By Jody Eagen

I jump out of bed at the shrill of the referee’s whistle. The darkness from outside fills the dorm where 20 of us men fumble for our exercise clothes in silence. This is my first retreat. It’s my first morning at the retreat. It’s also the first time in many years that I see what 6am looks like, although I could not tell you that’s what time it is since watches are not allowed.

The purpose of this retreat, The Wall, is to enhance my relationship with myself. The objectives include defining our driving needs, creating a long term vision, releasing self limiting beliefs and breaking through psychological walls that prevent us from the richness of life we seek. For the participants to do this, we must have time to listen to our inner voice and be willing to embrace the emotions we have towards our dreams and the beliefs that we use to sabotage ourselves.

I discover that one major goal of any retreat is to provide an environment that takes us out of our normal daily patterns. By patterns I include sleeping, eating, drinking, communicating and past-times. When this goal is achieved, we can then participate outside of our comfortable patterns of behaviour in ways that we might not do at home. The value of doing so is very powerful and multi-faceted.

Firstly, the retreat structure forces us to reflect on all of our actions, since they are not our usual ones. This allows us to really observe ourselves and the data we collect is invaluable. Whether it’s what we think or feel about our actions, all of it is useful information about how we see the world and in turn expect it to function. Of course, these beliefs could be the very ones that are limiting us.

Secondly, the desire to attempt to introduce our normal patterns of behaviour, if observed by ourselves, sparks an understanding of how important they are to us. If we look deeper into the pattern and see why we do them, then the learning is that much more rewarding, since it’s not what we do in life that is rewarding, it’s the why.

Finally, our struggle with the lack of familiarity tells us a great deal about our abilities to handle change, be creative and embrace the unknown. We all have these abilities yet we each have different fears that get in our way of using them. These may be the very Walls that prevent us from moving past our places of comfort into the unexplored, where all of our dreams and desires lie.

To make time in day-to-day life to do this kind of exploration requires great discipline. Most of us can manage it for awhile but the rapid pace of life usually wins out. Also, the time for reflection is usually so short that only the surface gets explored. So if you are looking for a real opportunity to know yourself and better understand what is truly important to you, a retreat could well be the best place for you to discover that. Even if it is at 6am in the morning.