Years ago, I wrote an essay about the benefits of going on retreat. I described it as a chance to separate from normal routines and triggers, see habitual patterns more clearly, and then change momentum in a positive direction.
Lela and I are getting ready to lead a one day retreat on Sunday, April 16, so I thought it would be a good time to revisit this piece. It’s not very long, so take a look and my next comments will make more sense:
I still broadly agree with what I wrote, but it leans a bit heavily on yoga tropes and performative certainty for my current taste. For example, at the end I summarized:
Over a whole day… in the supportive structure of retreat, we have time and space to 1) see our momentum for what it is – usually a collection of habits we've picked up unconsciously from parents/friends/society - and 2) consciously redirect our life though the skillful application of yoga.
While I still think #1 is very true, my thoughts on #2 have complexified. While I remain big fan of “conscious, skillful redirection”, I’m increasingly skeptical that sheer personal effort is the only active ingredient. What I left out of my prior writing, what I appreciate more and more, is that the context of what we do matters a lot… maybe more than the details of what we do. What we get in a retreat setting is a transformative environment, not just a set of practices.
Two weekends ago, I had the chance to study in person with Rod Stryker, one of my primary teachers who I haven’t seen since 2019. He offered two full days of teaching at the Heartwood Center in Evanston (the same place we’re holding our retreat next month).
Before kids, when I was studying with Rod regularly, I focused on the content of his teachings: philosophy, techniques, meditations. In the past few years, I’ve found myself drawn into other orbits - tai chi, somatics, nature meditation, running - and haven’t pursued a lot of formal hatha yoga practice. Returning to the forms I once avidly pursued was a pleasant reunion, and I noticed that my training in other paradigms has improved my hatha. The weekend also affirmed that my primary “growing tip” is no longer is hatha yoga (which will, however, always be part of my roots and trunk).
Less fixated on the exact details of the practice, and following my ongoing inquiry into yoga as ritual, I found myself more aware of all the “non yoga” ingredients that made the weekend - while not exactly a formal retreat - very impactful. To name a few:
3d High Definition Togetherness: We were around 45 people in a big room, moving and breathing together. We could see each other’s faces, hear each other knock over water bottles, borrow pens and Kleenex. It was sometimes awkward, sometimes inconvenient, and it felt damn good.
Cycling Together: Going through shared difficulties with a friendly group is primally satisfying. The weight of our collective focus was palpable and motivating. After wobbling, sighing, and fidgeting our way through longer holds, we could then dissolve together into a tremendous, resonant stillness during savasana.
Committing Together: Folks came from all over the Midwest. We arranged childcare, delayed work, missed other stuff. Our collective offering of time and money to be together in the same place was a kind of sacrifice, imbuing the experiences with more significance. (As a counter-example: how many free online webinars have you signed up for and never watched?)
Seeking Together: It is inspiring to be in a group of souls collectively seeking greater self-knowledge and skill-in-action. We affirmed each other’s sense that there is more to life than collecting wealth, pleasure and status (though maybe having $100 yoga pants helps? TBD).
In my prior writing, I described retreat as a chance to amplify one’s individual efforts with the guidance of a teacher. Now, I am more appreciative of the vital role played by the assembly of students1. Like superconducting magnets in a particle accelerator, all the participants together generate a catalytic ritual field that can bend individual trajectories at least as much - and I suspect even more - than personal effort.
But towards what are we aiming? What is the ritual of a yoga retreat for? After all, group vibes can be used to empower all sorts of behaviors: military training, multi-level marketing schemes, CrossFit gyms, etc.
As befits a mystical tradition, the answers are paradoxical. Rod based his teachings around the classical notion that the purpose of yoga is to attain kaivalya, often translated as "isolation," "separation," or "detachment." In the context of the Yoga Sutras, kaivalya refers to the state of absolute freedom from the vicissitudes of mortal life. “To stand in the ashes of the fires of life and not lose yourself,” as he put it.
So we were a group of people that came together in the name of refining our capacity to be “alone”2. Strange! Perhaps this points to the paradoxical nature of all dualities: we need community to support our individual evolution / we better serve the community when we clarify who we really are. Or perhaps we use the story of pursuing freedom as an excuse to hang out together? The dance between individuality and interdependence is endless, unresolveable.
I don’t think the urge to have more individual freedom is a unique sin of Western culture, or even the human species. Evolution brings forth both individuals and collectives according to the affordances of a particular ecosystem. Thanks to a confluence of geologic and historical factors3, individualism really “caught fire” around the Mediterranean rather than elsewhere, and it proved a very successful strategy - perhaps too successful.
Tremendous economic growth and material abundance have come at the price of discarding many if not most of the communal support structures that humans evolved to expect. The psychic weight of living in this beautiful and tragic world - once collectively addressed through ritual and myth - is now born largely by individuals, especially in the secular West. We’re cracking under the pressure. The evidence is everywhere.
Is there any amount of psychotherapy or pranayama that can take the place of belonging to a place and a people?4 If not (and I suspect not): can we deliberately step back into interdependence with each other and the land? Reweave ourselves back into the world? Can we afford not to try? I dream that yoga studios like Grateful Yoga might play some small roll in this work.
There’s no single strategy that’s going to fix this, but perhaps we could start by acknowledging that being in community is a skill that deserves cultivation. Just like we now need to deliberately exercise because our overfed bodies still expect hunting and gathering levels of activity, we are social mammals who still need to deliberately cultivate community, even if it feels like we can get away with social media and same-day grocery delivery. There is a “posture of interdependence” that we can practice when we come together for a class or retreat, alongside our solo asanas aimed at individual freedom.
That’s basically what Lela and I have in mind for our October 1 retreat, which we’re calling the Yoga of Reconnection. Through a variety of practices - yoga, Somatic Experiencing, connection with nature - we can take small steps back towards our animal bodies, towards each other, towards the living world. The room at Heartwood is quite large, so there’s plenty of space for us to be comfortably together, maybe some of us for the first time since the pandemic started. We have also partnered with the fabulous Mexican restaurant across the street, Zentli, to provide a tasty lunch that we can share together (or you can bring your own).
It will be a special day. If you live in the area, I hope you’ll consider joining us.
PS. No vocal track this time; still recovering from a nagging cough. I’ll record something when my voice is more reliable.
Of course the Buddha was on to this long ago, when he gave sangha (the spiritual community) equal billing alongside dharma (the teachings) and buddha (the teacher).
Please forgive the simplification here. There is quite a bit of nuance that’s hard to convey briefly. Basically, the Self who “stands alone” is actually something akin to a cosmic consciousness shared by all, so we paradoxically recognize our union with the world even as we withdraw from it. Atman = Brahman, as the Upanishadic formula goes.
As detailed in the highly recommended book Origins: How Earths History Shaped Human History by Lewis Dartnell.
Listen to the latest episode of The Emerald for more in this vein:
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