I want to make a neuroscientific argument for why you should book a retreat day. Not a wellness argument. Not a you-deserve-it argument. A biological one.
Polyvagal theory tells us that co-regulation, the process by which one nervous system settles in the presence of another settled one, is one of the most powerful things available to us. More than working on your own can do.
In kitchen language, co-regulation is the thing you have already seen 100 times and never named.
It is a baby going quiet when it is picked up by somebody calm. It is walking into a room where everybody is tense and feeling your own shoulders come up before you have been told anything.
It is the friend who rings you up in a state, and 20 minutes later they are fine and you are slightly frayed.
It works in both directions, which is the part that matters. You are not only a sender. You are being set by the rooms you sit in.
Your nervous system was designed to heal in community. This is not a modern concept dressed in spiritual language. It is an ancient, biological truth. Before all the infrastructure of modern self-development, humans healed together. In circles. Around fires. In physical proximity to each other.
Which is worth holding next to how most of us now do this work. Alone, on a phone, in a bedroom, at the end of a day, reading about settling rather than being near anything settled.
That is not nothing and I am not dismissing it. It is just the hardest possible way to do it, because you are asking 1 nervous system to steady itself using only its own information, and your own information is exactly what is unreliable when you are wound up.
A retreat day, 6 women, a houseboat, a day of genuine presence, is that in action. Your nervous system calms because other nervous systems around it are calming. You find states of expansion and openness that are harder to reach on your own.
What a day actually asks of you is much less than people expect.
It asks you to arrive and stay. That is genuinely most of it. The rest happens because you are in the room rather than because you have performed well in it.
There is no fixed running order, because a day built around 6 particular people cannot have one.
So you are not arriving into a programme you have to keep up with. You are arriving into a room, and the room does most of the work.
What people worry about beforehand is predictable and worth saying out loud, because the worrying is the main thing that keeps people at home.
They worry it will be too much. They worry about crying in front of strangers. They worry they are not spiritual enough, or are too sceptical, or will be the only one who does not know what is going on.
Everybody thinks they will be the one who does not fit. 6 people each privately certain they are the odd one is simply what a room of honest adults looks like.
They also worry about the day being wasted, which is the real objection underneath. A day is a lot when you are already behind.
The answer to that is the one I believe most. The day is not time off the work. For a lot of people it is the only part of the week where the carrying actually stops, and the carrying is what is costing them the other 6 days.
What tends to happen is slower than people imagine. The first hour is a bit awkward. People are polite and still mostly in their own week.
Somewhere in the middle of the day the room changes, usually without anyone doing anything, and you can feel it. That is the thing I cannot engineer and would not try to.
And then at some point somebody says the thing they did not come intending to say, and everybody else exhales, because it was in the room anyway.
What people notice afterwards is rarely a breakthrough. It is that the drive home is quiet. That they sleep. That something which had felt enormous on Friday is a normal size by Monday.
There is one more thing worth saying about why this is harder to arrange than it ought to be.
We have built almost everything about modern life around doing this alone. The app, the course, the download, the audio. All of it is delivered to 1 person in a room.
That is not a conspiracy, it is simply what scales. But it means the most effective version of the work is the one that is hardest to buy, because it needs a day, a place, and 5 other people who actually turned up.
So if a whole day feels disproportionate for what it is, that is worth questioning. The disproportion runs the other way.
On who comes. There is no type. People assume a retreat day is for people already deep in this, and in practice it is more often somebody who has never done anything like it and has reached the end of managing alone.
You do not need to have read anything or practised anything. Arriving with no idea what any of it is called is a perfectly good way to arrive.
Safe and alive are not the same thing. A retreat day is proof of the difference.
More like this
What actually happens in a houseboat reset day, the real version. https://www.annalouwellness.com/work-and-money/what-actually-happens-in-a-houseboat-reset-day-the-real-version
Guest practitioners at the houseboat. https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/guest-practitioners-at-the-houseboat
What The Returning Circle is, and what it is not. https://www.annalouwellness.com/reset-stories/what-the-returning-circle-is-and-what-it-is-not
If you want to come to one, I'm at anna@annalouoflondon.com or on WhatsApp at https://wa.me/447738470156.