I’ve just completed a 5-day silent home retreat with my teacher, Richard Miller, on the “Foundations of meditation”. He teaches the iRest method based in the Tantra teachings of Kashmir Shaivism - with a very easily accessible, non-secular approach, and with language easily understood for the Western mind. Not fluffy at all - it’s an immersive experience that cuts through all the intellectual BS, but with a teacher so well-versed in the teachings he’s able to explain what you’re experiencing with the intellectual concepts.

Everything you need to know about creating your home retreat

Online Retreat at Home?

CONFESSION: One of the reasons I wanted to do this particular retreat is because it’s part of my iRest meditation teaching certification requirements. It was meant to have been in-person around the San Francisco Bay area and I would NEVER have considered attending a full online retreat at home before this (quite different from an online course - of which I’ve done many) because of these reasons:

The whole point is to GET AWAY. How do you get away in your own home?
Community. You meet so many new and awesome people at retreat and so many of my current friendships have come from retreats - it’s the shared experience of similar interests, and sometimes going through the same “hardships” together creates a bond.
It seems like there may be too many distractions at home… the TV… internet… fridge… bed… INSTAGRAM... :)

The Mechanics of a Home Retreat

I chose to do this in complete silence for the 5 days - being totally offline without access to phone, messages, social media, internet surfing. As the sessions were taught live in Pacific time over Zoom - I still had to be online for the actual teaching sessions, which added another layer of potential complications. “Be offline, while still having to be online?”

Due to the timezone difference, the first session of the day started at 5pm and the last couple of sessions were between 11pm - 3am in European time. So I’d simply skip those and pick them up at the start of my day the next day (all Zoom sessions were recorded and uploaded). It was really well-organized on the part of the iRest Institute, so it was a breeze to follow.

It just takes a bit of planning in some areas:

Have all your food prepped and ready to go.
Close your usual internet browser and use one you don’t usually use (Safari in my case).
I journal both manually and digitally, and some notes are written up in Google Docs and I love Chrome for that (my usual browser). So I had a new page only with my Google Drive folders and docs in it and was surprisingly good at not opening other tabs to start surfing (you can also go into offline mode for Google Docs).
I put my phone in airplane mode for the entire 5 days. Side note: I didn’t have to charge it for at least 3 days in a row (on some days with regular use, I have to recharge it up to 3x in one day!)
Before the phone went in airplane mode, I turned off ALL app notifications as I didn’t want a deluge of red notifications calling my attention when I turned the phone back on again. I wanted to choose which apps to start looking at.
Set up your “retreat space” so it’s a quiet, cosy nest of yoga mat, cushions, blankets, blocks, notebooks, pens at the ready.

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Yes, Online Retreat at Home!

Now that I’ve come out the other end, would I recommend this?

Unequivocally: YES.

For all of the following reasons:

Getting into a different rhythm while in your own space.
Having more time and space to integrate the learnings in between sessions, while you’re in familiar surroundings - and isn’t that the whole point of retreat? Not just to go away to escape… but also learn how to integrate what you’ve learned into regular life. And you’re literally doing this while you’re IN the retreat.
No travel! This can sometimes add to the stress before and after a retreat, so it was lovely not to be stressing about planning/ booking/ packing/ lugging/ traveling.
No unfamiliar beds/ shared toilets/ shared spaces! I sound so unsocial right now, but all the things I love about the community a retreat brings together can also bring about some awkwardness if/ when you have to share a room or a space with total strangers.
There was still some community aspect with Zoom - especially with those who chose to leave their videos on and in between sessions, and some private messaging between old friends I’d met on previous trainings or retreats. There’s definitely a lot less of this than if you’re in-person, but since my focus was to stay in silence and be in my own world, this aspect of the retreat didn’t really bother me.

Some others with family at home rented Airbnb’s so they could completely retreat in peace - I was impressed!

One of the downsides: I missed having someone else cook me three healthy meals a day though - one of the big benefits of an away-retreat. ;)

Find Your Teacher

At the end of the day, all of the intentions I set at the start of the retreat were met (and beyond). The value of the teachings and the experience of learning from Richard were mind-expanding and this journey within Self and Presence isn’t something I could have known about before, so for that I’m forever grateful. I still want to meet him in person one day soon, but until then I’m really glad to have found another guide in him to help my light my path on this journey through life.

It’s definitely reaffirmed my belief that whatever it is you’re interested in, you need to find YOUR teacher. Someone who’s further along the path than you are, who can show you things you didn’t know before - about the world, about yourself… or who can help you see what you thought you understood but from a whole new perspective.

Create Your Down Time

I’ve been attending retreats since the very first one I did 16 years ago - a detox retreat in Koh Samui, Thailand, which were all the rage back then (including daily colonic enemas - TWICE a day!) Since then, the retreats I’ve been on have ranged from yoga teacher trainings, pranayama, ashtanga, meditation, ayurveda, more detox, surf camps (still can’t surf though) and SUP.

I go on retreats regularly as my time to be away from regular programming, learn new things, have some down time and hopefully integrate new ways of being back into regular life again. This home retreat has shown me you can still get all the benefits of an away-retreat while integrating what you’re learning into regular life.

Just because global travel is limited for the foreseeable future, it doesn’t mean your plans to rest, relax and have down time should stop either. All the more so now, it’s important to create different ways to give yourself time off from the Groundhog Day of being home in your own space. Being part of an online home retreat can also teach you how to be in the same space, but to get into a totally different rhythm from regular life.

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