I’ve just returned from my annual New Year’s retreat. I do it every year around this time to reflect on the previous year, discern next year, and make some plans. You can see pictures from this year’s retreat in this article!
I do it both for my personal and my business life. I find if I don’t do this EVERY year, well, it never gets done. I never slow down enough to find the deeper themes of my life, and to make decisions based on meaningful search for guidance. My outline (I love outlines!) is usually about the same: time for rest, hiking and prayer, plus reflection and constellations on the previous year, ditto on the upcoming year, analysis of income, and plans for the next year. It is always a rich time of self-discovery.
This year, I spent a few days in Chimayó, a tiny town between Santa Fe and Taos in New Mexico It’s an old hispanic area, and of course before that, a much older home for ancestral puebloan peoples. It’s wedged in a beautiful little valley, surrounded by red hills and barrancas. Chimayó is famous for El Santuario, an old adobe church that hosts a famous pilgrimage spot, where there’s holy dirt with healing properties. I’ve loved El Santuario for many years.
This year’s retreat over Christmas made it possible for me to go to some sweet Spanish-language services, bringing a much-desired homeliness and depth to the worship of the incoming of the Divine into ordinary human life. It is also a time when the local Pueblo communities honor their histories with feast day drumming and dancing. I visited San Ildefonso Pueblo nearby for their wonderful Buffalo Dances on Christmas Day.
All of this was rich nourishment for my meditations. At the center of my thoughts was the fact of my 60th birthday, only a few weeks earlier. I’d been meditating on having lived 60 years — 60 years! It’s a long time! I had been reflecting on those decades and coming to the conclusion — yes, I’d lived all of those 60 years, and all of it — the heartbreaks, the terrors, the pleasures, the successes, the unearned graces — was a true part of my lived dignity.
So, the new year seems to invite me into acting from all of that experience. But ironically, something else also came into my discernment work — that the new year will also present unexpected opportunities that don’t look anything like what I want to experience, and yet have gifts for me, more of what I want than what I think I want.
In the first 24 hours of my retreat, I realized that I’d already had more insights and meaningful gifts of prayer and poetry than I usually experience in a month! Giving it four whole days, away from home, with lots of nourishing, stimulating input, my heart enjoyed perceiving beyond the usual day to day knowledge.
Is it time, perhaps, for you to take a retreat? Give yourself a chance to let your love for your life show, in giving it this gift of time? Of course, not everybody can take away that much time from your families (I’m honoring you, parents of young children! And all you others with daily responsibilities!) But that doesn’t relieve the need for some kind of “retreat,” an upending of the usual pattern, just enough to allow the unexpected and deeper to come through for you.
If you want to step your toes in the water of this idea, attend my short online workshop for a mini retreat, and to get more resources for creating a longer one that is right for you. Check out all the details at At-Home New Year’s Retreat.
How does this idea sound to you? Or, what have your past retreats been like? Share on my blog here.
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