By Jody Eagen

In one of our retreat programs, The Wall, an objective is for participants to discover their driving needs – those experiences they must have in their daily life. Picture your driving needs as several horses that drive your chariot of life. If we have reins on all these horses then we can control where our chariot of life goes. Without the reins, one of these horses may decide to stop and eat at any time and your chariot of life will go round and round until the horse stops eating.

Being unconscious of our driving needs is like not having any reins on the horses. Once we become conscious of our driving needs, then we can control when to feed them or how to get our driving needs met. When all of them are being fed, life is very fulfilling. Some people are conscious of one or two but it usually takes some concentrated effort to gather knowledge of all of them.

This self-awareness is very important. If we do not have constructive ways to get these driving needs met, it is very common to resort to harmful and destructive means. Even when we find constructive ways to meet our driving needs our behaviours may become complusive, which could result in an unbalanced lifestyle. Imagine getting a need for solitude met by picking a fight with your spouse. It may be effective in the short term but it’s probably not fulfilling long term. If we know all our horses and have constructive strategies in place to feed them, then we have control over the level of fulfillment in our lives.

At the outset of a recent Wall retreat, we laid out the groundrules as we always do. A participant heard them as very authoritative. They felt constrained and chose to rebel against the ground rules. They eventually discovered they had a long history of challenge with authority and that underneath it all was a fear of losing their independence – one of their strongest driving needs.

Sometimes our needs are cleverly disguised. A participant was angry after discovering their accomodations included sharing a room with 3 other people. There was lots of complaining – I have to share the shower, it takes too much time, how can I be ready for class on time in the morning. In this case, several needs came out but one that was somewhat hidden was the need for solitude. In their daily life, they got that need met during their morning rituals. If their morning solitude had not been disrupted, they may never have discovered it was a driving need.

In these two cases, the structure of the retreat allowed the participants to see what they might lose. As humans, we do not like to lose our strategies for getting needs met, even when we are not conscious of that need. A retreat is a great mechanism to uncover what the unconcious is keeping to itself.