The inner need to be alone with oneself has always guided people who wanted to achieve enlightenment. Suffice it to recall the famous examples of Gautama Buddha, who lived alone and attained nirvana, or Jesus Christ, who fasted for forty days. In many cultures, such seclusion is called a retreat and is seen as a way to explore oneself deeper. The time of a retreat is used for meditation, prayer, or meditation. This essay will focus on how the practice of a one-time retreat can affect spiritual life.
In the pursuit of fleeting pleasures in the stream of daily worries, people do not always have time to understand the meaning of existence. The practice of retreat makes it possible to realize and accept this meaning to find inner freedom. Fading away from the world and being alone is the ministry to God (Nouwen, 1995). During exercises, people try to go beyond habits, stereotypes, to overcome themselves, their emotional prohibitions, and restrictions, to break the existing blocks that prevent them from living a full life. In this sense, a retreat is a conscious attempt to organize one’s thoughts and protect oneself from reality.
Today, the meaning of spiritual solitude has slightly changed its form. Whereas retreat used to be a significant part of the lives of many monks and prophets, today, it is more of recreational activity. To achieve a state of complete spiritual solitude, people often go to distant countries or visit specialized institutions. Depending on the religious culture, retreat practices vary greatly: retreats can be both individual and collective. Sometimes the retreat is accompanied by complete silence, but other times it, on the contrary, implies active live communication. Such solitude is reduced to almost continuous meditation, which is only occasionally interrupted by sleep and food.
My spiritual experience of retreat was connected, first of all, with rethinking myself. In a moment of loneliness, being a beginner in this field, I quickly caught myself thinking that I could not control the flow of my thoughts.
However, immediately after the spiritual practice, there was an improvement in the perception of the present moment, attention, and consciousness, including the body’s feelings. This effect can be associated with short-term changes in dopamine and serotonin levels (Newberg, Wintering, Yamen, Zhong, Bowen, Averick, & Monti, 2018). Ordinary, rapidly changing everyday life has suddenly become more balanced and concentrated.
In a moment of silence and ritual, my mind was doing amazing things. It emphasized all the movements around me, the physical sensations, the contact with the air that touched my skin. At that moment, I had a bright feeling that the room was beginning to move, and I was with it. The masters asked me to be especially attentive to the process of my breathing, to concentrate on it. So, the state of trance enveloped me, and I started hearing inner voices.
Just a week after the retreat began, I realized how beautiful the world was. It is a confusing feeling, but I felt like I had a vision at the atomic level. At that moment, I loved not only myself but everyone else around me. According to Nouwen (1995), this feeling seems to be the union with God. This feeling did not leave me for a long time, and these days I felt like the happiest person on the planet.
Emphasizing all of the above, there are many religious ways to find yourself. In many cultures, there is a tendency towards isolation and spiritual loneliness to distract oneself from the bustle of the outside world. Spiritual practices of retreat today are somewhat different from what they used to be, but serve the same purpose. A retreat is a more potent form of meditation that can affect your world view and change values. This practice is closely linked to going beyond the comfort zone and discoveries. It is important not to lose this spiritual state after the course, but to learn to live with it.
References
Newberg, A. B., Wintering, N., Yaden, D. B., Zhong, L., Bowen, B., Averick, N., & Monti, D. A. (2018). Effect of a one-week spiritual retreat on dopamine and serotonin transporter binding: a preliminary study. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 8(3), 265-278.
Nouwen, H. (1995). Moving from solitude to community to ministry. Leadership, 16(2), 81-87.