hear the word retreat, what comes to mind? Time spent in nature, meditation, journaling, solitude, connecting to your inner self, relaxation..? Would it be for a week, a few days, maybe a few hours? Would you need to travel to a remote location?

Take a moment to sit quietly and imagine your perfect retreat.

Author Jennifer Louden writes in The Women’s Retreat Book:

 

Each of us has a personal periodic, an internal tide, an instinctual cyclical rhythm that alternates between an accomplishing, energetic, doing time in which you engage with the world, dig ditches, get degrees, bake your ideas, and sell them and a retreating, reflective, being time in which you detach from the world, stare out the window at the rain, plant fat spring bulbs, and breast-feed your imagination. When we do not value or attend to the retreating cycle as much as we do the accomplishing cycle, we betray our basic rhythm and risk becoming walking zombies, with no life to speak of. We have not allowed time to replenish our inner world. 

Thought about that perfect retreat? So, what’s stopping you? Is that little voice in your head telling you that you couldn’t possibly do it now? What about the kids and the dog? I’m just too busy at work right now! I can’t fit it into my budget this month. My world could fall apart if I’m not there to hold it all together! Excuses, excuses..! 

Marion Woodman noted in her interview in The Feminine Face of God:

One of the problems women have today is that they are not willing to find the river in their own life and surrender to its current. They are not willing to spend time discovering themselves, because they feel they are being selfish. They grow up trying to please other people and they rarely ask themselves, who am I? Rarely. And then life starts to feel meaningless because they live in terms of pleasing, rather than in terms of being who they are.

OK, I understand that we all have certain limitations that may prevent us from going on our “perfect” retreat. Hopefully you get that opportunity in the not too distant future!  Let the journey begin!