Brie Doyle - You Should Leave Now: Going on Retreat to Find Your Way Back to Yourself

Brie Doyle

Foreword by Christiane Northrup

Broadleaf Books

Minneapolis

YOU SHOULD LEAVE NOW

Going on Retreat to Find Your Way Back to Yourself

Copyright 2021 Brie Doyle. Printed by Broadleaf Books, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email or write to Permissions, Broadleaf Books, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Cover design: Juicebox

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-6695-8

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-6696-5

While the author and 1517 Media have confirmed that all references to website addresses (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing, URLs may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To my mom, who taught me the value of creativity, individuality, and spirituality.

To my dad, who taught me grit, self-discipline, and to always question the status quo.

When I read You Should Leave Now, I was struck by the fact that I needed its message as much as any woman. I need to take Bries advice and leave now. Im on the brink of a new retreat-filled life. I can feel it. And it is long overdue.

Do you know what Im good at? Work! Writing books, giving lectures on womens health, doing conference calls, helping friends and family with health issues. I have just finished revising the fifth edition of The Wisdom of Menopause. Last year I fully updated and revised the fifth edition of Womens Bodies, Womens Wisdomwhat I call the post-#MeToo version. Both were huge projects. I have discipline to burn.

After years (or maybe lifetimes) of walking around with the yoke of duty, obligation, and self-sacrifice on my shoulders, discipline is a pattern that has established itself in my bone marrow. I was born in the Year of the Ox. I havent taken a break for longer than one week in fifteen years. As an obstetrician/gynecologist, it served me well through many years of staying up all night, delivering babies, and performing surgery while also trying to figure out how to take care of my children and my relationships. It was the unspoken rule of surgical training that the person who could stay up the longest and work the hardest was the winnerthe MVP of medicine, a true warrior. (Conventional medicine is rife with war metaphors.) And what type of warrior goes on retreat or takes a rest? Doctors are trained to be in the foxholeto be at war with our bodies, with germs, and with disease and sickness and to be the tireless champions of people who will die unless we are hypervigilant.

But not so fast. The truth is, there wouldnt be nearly so much disease and suffering if we all learned how to retreat and practiced it regularly. To do this, we have to be shame- and guiltproof. We need to have enough self-love and self-acceptance inside to stand up for ourselves and our worth. And that is exactly what You Should Leave Now teaches us. Its an owners manual for self-love, self-esteem, and the actual step-by-step plans for tapping into the courage it takes to surrender to our innate need for rest, reflection, and restoration.

Writer and sociologist Bren Brown has stated that guilt means I made a mistake, whereas shame means I am a mistake. Women have had centuries of enculturation into our less than, shameful status. As the late Anne Wilson Schaef put it, The original sin of being born female is not redeemable by works. As a result of this unconscious programming, we live in fear of being called selfish. To avoid that awful emotion of shame, we overgive.

In her book The Art of Extreme Self-Care, my colleague Cheryl Richardson wrote a chapter called Let Me Disappoint You. It speaks volumes to the fact that no woman is able to care for herself adequately without being a disappointment to someone else who wants her attention, her resources, or her timeeven if that someone is the well-practiced inner critic inside her own head who just cant seem to get it all done. Trust me, the world we have all been brought up in runs on the unpaid and unacknowledged labor of women and those who operate out of the feminine caring principle.

But theres another way that is now emerging as a new generation of women realizes that we cannot continue this unsustainable overwork and underrest any more than our Mother Earth can continue to be exploited for endless productivity and profit. Heres my prescription for you and for myself:

1. 1. Read You Should Leave Now: Going on Retreat to Find Your Way Back to Yourself.
2. 2. Put a retreat time in your calendar. Maybe start with a long weekend, thenas you read through this bookallow the details of the retreat to flesh themselves out in that powerful gift were all born with: our imagination.
3. 3. Repeat regularly. (I recommend every six months.)

Heres what will happen: We are going to find ourselves restored. And like a field that has undergone the miracle of regenerative agriculture, we will bloom with health and happiness like never before.

Christiane Northrup, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Womens Bodies, Womens Wisdom; The Wisdom of Menopause; and Goddesses Never Age

Dear One,

It is with humility and excitement that I welcome you to this book and to your personal retreating journey. If you have found me and this book, then you are seeking even more power in your life. You are ready for your own next level. If you have come to this book, perhaps youve tried many different self-care tactics and are looking for something even more profound to assist you in bringing your greatest gifts to the world.

It is my belief that retreating is the alchemy youve been seeking and the way to reconnect you with your center and most powerful source of light.

In over two decades of working with people young and old, studying human behavior, and watching true transformation unfold, I know that retreating has the power to radically change lives.

You are no exception. Retreating will change your life too.

We all come to retreating for different reasons. Some of us stumble upon our retreat seemingly blindlymaybe we follow a friend or we serendipitously end up in the right place at the right time. Some of us are simply seeking a new experience. Some may use retreating as a tool for personal healing. Under the right circumstances, our retreats can inspire profound insights, help us find our true voice, increase our creativity, and connect us to our own divinity.

No matter what brings you to retreat, let me assure you that taking time away to do one is always the right decision. You cannot know now what benefits, breakthroughs, personal understandings, or synchronicities await you. But by the end of your retreat, you will.

My deepest wish is that this book will remind you that no matter your needfun, healing, inspiration, and so onyou always have retreating in your toolbox of self-care tactics to bring you back to yourself. You need no fancy talismans, sites, or teachers, only yourself and a quiet space.

May this book be of benefit to you and yours.

Your inside self awaits.

With love,

Brie