Last Friday and Saturday I was at St. Placid Priory leading a workshop and a retreat. Much of my work is leading retreats – and while I spend a lot of time designing the flow of experiences, ultimately it is about creating and holding sacred space for others. On retreat the invitation is to cross the threshold of ordinary awareness and enter liminal space for a few hours or days to receive the new questions waiting for us.
This coming weekend I go on my own time of retreat to the place where the forest meets the sea. This space where wild edges meet invites me to ponder the questions which “make and unmake a life.” When I enter into silence, solitude, sabbath, and spaciousness I hear the quiet inner voices which get drowned out in the rush of daily life. I have had life-changing moments on retreat. I have encountered longings which carried me over new thresholds. I have been transformed in my willingness to meet myself. On retreat I can walk for hours among trees, I can gaze upon the unfolding of wave after wave, I sleep when I feel tired, I write pages and pages from a heart which begins to see things widely again. Daily life can narrow my vision and tighten my gaze. Retreat invites expansion, the pondering of horizons, the dancing on edges.
Retreats come in many shapes and sizes. Sometimes all that is necessary is an hour with the phone and computer turned off, a cup of tea, a journal and pen, and some silence to begin to reconnect with the heart.
How might you bring the gift of retreat to your life this season?
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CELEBRATE WITH ME! ART JOURNAL GIVEAWAY!
The Abbey blog is four years old this week! To celebrate my anniversary I am giving away a set of art journals (all five titles which are perfect companions for your own retreat). To enter the random drawing leave a comment below by MONDAY, MAY 10th and share your necessary ingredients for a time of retreat.
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NEW SESSIONS of ONLINE CLASSES AVAILABLE SOON!
Later this month I will be launching a redesign of my website as I move toward offering more resources online for integrating the experience of retreat into your everyday life. I have been pondering the shape of next year’s offerings here at the Abbey and will be announcing them by the end of May. Some free online gifts for my wonderful supporters are also in the works. Subscribe to the Abbey Email Newsletter to be one of the first to hear the details.
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EASTER SEASON LINKS:
Sunrise Sister at Mind Sieve ponders the element of fire and asks some wonderful questions
Melinda at Inspiraculum offers her reflections on air as breath of God and the art she created in response
Diamonds in the Sky with Lucy contemplates the renewal and release of water
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© Christine Valters Paintner at Abbey of the Arts:
Transformative Living through Contemplative & Expressive Arts
63 Responses
Congrats on 4 years!
I make a yearly retreat/pilgrimage to the carmelite monastery a few hours away in the high desert, and stay a week in my own hermitage. I leave behind the computer and the cell phone. I bring music, journals, mystics, poetry, my Bible, a good novel or two, and chocolate. But probably the most important thing for me for these retreats is knowing my people are back home, holding me in prayer as I tackle the “frightening requests conceived out of nowhere,” because that is certainly work I cannot do alone…
Living with intention is for me to be on retreat, so that I do not have to go to a special place but only have to stop where I am. Now that I am retired from my nursing career I look back and see how stressed I was. Working full time and keeping up a home and relationship and friendships and health with nutrition and exercise was making me sick. Now I feel like I am on retreat every day. I have all the time I need to do my daily tasks. It has been 15 months of gradually slowing down. Every day is filled with so much beauty I can hardly believe my good fortune. Yet now a longing is setting in. It is a longing to not only live in beauty but to make some meaningful contribution to this amazing, fragile and threatened life on planet Earth. The question I am trying to live is how to maintain my connection to the peace, beauty and love that I have found in my relative solitude in the woods, while I go out into the world to be fully human in community. “There in lies the rub.” This is a transition that has always eluded me. Any wisdom on this would be appreciated.
Retreat for me means an inner moment, the time of knowing, to collect within the pause – the resonance of God. I discovered myself on the inside…
Inside Instead
There once was a girl, a lonely girl.
She wondered what could be.
She’d sit outside and look and look
without a friend to see.
One day while in this lonely spell she
looked inside instead.
She found the friend had always
been and what could be was dead.
silence
attention to inner silence no matter what sounds surround
space
expanding inner space in whatever spaces surround
listening
for the whispering on the edges of consciousness
light
kindling my inner flame and finding connection to divine light
being
For retreat
all I need is
a low tide
and
a lofty question.
The question is usually: What next?
thanks for asking.
A quiet forest
Rolling waves of the ocean
My backyard
A moment of sabbath rest in my work
Lectio in my small cell
The Divine Presence is everywhere….
My retreat in utter trust.
What a wonderful post. It feels like a retreat itself.
To me, a retreat is just time to be, instead of to do. If busyness is heart killing, then a retreat is heart restoring. That is the essence.
I have discovered that when I am on retreat I am of an entirely different mindset. It is as if I enter another dimension, a timeless dimension. Yet in my daily life I get caught up in production, how much I can do, and I absolutely love completion~a completed project of any sort. Often my focus is so much on the end product that I am not the least bit mindful of the journey and the joy that is inherent in the journey itself. When I am on retreat all that changes, and I just very simply am.
Lately I have been taking 2-minute retreats. I step out into our yard, stand and simply take in the beauty of God’s creation. I am especially drawn to the interplay of light and shadow which is most pronounced at the beginning and the end of a day. These 2-minute retreats throughout the day feed my soul as I step into that timeless dimension and open myself to God’s presence.
I bow in gratitude for your blog, your quiet, contemplative spirit inviting me/us into deepening spirituality. Blessings on the journey~
“this space where the wild edges meet”…this is the phrase that drew me into this post…this is precisely where I find that interior land of retreating into myself, where I am grounded, where I am centered, where I know all is well and as it should be, where I find my faith, even in the midst of uncertainty; and no matter if the time spent there is only a 20 minute lunch break walk at work or a whole Saturday devoted to nothing else but care of my self and my thoughts – it’s all about smoothing those wild edges and realizing that peace and grace can exist there, too, side by side with all the chaos that I sometimes feel in the outerworld.
The most important ingredient for a retreat, for me, is some kind of pre-retreat. I am an overdrive person, and I can easily spend all the time I had planned for a retreat just decelerating (or pacing, bored). For a couple of days pre-retreat, I try to begin the shift into a more fertile, calmer space, so that the richness of the retreat experience has a better chance to grow and flourish.
The way this plays out in my life is a regular practice of pre-retreat, and almost never an actual retreat. It seems to work, keeping me in touch with what matters. I guess the pre-retreat is the real thing!