What is a spiritual retreat and how to choose one?

In a spiritual retreat you can live enriching experiences, share your experiences. You can learn ways to improve health, free yourself from limitations, reduce anxiety, improve your mood, heal old wounds. It can also help improve your physical state, learn techniques to take care of your health effectively.

These are some of the benefits of going on a retreat. You can find group retreats with a clear goal, such as healing, meditation or awareness of yourself. Now you can also choose to make an individual and personalized retreat.

Which one suits you right now? I will raise some questions and make some points to help you choose.

Group retreats

Group retreats are an ideal place to hare and connect with other people since the activities are done altogether. An important aspect is sharing a living space. The connections and exchanges help learn and develop certain skills and practice new ways of relating to others. In essence, we are social beings, and the group mirrors certain characteristics of our personality that, otherwise, we could not develop and improve.

In our path of personal growth, one of the aspects to improve is how we relate to others, how we cultivate and nourish our relationships and bonds. It is important to become aware of how we express what we want, how we receive what we are asked for, also how we handle conflict, how we relate to the different people in the group.

As in our day to day, in a spiritual retreat we can become aware of attitudes, emotions, ways of expressing ourselves and endless possibilities to consider in our personal processes.

During spiritual retreats with workshops and activities, group work enriches everyone. By sharing, by asking, by commenting … we help oneself but, also, one another. When we make a question, we may be asking something that someone else had not considered or was shy to ask. We may be telling an anecdote and without knowing inspire someone else, we illuminate each other another in knowing other ways of thinking and feeling, or simply connecting with the same or different emotions. Everyone is enriched and everyone learns from each other.

Usually there is a daily space to share the experiences of what each one is living. This sharing while listening, without expectations and without judgment, unites the group. It helps builds trust and it becomes a safe place to share feelings, thoughts or experiences. It is one of the daily moments that I like the most, to see how we learn, nourish and experience the activities that we develop throughout the day.

Individual or personalized spiritual retreats

In individual spiritual retreats the goal is different, We no longer seek to share with the group, but to deepen the connection with oneself. In these retreats we dedicate most of the time to individual therapy, whether psychotherapy, energy techniques, massage or body techniques, meditation, connection with nature … all adapted to your needs and preferences.

The person who chooses this option becomes the protagonist, all the activities that are carried out are thought to contribute to his/her process and meet his/her needs: be it healing, raising awareness, reduce stress or purification … All the activities that are carried out are a process to take the person to achieve the goal that was proposed at the beginning.

There are those who choose personalized retreats because they want to work certain aspects of themselves and a group retreat cannot always give space to these specific needs, it is not possible.

Whichever option you choose, make sure to enjoy yourself!