How to Go on a Spiritual Retreat

Advice for the rest of us

Spiritual retreats are not just for monks and hard-core yogis, and they don’t have to last for years.

My traditions are Kashmir Shaivism from North India and Dzogchen from Tibet. People practicing and teaching in these traditions are mostly householders. We hang out in the world with families, jobs, and cafes.

My Dzogchen teacher used to joke: If you go on a long retreat hoping to lose your attachments, what you might lose is your family and friends and job!

So never fear. A retreat can last for half a day, a day, a few days, a week, or, if you insist, longer.

The key to a retreat is that you devote yourself one hundred percent to doing some kind of spiritual practice and to relaxing more deeply.

Good times to go on retreat are when:

• you feel the need to rejuvenate and reconnect with your spiritual life;
• you receive a new practice from your teacher and want to bond with it;
• you are curious about retreats and are ready to explore your practice more deeply;
• you have encountered some blockage in your spiritual life, and you want to try to resolve it; or
• you enter a particularly good time…