Louden - The Womans Retreat Book: A Guide to Restoring, Rediscovering and Reawakening Your True Self --In a Moment, An Hour, Or a Weekend

Retreats. The word has an almost mystical power for me, a feeling of coming home to my deepest truth. Rabbi David Cooper in Silence, Simplicity and Solitude writes All of us have a deep reservoir of mystical experience that sustains the part of what some call the soul. The soul yearns to be nourished, and if the reservoir begins to run low, we feel ourselves becoming dull, empty, brittle, and arid. If it sinks lower, we enter into states of angst, despair, and depression.

In a word, retreats are essentialto our minds, bodies, spirits. Yet retreats dont have to be long or in exotic locales to be effective. Yes, it is often highly valuable to get out of your home, your routine, away from your responsibilities but sometimes, the insights and renewal come from retreating in the midst of your life, just as it is, right this moment. Pixie Campbell discovered just that: I needed a getaway vacation and wasnt able to arrange one because of running my small business. So early in this first year of running my company, I committed to taking a series of ten minute retreats during the span of each day. I told myself, Look, ten minutes of forgetting everything will not take anything away from my productivity. So upon finishing a press release, I sat cross-legged on the wood floor in the sunshine, with paperwork all around me, and I closed my eyes and envisioned myself in a sweat lodge. I stayed like this until the timer went off, then got up, stretched a little, and went back to work. This became my new habit, and I felt renewed and energized each time. The best thing about it was being able to completely let go, knowing that in one-sixth of an hour I would be back to work as usual, not missing a beat. It transformed me from worker bee to queen bee. Ten minutes of grateful, mindful, soul nourishing can feel like a much needed vacation!

It is not that I discourage you from taking longer retreats. There are times when a pilgrimage is exactly what we needalong with the courage to upset the status quo, to risk the comfort of the known (and the good job) to walk to the edge of whats next. Nicky who journeyed from New Zealand with her two sisters to retreat at the Omega Center with myself and twenty-five other women, had this to say, Because of that retreat, my life totally turned around. Giving myself permission to do something so huge, well I had to ask, what else could I do? I left my job to start work on a masters in business administration and became involved in setting up a conference on Spirit at Work in New Zealand. Im living the life I want now, a rich and juicy life that I deserve!

Sarah Flicks career burnout as a doctor working in the public health field lead to her retreat. I was struggling with working in the public health system that was suffering funding reductions. I felt I was living in a culture that was less and less committed to human service and more and more concerned with wealth and power and tax shelters. I wanted to flee and yet, because of family commitments, I needed to stay. I felt trapped. I was exhausted. As I pulled into the retreat center parking lot, I kept seeing the faces of my husband and my child and my ever-growing to-do list. I walked into the woods with my journal and this book. I stayed there all afternoon, reading and writing. Over the next two days, I returned again and again to this spot in an oak grove. I felt my body stretch and relax. Insights treaded softly in, insights like the only way to find peace within the forest of the past and the future is to be present right now. On retreat, I found a way to reframe my commitments. I made a covenant with myself and God to spend the summer in interior trust and waiting. Over the summer I was offered an opportunity for a new job. I was tempted but I needed the flexibility of my current job. Because of my retreat, I was able to hold the tension of this choice. Out of my decision to stay in my current position (for now) came a new level of commitment to my current work and the energy to develop the material for a class, which is now evolving into a much bigger project. I hope Ill remember to retreat again and again.

A former coaching client of mine, Shelley, created a six-month retreat for herself near a beach in Florida. I was outsourced from my job, a job I wanted to leave anyway. I used my retreat to guide me to the next phase of my life. Those six months fundamentally shifted how I am in the world. I made time for the deep rest I so badly needed, and allowed myself to live by my instincts. From drawing labyrinths to writing my fears, anxieties, worries in the sand and watching the waves wash them away, I found myself.

Barb wrote me about the retreats she takes each year with her two kindred spirit soul sisters. Their first retreat took place in an unheated cabin with no electricity or running water in the middle of winter. With our feast spread out and an incredible view of the valley sparkling in the moonlight we started stating our dreams, shy and reluctant to give voice to what we most wanted. It was quite an enlightening experience to hear each other, to say them out loud. We left that retreat with faint hopes that we might be able to create some real change in our lives. Fast forward a year. This time, we stayed at a B & B. A bit more comfort, more permission to spend money on ourselves. We werent so shy anymore. We spent hours sitting on the cobblestone courtyard between the main house and the summer kitchen, nestled in among the tall pines, discussing our authentic selves. It was quite enlightening, how we saw ourselves and how we saw each other. The owner of the B&B was working in her office and, unbeknownst to us, could hear us. She came out briefly to tell us that she was wishing she could be one of us. After this retreat, we were more sure than ever about what we wanted for our lives.

On our third retreat, in a cabin with warmth, real beds and a real bathroom, we found we were well on our way to following our dreams and celebrating our successes. Your books followed us again, instructing us, guiding us, and supporting us in our endeavors. The power of retreats!

If I could give you anything, I would give you the courage to listen to the whisper, the roar, the ache, that brought you to this book. If I could send you anything, I would send you the courage to venture into your inner world, to venture into the mystery of retreat. Be still and listen. Can you hear your story of retreat? Can you hear it calling to you? It knows exactly what you need. You need only listen.

Jennifer Louden
November 2003
Bainbridge Island, Washington

My interest in solitude and retreat has been one of the main threads running through my life. It was the way I used to hide from being connected to others. It became the way I located my authentic self and, in doing that, true connection to others.

Thinking, writing, and teaching about womens and couples self-care has consisted of years of diving deeper and deeper into the subject and into my own psyche, each time surfacing with another fragment of understanding. After years of doing this, I had to ask myself, Why am I so obsessed with this subject? The answer was that as much as I immersed myself in trying to understand and explain the importance of self-care, it remained a mystery. I could never lay my hands on exactly why self-care was so important.

Until I took a retreat.

And met my authentic self. Only then was I able to grasp that self-care helps me to make daily choices that affirm me, thus allowing me to contact, hear, and eventually live from my truest self, what Alice Walker calls the natural self. I am more and more able to choose a self-referenced life: looking inside of myself to see what I think, feel, and need, then looking outside of myself to see what others think, feel, and need, and then bringing the two together. This may seem like common sense, but for millions of women, including myself, it is nothing short of a revolutionary act.