Growing Your Retreat Habit: Practical Foundations for Sustainable Practice

Retreat offers something that regular daily practice rarely can: an extended, uninterrupted time for the mind to settle, and for teachings to be absorbed in-depth. Even a short retreat can mark a significant shift in your relationship to your spiritual path. Yet, while a short home retreat may seem like a modest commitment on paper, it’s a more demanding one in practice. The key to a meaningful spiritual life is building a vessel right where you are.

This workshop addresses the practical framework of a home retreat, focused on the real-world decisions you will face: how to prepare your space and your mind in the days beforehand, how to organize your time, and how to close a retreat in a way that preserves the work you’ve done.

Regardless of what you wish to focus on, the logistical structure of a well-designed retreat is largely consistent across approaches, and it can be learned. Over the course of the day, we will explore a blueprint that participants can carry forward and adapt to their own practice.

We will examine how to choose a topic aligned with your current stage of practice, design a balanced daily schedule, establish clear commitments, and prepare your environment so that your retreat supports concentration rather than distraction. Attention will be given to common obstacles: restlessness, doubt, fatigue, and overexertion, and to developing concrete methods for working with them skillfully.

You will leave with a concrete plan for your next two or three day retreat, grounded in your own interests and calibrated to the conditions of your daily life.

Establishing a retreat habit strengthens confidence, deepens understanding, and brings practice into sharper focus. Join us and take a deliberate step toward making retreat a steady and energizing part of your spiritual life.

Schedule: Morning Session 10:00 am to 12:00 pm, Lunch Break, 12:00 – 1:30 pm, Afternoon Session, 1:30 – 3:30 pm. You are welcome to use our refrigerator and microwave for your food, or go out for lunch.

Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87022108703?pwd=czdqb0I5cTJsZ3YzYkpOektYaEdTdz09#success