Thoughts on retreating

“Take the backward step and turn the light inward. During a retreat everything is designed to allow that process to occur – this is ‘time out’ from daily activities.

A retreat has a dynamic all of its own – and this dynamic will be different for each person – but, like a good film or a book, it will probably have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The overall experience can often be cathartic.

Attending a retreat is not only making a commitment to yourself, but also to the other people who have come. There is a collective, supportive energy generated during a retreat, especially in a meditation retreat held in ‘noble silence’ which creates the psychological space, to better enable us to “turn the light inward”. Such silence allows us to experience our inner self more fully; to drop the masks and the various other defences we often employ in our day-to-day interactions with others and also gives us the chance to experience better the world around us: The sounds of birds, the creak of trees in the wind.

Many expect that a retreat will automatically be a blissful experience. For some it may be, but, as with anything in life, there are no guarantees. If you are not comfortable with yourself in daily life you won’t suddenly find yourself in some magically transcendent state simply by going on a weekend retreat.

As Jon Kabat-Zinn points out: “Wherever you go, there you are”. Sitting on a meditation cushion, breathing in and out, there is no escape from who you are. That is not always a comfortable place to be. Like it or not, you are forced to confront the reality of your own circumstances.

So choose the retreat you wish to attend with care, with a sense of where you are right now, what you are looking for and what you need.

Retreats demonstrate, in a surprising variety of ways, how we can harness the clarity and calmness to engage our world of experience boldly, both the rough and the smooth, and act creatively and compassionately within it.

Honouring the light and life of Louis van Loon of The Buddhist Retreat Centre, Ixopo, KZN
CNN featured the BRC as one of the 10 finest meditation centres in the world.  https://www.brcixopo.co.za/