 RETREAT AND RENEWAL
William Bridges
"If any individual lives too much in relations, so that he becomes a stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls after a while into a distraction, or imbecility, from which he can only be cured by a time of isolation which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up."
In the past six years, I have begun to return to my original subject of individual transition,(2) and as I have done so I have realized how much people need practical help clarifying their experience of transition and assistance finding their way through it. We lack the old rites of passage that told people from other cultures when a life-transition was at hand and supported them as they moved through it. It is unlikely that we'll ever be able to recreate passage rituals in anything like their original form and effectiveness—things can't just be exported from one culture to another, like consumer products. Fortunately, however, our own culture provides us with a practice that many people find very helpful. That is the practice of going off "on retreat."
The idea of going away alone to think things through has deep roots within both the Judeo-Christian tradition and Islam; it is common in both Buddhism and Hinduism. It is, in fact, less the product of a religious tradition than of our common psychological heritage. It is something that people naturally do when they need a new perspective on their lives. In his useful book, Solitude: A Return to the Self, the psychiatrist Anthony Storr writes that
The capacity to be alone is a valuable resource when changes of mental attitude are required. After major alterations in circumstances, fundamental reappraisal of the significance and meaning of existence may be needed. In a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic and emotional support. (3)
Seeking solitude is what many people naturally do when changes have so stirred up their feelings and thinking that, like muddy water, they need time—quiet time, alone and in some neutral, natural setting—for things to "settle."
The kind of retreat I have myself taken and that I have watched others take is not a traditional religious retreat, but rather something that I have come to call a Renewal Retreat. The setting requires only solitude and silence—and nature, for much as people may enjoy themselves at a hotel in London or Las Vegas, their time there does not qualify as a retreat. The natural setting contributes not only quiet, but also the evocative reminders of life's natural rhythm. Whatever the setting, there should be an absence of familiar input—those "signals" from your world that keep reminding you to be you.
In the absence of those signals, you have access to your own inner signal system. You begin to move to your own rhythms. You live moment-by-moment according to your own preferences. Without outside stimuli, you "settle" like muddy water. Your own stillness is accessible, not by denying your feelings or controlling your thoughts, but by finding the inner calmness at the core of your being.
This is not a technique-driven effort. It happens naturally after a couple of days alone in the desert or the mountains or at the seashore. (It usually happens shortly after you have just about decided that, in fact, nothing is going to happen on this particular retreat.) It helps if you think of your arrival at your retreat location in terms of crossing a threshold between the everyday world and a special world in which things are different. It's a little like those children's stories in which people find themselves in a strange "other world" when they fall down a rabbit hole or go through the strangely permeable back of a wardrobe.
It is natural to describe this state of being in terms of an "as-if" world. Victor Turner, an anthropologist who has written extensively about passage-rituals, talks about the pivotal liminal or in-between phase of those rituals as "subjunctive."
Just as the subjunctive mood of a verb is used to express supposition, desire, hypothesis, or possibility, rather than stating actual facts, so does liminality...dissolve all factual and commonsense systems into their components and "play" with them in ways never found in nature or custom.... (4)
As one settles into the strangely different "world" of being on retreat, one's perception of reality and possibility start to loosen up and admit possibilities that would not be considered in the everyday world.
Although there is nothing to do on retreat—nothing, in the sense of "no thing that you do to make something occur"—there are some activities that seem to deepen and focus the effects on you of the solitude and silence. One of them is denying yourself food for periods of time—and when you do eat, eating very slowly and with full attention on what you are doing. (There is nothing like a full stomach to make you dull and thoughtless.) Another thing is sitting up awake—without any distracting activity—well into (or even all the way through) the night. One of my most memorable retreats was a Midsummer's Night spent on a hilltop near the place in the country that I was then living.
Some people find that reading aloud to themselves—slowly and with full attention on each word and stops at anything that they want to think about further—puts them into a deeply thoughtful frame of mind. Other people listen to introspective music, like Rachmaninoff's Vespers or Gregorian Chants. Or they listen to a recording of a poet reading soulful verse. Obviously, the reading or the listening is done for the sake of the feeling or thinking it stimulates, not as entertainment or a way to pass the hours.
Anything that slows you down and makes you pay close attention to whatever you are experiencing is a good thing to do. Some people find that writing their thoughts in a journal helps them to do that. Other people narrow their focus of their perception to some physically limited area—a patch of earth, one wall of the room, a lone tree, or a single cloud—serves to deepen the attention they pay to their experience. As they do that, they find their thoughts and feelings taking a new shape. Ideas occur to them. They remember forgotten incidents. They realize things that they had been unaware of before.
I suggest these things hesitantly, because it is all too easy—particularly in the first contact with the empty time on retreat—to start looking for "things to do." Filling up time is the opposite of the emptying-out process that mimics the first phase of a life-transition, which is letting go of your old life. Unlike the traditional religious retreat, you see, the Renewal Retreat is not intended to give you spiritual insights—or rather, to give them to you as byproducts, not as the primary outcome or the goal of your experience. The primary result of the Renewal Retreat is the help it provides in going through a life transition and emerging from it with a new store of energy and a new sense of purpose.
The appeal of such retreats is the widespread experience that people have today of "running on empty," of living Thoreau's "lives of quiet desperation," of discovering after they have been at the business of adulthood for a while that they are living out someone else's life-plan, or that they are strangely moved when others talk about "living with passion" or having a "calling" or finding work that touches the heart. Such retreats have much to offer us whenever we come to the end of a chapter in our lives or find ourselves sensing the presence somewhere in the darkness ahead of something that is meaningful.
I myself have spent such retreat-time at a house I once owned beside the sea, in a tent in the Sierras, and in a shallow dry cave in a side-canyon off a valley in the desert. To an extent I never intended, I found the experience of retreat during a journey that I once led to Stonehenge and a dozen other megalithic sites in northern Europe. (My own magic moment came quite unexpectedly when our group finally found its way to the fabled spring in Brittany where the wizard, Merlin, was bewitched by the dangerous Nyneve.) On another occasion, a journey through the lonely Welsh countryside brought me down a ridiculously narrow road down a steep valley that led to Llantony Priory, a ruin where the presence of the vanished 13th century monks was palpable. Journeys can function as retreats, although "trips" (which are the travels that take you to some predetermined destination) seldom can.
The point is that the Renewal Retreat can be sought and even planned out, but the transformative time-and-place must be discovered a little bit by accident. Even when you know just where you are going, the experience of being in the solitary silence that you need at that point in your life comes on you when you do not expect it—in the middle of a blustery night, when you take the wrong turn coming back from the store, or when an utterly amazing sunset lights up the Western sky.
The external place is just a symbol and stage-set for the internal state of being on the threshold between one life and another that Turner called liminality and that I have called being "in the neutral zone." When you are there, you spend your time doing anything that helps you to be fully present in that state. On a religious retreat you might pray, in the sense of petitioning God for help or guidance. And on a renewal retreat you can do that too, although the kind of prayer that fits the occasion better is a complete watchful presence that the modern French revolutionary and mystic, Simone Weil, had in mind when she wrote, "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." Or it is the simple act of speaking honestly about how things are with you at that point in your life. Herman Hesse wrote, "Whoever prays truly does not ask for anything, he merely recounts his condition and his wants, he sings his suffering and his thanks, as little children sing. So the blessed hermits prayed in their oasis." (5)
Whatever you do must feel natural—which is not to say that it may not feel strange at first, but simply that it not feel artificial or "fancy." One thing that I myself have found useful is a variant of Carl Jung's practice of "active imagination," in which you begin with any mental image that happens across the screen of your awareness and follow its natural evolution in your mind. Whatever mental picture you start with will change in a little while into something else. You need do nothing but follow it. Follow it, without trying consciously to change it—or to keep it from changing. It takes a little practice to do this, for it is all too easy to interfere with the natural flow of your mental imagery by trying to manipulate it. All you are doing is riding the flow of your mind, as you might ride the current of a river.
What happens when you spend your retreat doing things like this—or better yet, doing nothing? That depends partly on the situation that made the retreat feel timely to you. If you have been wrestling with a decision you knew you needed to make, you may find that you wake up one morning knowing what you are going to do. If you have known that you were on the edge of some new stage in your life, you may find its outline growing clearer as you record your thoughts in your journal. If you have been feeling strangely empty and enervated, you may realize as you walk back to your retreat site that something has entered you and filled the void.
A couple more suggestions: Don't try to shut off thoughts or feelings that you disapprove of, because the whole point of this kind of retreat is to experience the renewal that comes from an inner process being completed and things falling back into place. If your own everyday purposive thinking could solve your problem, you wouldn't be out here. You are here to focus your attention on the natural renewal process that starts with letting go of your old connections to "my life" and discovering new ones. The retreat is probably only the beginning of that process.
Don't expect things to "be different" when you get home, the way they were for Dorothy after her retreat to Oz. Just expect the center of gravity of your awareness and feeling to have shifted a little, for your center of gravity to have moved, for you to be on the other side of one of life's "divides," where the water flows toward a different sea.
NOTES
1 From Women in the Nineteenth Century (1845).
2 See The Way of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments (Perseus Books, 2001).
3 New York: Ballantine Books, 1988, page 29.
4 Quoted in Tom F. Driver, The Magic of Ritual (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), p. 159. This liminal state is the phase of a life transition that I have called "the neutral zone." Both Turner and I took our original image of the transformative process from Arnold van Gennep's seminal book, Rites of Passage (1908), in which he spoke of the central part of the passage ritual as its "neutral zone," the time when the person was no longer the old person but hadn't yet emerged as a new person either.
5 From his book, Wandering, quoted in The Daybook: A Contemplative Journal, Spring 1993, p. 11.
Organizations In Transition, Vol. 14, #4
|
