It’s hardly the stuff of buckets and spades, raucous nights out or days lazing
in the sun. But more of us are choosing to use our precious holiday time
exploring our inner, spiritual lives by going on a retreat. Retreats are a
multimillion-pound industry, offering everything from Catholic monastic
weekends to nature trails, from disciplined, silent spaces to
family-friendly gatherings.
The idea of retreat has been around since ancient times and the concept is
found in all the world’s big religions. While many retreats still adhere to
strictly religious principles, many others offer to meet a more secular
need, to help people from all walks and of all ages to maintain some balance
in their lives by getting to know themselves better, and to develop.
Stafford Whiteaker, the editor of the Good Retreat Guide, says its
website (thegoodretreatguide.com)
receives on average four to five requests to be listed every week from new
centres: “When we started the guide in 1991 we found a few hundred places;
now we have to be highly selective to keep the number under a thousand.” The
fastest-growing sectors are meditation, Buddhism, yoga, alternative
healing and retreats based on religious concepts such as the
spiritual exercises of St Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits.
Whiteaker believes two factors are feeding this: the increasing popularity of
personal spirituality beyond established religion; and an increasing need to
take time out of our busy lives. But he believes that underlying these
factors is a deeper motive: “Going on a retreat gives our spirit the chance
to show us that we are more than just the sum of our possessions and our job
title. Such revelations can influence environmental consciousness or how we
vote.”
We sent three journalists on retreat to England, Scotland and New Zealand. Did
they find fresh insights? Or was the experience more sanctimonious than
spiritual?
ROSEMARY DUFFY samples t’ai chi and wild seascapes in the Orkneys
Via House overlooks a loch in the Orkney Islands and is the UK’s most
northerly holistic retreat, but there’s a distinctly Far Eastern flavour as
well. You can choose to structure your own days here, chosing from t’ai chi
workshops to create inner space, to walks along the Atlantic seascape that
give you outer space to unwind. Chinese massages and meditation classes are
also on the menu.
I am picked up at Kirkwall airport by John Brooks, who runs the retreat with
his partner Lynn Barbour, and driven the half hour to Via House. We pass the
megalithic Stones o’ Stenness, one of the famous Neolithic sites. At dinner
I meet my fellow guests, two American psychotherapists and a London-based
theatre director. Afterwards, feet up in front of the peat fire in the
little library, there’s no telly, radio or papers to distract from
decluttering the mind.
In the morning I have my first t’ai chi workshop. Lynn asks me first simply to
walk around the room. I think I’m walking slowly until she says: “Feel every
part of the foot as it touches the floor — heel, outside/inside of foot,
ball of foot, each toe. Breathe in with the weight on the back foot, out as
the heel of the other touches the ground.” Each step now takes aeons and I
wobble at the unfamiliar pace, but moving in time to my breathing is
hypnotically calming. Lynn explains that this is the basis of t’ai chi:
harmonising mind and body through the breath, enabling chi, the body’s
energy, to flow.
In the afternoon on a spectacular cliff walk to Yesnaby Castle, Lynn points to
a big rock taking a pounding from the incoming tide and suggests that I
imagine my feet as heavy as this rock when I’m in a t’ai chi stance to help
me feel grounded. I try planting my huge rock feet in the stance and it is
remarkably effective.
In the evening, Lynn suggests a postdinner outing to view the Stenness stones
by moonlight. Wonderful. But I miss the trip as I nod off after my organic
Orkney beef olives, with John’s home-grown tatties. The fresh air has
drugged me and I stagger to bed at 9pm.
Next morning we head off to Skaill Bay to practise t’ai chi on a near-empty
beach. Lynn suggests that I try seeing without looking, hearing without
listening. Huh? “Widen your awareness of your surroundings; sound of waves,
changing light,” she says, “but without focusing on anything in particular.”
I give this my best shot but achieve only vacant staring. No matter, this is
bliss: barefoot in the sand, deep breaths of sea air, sl-o-o-o-wly circling
the arms. Until a rogue icy wave breaks around our ankles sending us
shrieking with laughter up the beach. The day ends with a gentle stroll to
the Brough of Birsay, an island accessible at low tide, and we watch fulmars
giving a masterclass in going with the flow as they soar in the thermals off
the cliffs. At dinner, I stay awake till pud.
My final outing is to beautiful Stromness, which “descends to its harbour like
a tumbling stone wave”, as the writer George Mackay Brown put it. As I
practise my wobbly t’ai chi walk along a path by the sea, to my delight a
couple of seals bob their heads out of the water and swim alongside us
inquisitively. Too soon, however, it’s time to leave, but they say that
Orkney puts magnets in your feet. So I call to the seals: “See you again!”
NEED TO KNOW
Via House, Sandwick, Orkney, 01856 841207, orkneyimages.com.
Weekend retreats, including accommodation, full board, workshops, treatments
and airport pickup, £295. Loganair flies to Kirkwall (40 minutes) from
Aberdeen or Inverness, from £117.40
RUTH GLEDHILL goes on a family retreat in Derbyshire with her four-year-old
son
It was a grey, cold morning and the last thing I wanted to do was to drive to
a remote village, Unstone, just north of Chesterfield, Derbyshire, for a Zen
Buddhist retreat. In spite of being the religious correspondent of The
Times, I had not been on a retreat for years. They are places where
children should be neither seen nor heard. But this one promised to be
different. It was a family retreat. And family did not just mean children.
It meant ancestors as well, or at least photographs of them, for the
ancestor shrine.
For just under a week, my four-year-old son Arthur and I would join the
Community of Interbeing’s “Joyfully Together” Sangha gathering at Unstone
Grange, a rural residential centre, with organic gardens run by volunteers.
Community members, of whom not all are fully practising Buddhists, follow
the teachings of the French-based Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, a
former Nobel Peace Prize nominee, known to his students as Thay (pronounced
“tie”).
Anxious to please, I had dug out a photo of my late grandfather, Alan
Gledhill, bewigged and lined up with two dozen other judges from the Burmese
judiciary, shortly before independence. Besides being the requisite
ancestor, he was my closest familial link with Buddhism.
About two dozen of us, 12 children and 12 adults, turned up to enjoy the first
of our organic vegan meals — baked potato and apple crumble — in the
fast-fading gentility of the Grange. There we met our retreat leader, Murray
Corke, a vet who also lectures at Cambridge University and is one of the
UK’s leading dharma teachers.
Broadly speaking, dharma means the right way of living, referred to by
this community as “mindfulness”, an awareness of how human beings can
inflict suffering on others.
As we sat down to the meal, a bell sounded and all was silent save for Arthur
and another child, who were outside the dining room, throwing themselves up
and down the stairs, emitting fearful shrieks. Was the whole retreat
intended to be silent? Panic set in as my son reappeared with a nasty new
graze on his back and livid bruises on his shins, grinning madly, delighted
with his war wounds. I established where the naughty step was, put him on it
firmly and spent dinner running in and out, feeding him spoonfuls of baked
potato. Another bell sounded and, thank heavens, people started talking.
From there on, it got better and better. The organisation and the food were
superb; the grounds and house were magical, like stepping into an Eastern
fairytale. Most people there were with children, including a few with
special needs, who were being educated at home and who had a rare form of
wisdom from which the rest of us could learn. Many friends voiced bafflement
that there could be any “retreat” that involved children. All I can say is
that children on retreat can teach us more than we can imagine: watching
them meditate, for example, by using jewel-like stones, which we sought out
in the meadows around the Grange, and then sewing little bags in which to
store them. Or teaching them to sit crosslegged, or even to stand on their
heads, as Arthur managed to do, while singing a little “dharma song”, like a
nursery rhyme.
Arthur loved the big garden, and was entranced by the bonfire around which we
sang and danced on the last night. The children enacted various dharma
children’s stories, Buddhist versions of Aesop’s Fables,
and the adults sang dharma songs. It was the first time Arthur had seen a
bonfire, but at the end he said: “I was sad that there wasn’t a bomb in the
bombfire.”
One of the nicest things of all, though, was the people. Hardly anyone wanted
to know what anyone else did, how big their cars or houses were, how many
times they went skiing. All anyone was interested in was whether a person
had been to Plum Village, Thay’s sanga (or community), in France, not far
from Bordeaux. About 150 monks and nuns live there and where retreats,
including family ones, are held regularly. I have never been. But one day,
now, I just might.
NEED TO KNOW
The next family retreat will be held at the Ringsfield Hall Eco-Centre,
Ringsfield, Beccles, Suffolk, August 25-29. For further details and
information, phone 01502 713020, ringsfield-hall.freeserve.co.uk,
or e-mail info@ringsfield-hall.co.uk. For information on the Community of
Interbeing and retreats in Plum Village, visit interbeing.org.uk
JENNY RICHES keeps quiet in New Zealand
When my old flatmate Kirsty told me about a Vipassana meditation course she’d
been on while travelling in New Zealand, I found myself listening properly
rather than cynically. She said it had taught her how to stand back from
negative situations and people, just observing instead what was happening.
She didn't have to say that she was happy; it came off her in waves.
She handed me a blue leaflet that told how I could learn Vipassana at a
ten-day course in one of the organisation’s worldwide network of meditation
centres. While there, you must maintain “noble silence”; not only not
talking, but not exchanging body language, such as smiling, for ten days. I
struggle with the idea of shutting up for ten minutes, so it seemed too
daunting. But eventually I decided that ten days of silence might be a fair
price for stilling the worries that loop around in my head.
A few months later I arrived at the Vipassana centre in Kaukapakapa, a village
north of Auckland, and it was everything I had imagined. Humble-looking
people in shapeless clothing welcomed us. We took off our shoes at the door
and began to talk to our fellow initiates, all eagerly trying to find a
connection in the few hours before noble silence began. I handed in my
belongings, iPod, mobile phone, notebooks and paperbacks.
Men and women were segregated, the only shared area being the dhamma
(meditation) hall. Walking into the hall was terrifying. For the next hour I
focused obediently, as bidden, on my breathing, while shifting around trying
to get comfy. I was able to focus on my breathing for a few moments, and
then I'd find myself pondering on something profound, such as whatever
happened to Trio biscuits? Filing out of the hall I glanced around and
everyone seemed to be pretty calm. Did they all know it was going to be like
this?
The gong at 4am sent me outside into the black freezing air beneath glinting
stars, and I staggered to the dhamma for the day's first two-hour sitting.
For the next three days the routine of concentrating on my breathing for
about ten hours each day while trying not to nod off, get distracted or
annoyed at myself continued. Thoughts streamed across my mind: old hurts and
long-forgotten memories. One clear thought pierced all others: “This isn’t
bloody meditation. This is boot camp for your brain.”
But at one of the afternoon sittings, I had a breakthrough. I felt my mind
become still and I felt a real peace in the centre of my chest and a
lightness in my mind. I skipped out of the hall on a high. But the next day
when I sought this feeling again, I felt I’d regressed and tried not to sulk
when I couldn't achieve it. Slowly it became clear that working in the way I
was used to, by focusing on a goal or endgame, wasn’t working. You just had
to observe whatever your body was going through, without any thought of
success or fear of failure. The idea seemed impossible and depressing.
But each day brought a new advance, a new revelation at a deeper level. On the
final day I woke, nervously excited about reaching the end. Sophie, one of
the girls with whom I’d managed to grab a quick conversation before the
silence, caught my eye and grinned. I grinned back.
During that last session, I was overcome by emotion as Goenka, the course
teacher, told us to give forgiveness and to ask forgiveness for anything we
had done that had hurt others. Tears streamed down my face and I felt a
burden that I didn’t know I was carrying lifted from me. I opened my eyes,
wiped the tears and walked out into sunlight. Sitting on the wooden deck in
the sunshine as nature zinged around us, a new shared calm smoothed back
into the air.
Has it changed me? Well, it has changed my perspective on life completely. I
feel different, entirely different.
NEED TO KNOW
Jenny attended the New Zealand Vipassana meditation centre in Kaukapakapa,
north of Auckland. Courses are held throughout the year at Vipassana centres
around the world, and the UK centre is in Hereford. Courses are free and run
on a donation basis. Contact www.dhamma.org
