Safe and sacred. These are the two basic qualities of a Retreat place. Like a sort of refuge. A place where you are respected and protected. A lay version of the Monastery, mostly meant for people who are not nuns or monks. A temple, but without any religious connotation, as neutral as possible. A mind-and-heart Sanctuary, where people gather to connect through their intelligence and their emotions.
Retreat centers can be quite special places because of the lifestyle in them, which is rather different from everyday, worldly life. Nothing to blame on the world, yet it can be a tough and not very safe place to be living in sometimes. We lock our doors and have to watch out for dangers in most of our cities and we have to put up with a lot of stress and difficulties as well. We cope with so much pressure and so many expectations we are not even aware of.
Besides safety, stepping in a Retreat center offers us the chance of letting go of our continuous doing and being busy. We give ourselves the permission to stop and listen from the inside instead. We are more than we do. Maybe we just need a place where we can be held with compassion, because we are grieving or suffering and have nowhere else to go. A place where we know it is safe for us to open up and release that pain, that fear, that anxiety or where we can step out of ordinary life and ask ourselves some deep questions about who we are and what matters to us.
When we drop all our fixed ideas about life we are more likely to have new insights and perspectives and we can step back in the ordinary world and live from a less dualistic point of view. We return to our worldly life knowing more about our good qualities and about our potentials.Tapping now and again into the beauty and grace we carry within can really have a different impact on our life and on that of others.
Once we have found our own source of peace and well-being, we might also find it easier to recreate our own Sanctuary, no matter the circumstances. We learn and practice the ability to pause and give ourselves that sacred space, which is essentially within. Like tuning in, on a different frequency. We switch from outward to inward and we stay there, paying attention to what is happening.
This simple habit of pausing, dropping all mental and physical doing and letting come to surface whatever it has to, gives gradual yet very tangible results in the way we relate to others and to the external circumstances we encounter daily. We become less reactive and more responsive. We don't act driven by our immediate feelings as much. We are more lucid and more effective. We start choosing our words and actions more wisely. If caught in anxiety, fear, judgment, frustration, we identify those triggers and don't act upon them as often as before. We investigate the causes beyond them and try to remove those causes or we choose a different mind attitude, less harmful for ourselves and for others.
By making the decision to step into our inner Sanctuary we can save us from lots of unskillful situations and from waisting time and energy. After a pause, we are more incline to see things with more clarity and with an open, more relaxed mind. We have more space because of the uncluttering that inner stillness naturally produces. Our internal narratives seem quieter, our breathing pace calmer and we are not as caught in our personal little dramas as we usually are. We become more solid, less craving, freer.
If we keep doing it, we slowly turn into a Sanctuary for others too, may they be our friends, relatives, colleagues, students. We carry those quality of safety and sacredness with us wherever we go. And hopefully we inspire those around us to do the same. To be a refuge for themselves and for others. Like a pebble thrown into water, it ripples out, further and further.