Returning Home
I’ve just returned home from our Ireland Yoga Retreat and I’m finding the return home to be a challenge. On retreat you are immersed in a setting designed to thoroughly nourish your body, mind and soul. You’re with a group of like-minded individuals with shared goals and a growth mindset. The location is often worlds away from everyday life, peaceful and bucolic. You have the time and the space to tune into your heart. Maintaining the peace, serenity, and personal progress gained on retreat is a challenge once you return home to our jobs, our families, and our often crazy busy lives.
Yoga retreat can be a transformative experience, and you often return home different than you were when you left, while the life you left at home didn’t change. Returning home from retreat requires a delicate process of reintegrating into everyday life. After days or weeks of deep introspection and self-exploration, re-entering the familiar surroundings of home can feel both comforting and unsettling. When returning home from retreat it can be difficult to verbalize the profundity of the experience, and friends, family, and loved ones struggle to relate to how you may have changed after retreat. You may have developed boundaries relating to things like social media, work e-mails, your daily schedule, etc. that can be difficult to relay to the people you return home to. Your boss might not understand your new boundary to not check e-mails after 5pm, and your friends may not understand your new boundary to choose an earlier bedtime over going out for after dinner drinks. It can be easy to let those boundaries crumble to make your boss and friends happy.
Returning home from retreat can also be a shock on the mind and body. Retreat is a space of deep nourishment, with healthy meals, daily movement, and plenty of time for rest and relaxation. As the mind and body readjust to the usual hustle and bustle, it becomes crucial to carry the lessons and practices learned during the retreat into your daily routine.
These are some of the things I’ll be doing as I reintigrate from retreat:
Mindfulness, meditation, and conscious breathing - these are essential tools for grounding and maintaining a sense of inner peace.
Connecting with supportive communities and seeking opportunities for continued growth and learning - I’m so blessed to have our yoga community and a supportive family to return to. I’m surrounding myself with people who also crave a more joyful, more nourishing way of life.
Yoga, exercise, and plenty of outside time - after daily movement, hikes in nature, and plenty of exercise my body and mind feel restless when I’m stuck inside at my desk. I’m making sure I continue my daily practice, resume my pre-retreat weightlifting routine, and getting outside for fresh air every day.
Eating good food - I’ve always been a mindful consumer of food, and I’m excited to be creating healthy meals in my kitchen again. Having someone else prepare my meals while on retreat was a pleasant reprieve for me, and now I feel ready to get into the kitchen and create!
Retreat is an amazing experience to take part in, and even more powerful when we can integrate the lessons we learned on retreat into our daily lives. Be gentle and kind with yourself as you work toward finding your new normal. Stay close to what spoke to your heart on retreat, and keep the post retreat feeling alive.
