After my Riviera retreat, my family and I headed to one of the European cities we love the most, Florence, Italy where I’m sitting now, processing and writing as I look out the window listening to songbirds flit through a dusty Tuscan sunset as it glows upon the gardens and statuary of this stately, old growth neighborhood just outside of the Porta Romana.
My journey to both France and Italy has taught me about different angles of the pilgrim’s journey to the crossroads so I’m going to share both angles both in this message and my next.
In my last message, I wrote about the magic that comes at the crossroads of giving and receiving heart-felt service. Today, I want to explore how retreats are more than just nice things to do—they are transformational when you're on a pilgrim’s journey at a crossroads of life.
Disruption At The Junction
Over the course of many years, the themes of crossroads and pilgrims have woven their way into my personal spiritual evolution. Naturally, the theme of the crossroads has found their way into my writing and teaching, including my most recent retreat to the French Riviera.
And let’s get real—we are all at a crossroads in one way or another, be that a transition of stage of life, of our spiritual practice, of relationships, work, or myriad other things. At a crossroads, we are often not sure where to go next, what direction to turn, or even how we got to where we are in the first place. Often, it’s hard to be at a crossroads because it means change, transformation, metamorphosis.
And generally, people don’t like change.
Yes, when life is changing, it can often feel disruptive but I believe that’s exactly the point. Being at a crossroads is a catalyst for transformation precisely because it means stepping away from what’s familiar—familiar yet often broken. The process of being at a crossroads launches us headlong into the unknown, setting off on a pilgrim’s journey with a head full of questions and a heart full of faith.
Magic At The Crossroads
Though being at a transition point in life is often uncomfortable, both life and yoga have taught me something indispensable—magic always happens at the crossroads.
A truly beautiful way of engaging with whatever magic is at whatever turning point you might be at, is to come on a retreat.
What Is A Pilgrim?
It’s true, yoga retreats are a lot of fun, but they are also a lot more than that.
“You’re not tourists, you’re pilgrims,” Nórín said.
Last year while hosting a yoga retreat in Ireland (I know, rough life) we were treated to a day with poet, author, singer and storyteller, Nórín Ní Riain and her son, singer, poet, and performer Moley Ó Súilleabháin. Her declaration about being pilgrims rather than tourists articulated something I’d been chewing on for a while, something essential: I’ve been leading retreats for over 2 decades and know how transformational they can be—more than just a vacation with yoga sprinkled in.
With her words, it finally dawned on me that these retreats are pilgrimages.
A pilgrim is often someone who finds themselves at a transition—sometimes chosen, sometimes not—and is either willing or compelled to leave the comfort of their routine to find some illumination on a journey that becomes holy.
A pilgrim is willing to search, to search with a question, one that may start the journey or perhaps a question that is illuminated or clarified en route.
A Pilgrim has faith in the unknown and wields weapon-grade curiosity and humility to greet whatever comes around the next corner.
A pilgrim evolves from a state of searching to one of constant arriving, often within the same foot step.
To the pilgrim, every stone is sacred along the path.
Why Retreat?
Perspective
So why must a pilgrim retreat? Can’t transformation be done at home? I mean it would save a helluva lot of time and energy and money.
Quite simply, one of the biggest things a retreat does for you is to help you get out of your routine. Getting out of your routine is essential for discovery and transformation because, like Einstein said, “No problem can be solved from the same state of mind that created it.”
To change your circumstances, you must first change your state of mind and one of the most effective ways of doing that is to get outta Dodge.
Getting away gives us perspective. I’m not alone here—Hemingway understood this. Get this: Hemingway couldn’t write A Moveable Feast his book about living in Paris while in Paris. He needed to retreat to Cuba (so Hemingway) and Ketchum, Idaho (random, love it!, and also so Hemingway) in order to gain both clarity and perspective about what to write.
Do you resonate with this? Have you ever found clarity on an issue by simply getting some space from your routine?
I mean, I’m currently working on a piece that I’ve been trying to write for about, oh … 15 years! As I started to write it, I just kept getting blocked over and over until I had to leave it alone until just recently.
Now I understand that at the time, I just didn’t have enough space from and perspective of the events I was trying to write about. How can you write about something that hasn’t finished yet—you don’t know the ending, what it all means, or even when to pause, take a breath, and say, “Yo, can you even believe how crazy this is?!”
A retreat gives us clarity by helping us get out of our old routine precisely to gain perspective. It’s almost like sitting in the airplane and looking out the window gives us the perspective to see our life from 10,000 feet.
Presence
Another thing that a yoga or meditation retreat does so well is to anchor you to presence, the part of yourself that has all the answers. You gain presence not only through the many yoga and meditation practices, but also, and perhaps especially, because being out of your comfort zone—in a different country, language, cultures, climate, etc.,—stimulates your senses and activates the wisdom of your presence.
And speaking of accessing our most vital sense, in classic novella, The Little Prince, the wise fox drops this truth bomb when he says: “One only sees well with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eyes.”
At a retreat, when we are no longer anesthetized by the every-day, our senses and hearts tend to open causing our vision to dilate with a keen presence and take in what’s really essential.
So, being on a retreat stimulates presence, a crossroads where past and future meet. And like I said, there’s magic at the crossroads.
Body, Mind, And Spirit
Another magical crossroads you can find at a retreat is that of body, mind, and spirit. For millennia, yogis have understood the power of this crossroads as an effective driver for our spiritual evolution as well as a reliable resource to keep us healthy, manage life’s curveballs, and navigate the predictable shit-show of the every-day.
A retreat is a unique opportunity to immerse yourself at the nexus of body, mind, and spirit, perspective, and presence.
As all the magic of these divergent elements converge, it illuminates the truth of your hero’s journey: the answers you were looking for were already inside of you but sometimes you need to go halfway around the world to discover them.
Stepping Off The Mat
Each morning at the retreat we met at the ocean’s edge to greet the dawn with sun salutations, to breathe and meditate. One morning, as the sun lifted out of the ocean, coloring the landscape with warm hues of peach and gold, we discussed how the practice of yoga isn’t limited to what happens on our yoga mats.
One retreat attendee chimed in and admitted that now, she finally understood what one of her yoga teachers said about how the practice begins the moment you step off the mat. She said her off-the-mat practice began the moment she said yes to this retreat.
She discovered my Riviera retreat literally on the day it began. I was sitting at the airport waiting for my guests and our drivers to arrive when I got her email telling me that she lived in Belgium and that this retreat sounded so perfect, exactly what she needed, but I wished she would have discovered it a week ago. “I fear I’m too late!”
I invited her to do something bold—jump on the next train, take a leap of faith, and join us!
And she did.
This retreat became a veritable pilgrim’s journey for her. It was a journey of faith, having never met me before, yes, but more importantly it was a journey of reconciling and encountering many crossroads she was experiencing at that moment in her life.
She came to the Riviera to get on her mat so that she could perform all of the yoga that needed to happen off the mat.
Poet, author, and speaker David Whyte is a master of speaking to the pilgrim’s journey. In his poem “The True Love” he speaks to that catalytic moment when all the bullshit is burned away and there’s nothing left but to say “YES!” in the face of what you know you need to do.
Check out this excerpt from his poem “The True Love”:
. . . we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes
A yoga retreat reminds us that we don’t live on our yoga mat or meditation cushion and that the true practice begins when we connect to our heart and step off the mat and into the world, one where we must keep our center, find our balance, and breathe through both life’s joys and discomforts.
Bringing It Home
In a retreat setting we will undoubtedly have a chance to practice responding rather than reacting to life's events, like collecting ourselves the first time we are addressed in a language we don’t understand, get lost, or encounter a new custom.
A great way of learning to do this is with a very simple yet profound practice is what I call the WRW(R) model: Welcome, Recognize, and Witness (Respond optional).
For example, when leading a Yoga Nidra practice, I invite students to relax while practicing the following:
Welcoming simple and benign objects (anything you can be aware of)—like the sound of my voice or the sensation of body—into their awareness
Recognizing it objectively for exactly what it is—no more, no less
Witnessing the object, just observing it.
Responding. Sometimes, a person may choose to then respond to the object like respond the object of body discomfort by changing positions of their body or scratching an itch or something but responding is fundamentally different than reacting. Responding is mindful. Reacting is mindless.
By practicing the WRW(R) method with relatively benign objects in the controlled environment of a Yoga Nidra practice, we prepare to do this with the circumstances of every-day life. Even and especially when those objects feel much less benign—like almost getting run over by a cyclist or missing your flight. No matter the object, we can also practice welcoming, recognizing, and witnessing—sometimes responding to— that object. Note that responding to an object is light years away from reacting to it.
By learning to WRW(R) both the objects in Yoga Nidra and life, it wakes us up to two great truths. First, that we are not defined by the events that happen to us. And second, we may learn to respond to them from the foundation of our innate abundance and compassion rather than react to them from the loose sands of scarcity and fear. Learning to be the witness and therefore respond to life helps us wake up from the dream of identifying as life’s victims and wake up to the truth of being agents—truly the Divine itself, living a human life full of passion, perspective, and purpose.
After all, the greatest practice is life itself.
Like Louis Armstrong said, “What we play is life.”
Perhaps the greatest magic that happens along the pilgrim’s journey through the crossroads is that you come back home to your own self with expanded self knowledge (swadhyaya is the yogic term).
A Remembering Not An Escape
Therefore, the point of a retreat is not to escape. It’s to retreat a while, regroup and remember ourselves—our True Selves—so that we can bring this all with us back home and apply it to our families, our work, and community. We come home from retreats with stories, new lifelong friendships, and a deeper perspective of life.
We come back home feeling more like ourselves.
Our family and colleagues will be so happy with the rejuvenated person that comes home from the retreat that they’ll start a fund so that they can send you away EVERY year.
May we all find the magic at whatever crossroads we may be facing in life. May you take the opportunity to retreat on your own pilgrim’s journey to find the wise inner teacher inside that distance, perspective, and presence offers. And as the airplane hits terra firma, having gained that 10,000-foot view, may we see home with new eyes, clear in the truth that the answers already lay inside of us but that sometimes we need the journey to illuminate them.
Stay tuned because in my next message I want to talk about how the seemingly impossible challenges life throws at us can help act as a renaissance to do the impossible.
P.S. And if you’re itching to book your next adventure, please join me for my next retreat!
