Personal Retreats & Intensive Therapy

“Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be,” said Abraham Lincoln. This speaks to an important component of the quest for personal growth: there’s a decision that must be made to do the work required to change the patterns we need to change.

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When you commit to a retreat or intensive, you are making an important and empowering decision: Committing resources to your inner development. That commitment is like telling yourself, “Yes, this is possible. I can grow, I can change, I can learn.” It’s a choice to set aside the doubts and worries that can hold us prisoner, and say, “Yes!”

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Another powerful aspect of a retreat or intensive is the focused, sustained time and effort devoted to your goal. Imagine learning a language by studying it one hour a week. Then imagine what would happen to that process through immersion- devoting several days to learning it. There’s a level of learning that goes far deeper, and has more sustainable results. This is one of the reasons that most wisdom traditions, such as meditation, encourage practitioners to go on retreat- it’s a recognition of the power of time devoted to a single focus.

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A retreat or intensive creates a powerful disruption of business as usual- our normal way of operating in the world, in which habitual patterns are continually reinforced. Stepping out of everyday patterns for a sustained period of time disrupts the stuck or self-limiting patterns- and in that disruption there is the fertile ground for new patterns to be identified, understood and nurtured. The new pattern of thinking, responding to emotions, or behavior becomes a blueprint for positive life changes going forward, based on direct, lived experience, not simply conversation. From then on, it’s in your bones, not just the mind.