Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's episode we are going to talk about the value of retreat.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so many of you have heard me mention my own personal experience with retreats, meditation retreats or otherwise.

But typically when I refer to time I've spent on retreat I'm talking about some form of meditation retreat,

whether it's silent meditation retreat or structured mindfulness meditation.

And this has been a big part of my spiritual personal growth journey since I began.

I've attended many thousands of hours worth of retreat and I have taught over 30 in-person retreats and over 15 online retreats.

So it's something I believe in for myself and others.

Now when you hear retreat you might often think like seven days off the grid or month off the grid where you hear me talk about taking six months when that was younger after college.

But I think for the purpose of this episode and for the purpose of like actual integration of retreat in your life, it's useful to view it also through the lens of one day or six hours or three hours.

Or even 30 minutes or one hour of dedicated, I don't want to say off the grid time but deep attunement time.

The thing that's just been clear to me more and more in my life especially as it's gotten busy is that the momentum of doing accumulates, develops quite quickly and it's very easy for certain stress events to not actually get the opportunity to resolve, to unwind for your nervous system to come back to homeostasis.

And it kind of just bleeds into the next moment until something else happens and it mixes with that and builds and the system in order to get through that either has to harden or it collapses.

But for many of us is a certain hardening that happens which is another form of saying we have to like suppress or put up a guard or disconnect from ourselves or we live in a more livable place which is in the mind.

We kind of just stay in the realm of thoughts and cognition and chasing the next idea or just like living in that stimulation because there's a lot to feel in the body and you know if we slow down to tune into what's happening there, it just feels like it would be too much.

And so when we're not giving ourselves a space to retreat to take time off to just really simply tune in and be these life experiences accumulate and and through that accumulation is just a bunch of downstream effects that can be as benign as just some basic disconnection and overwhelm.

And more extreme as burnout, serious anxiety, depression and different forms of mental illness that extend from various mental compensations, psychological compensations from a system that is too overwhelmed.

And having won so many retreats, I can't tell you how I can't overstate the value of taking time to really in a sense do nothing.

But it's not just a doing nothing because there is a particular structure to the form of tuning in, paying attention, being aware, it's not a full checking out.

And it's the container of presence of attunement really does facilitate and a movement of energy in the system.

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