How To Create Your Own Retreat Space
When you’re at home, you can create your own retreat space for deeper introspection – a place free from distractions, to activate your senses, shift your perspective and open the mind’s creative gates. You could use this contemplative space for a short time each day, at a regular time each week, or for a lengthier intensive day(s) – whatever works best for you and your schedule.
Setting up your space
- Eliminate distractions, turn off electronics. Have kids? Set your alarm an hour earlier than they wake-up
- Light a scented candle – I like Diptyque
- Use sound to activate the right-side of your brain such as music from existential composers like Philip Glass
- Wear something extra comfortable, like a cashmere sweater or your favourite socks
- Prepare a nurturing tea or water infused with lemon/ginger/cucumber/herbs
Using your space
A good way to begin taking a contemplative look at your life, career or business, is to take inventory of the past year/decade. It’s easy to lose sight of how far we’ve come. Each of our past chapters has been made up of times when we were confused, uncertain, or discouraged. Yet it was also made up of times when we were clear, enthusiastic and confident. People fell away from our life, and new ones came into it. By looking back over our journey’s milestones they illustrate how it all connects and leads to where we are today.
You can review your calendar to help jog your memory, then capture your answers in a journal, a notebook or in a digital document.
Here are a few questions you can ask yourself:
- What are you most proud of and why?
- What were your biggest challenges or mistakes, and what lessons did you learn from them?
- What is your biggest obstacle between where you are now and where you want to be?
Reviewing a list of past milestones can also help our future thinking selves calm down, relax and lean into the unknown journey that lies in front of us. This is terrific prep for a personal strategy retreat too, should you wish to take things further.
Virtual retreating
During a crisis like a pandemic, there is the Before, and there will be the After. What we do in the middle can prepare us for the transformation that will come, which is why virtual retreats and private strategy sessions as incredibly helpful now. The Strategic Space offers guided virtual retreats and private 1:1 strategy sessions online – from wherever you are, when you need it most. This is a great option for those who are interested in using this isolation period to go deeper and think long term about what’s important in the bigger picture, and then map themselves to that vision. Otherwise, we can find ourselves buried and reacting to the fearful urgency of proximate issues, operating within the narrative of old goals that may no longer fit.
Plan ahead for a Strategic Space retreat in France
Once it is safe to travel again, Julie Hosler of The Strategic Space will resume her offering of all-inclusive and totally private retreats in a medieval village in Burgundy, France. The retreats include all materials, guidance, chef-prepared meals, luxury accommodation and the chance to step away from your day-to-day distractions so you can instantly shift your perspective.
