4 STEP GUIDE to CREATING YOUR OWN PERSONAL RETREAT
Step 1: Create your vision for your retreat
- Depending on your life schedule, decide to block off a half day (about 4 hours) or full day (about 8 hours) for your personal retreat
- Choose the elements you’d like to have in your retreat day. You’ll want this to feel right to you! Here are some elements that you may want to include: embodied movement, breath exploration, singing, chanting, dancing, yoga, meditation, journaling, reading, prayer, water or broth fasting, self massage, silence, tech-free, mineral salt bath, nature walk, Deep Nourishment practice.
Step 2: The week before your retreat
- Get any supplies you need such as candles, epsom salts, oils, teas, retreat meals.
- If you’re going to incorporate music on your retreat, make a special playlist ahead of time that feels connected to your theme or intention. Here is a movement playlist that I use for Amba movement journeys. Here’s another playlist that’s for our signature earth-resonance meditation, the Deep Nourishment practice. You may want to have part of your retreat silent and part with a sumptuous soundsacpe.
- Set up the people in your life who expect you to respond promptly to emails or texts that you’ll be unplugging so they don’t worry about you.
- If you live with family or housemates, let them know that you’ll be doing a home retreat. See if they can be out of the home during this time. If they’re not able to be out, you can always do your retreat in a dedicated room in your home. Ideally you’ll have the full length of time without distraction or disruption.
- Carve out some time to journal and explore what intentions or themes are emerging for you to explore during your retreat.
- Make a list of parameters or guidelines of what you are choosing do and not do during your retreat. Will you have access to your phone? Will you be silent? Will you turn off your wifi? Candle light only? Will you eat delicious nourishing meals, or fast, or have light foots like broth? Do you wish to have a schedule or keep it open to see how you feel, or a little of both? Remember, this is YOUR retreat. You get to set it up however you’d like!
Step 3: The day before your retreat
- Set up your space. Clean it, arrange it, make it beautiful, bring in anything you’ll want for it such as a meditation cushion, soft rugs, yoga mat, blankets, eye mask, speakers or headphones, journal, etc.
- Remind anyone that may expect your responses that you’ll be unplugging for this time.
- Eat clean, nourishing foods and limit your contact with the outside world (news, social media, chaotic people and places, outside energies).
- If possible, plan for the day before your retreat to be a little extra spacious so you have some to prepare energetically and tune into yourself.
- The evening before, light a couple candles, sit at your altar if you have one, and drop in to a meditation or prayer space and set your intention. Make this as clear as possible. Your intention doesn’t necessarily have words. It’s most important to feel this vibrationally. Feel it all the way through your body, and all the way through your heart.
Step 4: The day of your retreat
- Set your phone on airplane mode or do not disturb. If you’re water or broth fasting, have that on hand. If you’re eating food, have your food easily accessible.
- Begin your retreat time with a drop in (aka meditation or prayer). Get quiet and still, connect with your breath, drop inside. Open sacred space by connecting with your heart, your own higher self, and all of your guides and divine support in the unseen realms.
- Enjoy your retreat!
- At the end of your retreat, receive all that you just opened to. Bow to yourself and acknowledge that you are closing the sacred space. Ask to be supported in your sleep time to integrate your retreat and anything that came up for you. You may also wish to journal at the end of your day, to receive any downloads or insights that have emerged from your time ‘outside of time’.