Between the woods and the world
On retreat, transition, and remembering how to listen
A few months ago, I told you I was losing faith and that I was going on retreat to see if I could listen. You can read that earlier reflection here: When Certainty Slips Away.
Here’s my confession. I didn’t book that retreat myself. My husband did. He gifted it to me for my birthday, long before either of us knew I would find myself questioning everything, but knowing full well I was heading into burnout. He knew I needed space. And he also knew that I wasn’t going to take myself off unless someone intervened. So he quietly intervened.
A few months later, I found myself in the woods in the West Country with a circle of beautiful women I’d never met before. We ate together, sat around a fire, camped out for 5 days and shared stories, laughter, and tears. It felt like exhaling after a long breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.
What I didn’t expect was how much this short time away would mirror the very process of transition itself.
Going on retreat is like living a whole transition in miniature. You leave behind your usual life: the roles, routines, and noise (so. much. noise). There’s often guilt or fear in that leaving, and sometimes grief too. Then comes the messy middle. The space where you’re no longer who you were, and not yet who you’ll be. It asks for trust. For holding onto your seat when everything inside you wants to fill the silence.
Eventually, there’s a moment of beginning again. Seeing familiar things in a new, maybe older, actually ancient way. And then, of course, you return. You re-enter the world, carrying something fragile and precious that the world doesn’t always make room for. There’s a grief in leaving the cocoon of retreat, the constellation of community that was temporarily created. But this is where the real work begins. The work of integration. The spiral turns, and you begin again at a deeper level.
Jack Kornfield wrote a book called After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. He reminds us that the path isn’t about escaping life, but learning to bring what we touch in stillness back into the ordinary. The folding of clothes, the school run, the endless emails: these become the practice. The divine isn’t found away from life, but through it.
The gift itself was part of the teaching. My family rearranged so I could go. My children helped their dad manage uniforms and PE kits. My mum stepped in. And my husband, who searched for the right retreat, chose so wisely and well. Their love made the space possible. It reminded me that faith, the kind I thought I had lost, was there all along, humming quietly beneath the noise. Like a record player shoved in a cupboard under the stairs, its song was waiting to be heard again. And I could really hear it in the stillness, beauty, and holding of the woods.
And perhaps that is what faith truly is. Not belief, but connection. A rhythm that’s always there beneath the chaos. When I forget, it isn’t that the music stops. It’s that I’ve tuned into another frequency: the relentless noise of the world.
We are all learning to dance between these worlds. To step between noise and stillness, between the known and the unknown, the rational and the mystery; between the wild woods and the civilised world. The mystics called this the dance of the cosmos: the endless turning of creation and dissolution, embodied in the figure of Shiva Nataraja, the cosmic dancer. His dance keeps the universe in motion. And maybe our small lives echo that same pattern: letting go, stepping in, beginning again.
The word retreat comes from the Latin retrahere, meaning to draw back. It doesn’t have to mean a weekend away in the woods or a monastery stay (though those are wonderful). We can practise retreating every day: drawing back from noise, from screens, from the endless pull of doing. We can learn to pause, to listen, to step inward for a moment before returning to the world. In that pause, life realigns itself.
I know that being able to go on a formal retreat is a huge privilege. I also know it can look indulgent in a culture that glorifies productivity. But being kind to ourselves, in whatever way we can, by giving ourselves time and space to listen, is one of the most subversive acts we can make in a world that insists we are always on. And as women, that we are always giving to others.
If I am to serve others as a mother, daughter, wife, friend, minister, and coach, I need to drink from a full cup. We all do. And that is why I’ve taken the medicine of this precious gift of a retreat, and will now take responsibility for getting myself off on one more regularly. Giving myself permission to practise self-compassion in this way. And part of what I’ve integrated from this retreat is also giving myself permission to pause every day, often many times a day, to reconnect with myself and the stillness.
A micropractice
Take five quiet minutes today to step outside, even if only to your doorstep. Leave your phone behind. Notice what is changing: in the air, in the light, in the leaves, in you. Feel the rhythm of your own breath and imagine yourself as part of that great cosmic dance, moving with the turning of the seasons, the rising and falling of life itself.
Reflection questions
Where are you in your own spiral of transition: leaving, waiting, beginning, or returning?
What part of you needs space to be heard again?
How might you carry the stillness of retreat into the rhythm of your everyday life?
Invitation
My work through The Blossoming Path is about walking with people through these same thresholds. Helping them find ground and meaning in the in-between spaces of change. Many of the women I met on that woodland retreat were in seasons of deep transition too, reminding me how universal these crossings are. If you’re in one yourself, you can find out more about my one-to-one coaching here.
I’d love to hear how this resonates for you. You can leave a comment below or share this post with someone who might need it.