What Are Retreats Really For?
Going beyond the "t-shirt” model of modern-day spirituality
I did a five-minute search of “meditation retreat” videos on YouTube, and mostly what I found were variations on the theme of…
“I meditated on a retreat for 48 hours, and this is what I learned…”
or…
“I meditated all day for 4 days, and I’ll never be the same again.”
There’s a pattern here that is familiar to me, because it reflects a trend I observed when I moved to NYC in 2010. In the early 2010s, it was a fad to approach the “meditation retreat” like many people now do the “ayahuasca ceremony.”
People shared stories about how they “did Vipassana” – describing how “high” they got from the practice and the crazy visualizations they would have. “Was it a hallucination or was it a vision?” they’d often wonder. The excitement was, of course, around how unique these experiences were, by contrast with the drudgery and normality of everyday life.
Vipassana, of course, has a very long history in Buddhism, but the “vipassana retreat” has a much more recent history. Vipassanā (in Pali; in Sanskrit, vipaśyana) is vi- plus the root /paś means “seeing-apart,” “seeing-into,” in the sense of discriminative or penetrative seeing.
Vipassana, of course, has a very long history in Buddhism, but the “vipassana retreat” has a much more recent history. It almost never stands alone, as it does in the context of the modern-day vipassana retreat. It is half of the dyad samatha-vipassanā, equanimity and insight. Samatha steadies and unifies the mind; vipassanā sees the conditioned field of ephemeral awareness.
The locus classicus that modern movements lean on hardest is the four foundations of mindfulness, especially the contemplation of the body. But in their canonical setting these were never a freestanding “technique”; they sat inside a comprehensive training, the full eightfold path, and a holistic cosmology and theory of practice in which awakening was the point.
Back to recent history, in very much the same way that the “ayahuasca ceremony” became trendy a few years afterward, the “I did Vipassana” experience was on the shortlist of must-haves for any hipster or yoga-spiritual type in New York City. The point here isn’t to critique vipassana and ayahuasca, or claim that they’re not legitimate or meaningful for many people. Rather, I’m critiquing the “been there, done that, got the t-shirt” model of modern-day spirituality.
There are, of course, many people thinking holistically within these contexts. People who regularly attend ayahuasca ceremonies (which, full transparency, I have also done myself) will often encourage integration. Those who teach and regularly attend vipassana retreats will also emphasize the importance of incorporating the practice into one’s daily life – after retreat. But, for the majority of people I encountered, this was generally not the norm. It was a box to tick.
This is perhaps because the “retreat” or “ceremony” is approached first as a “peak experience” we first hear about, then something we want to have the experience of for ourselves, and then something we can tick it off the box of spiritual things we’ve done. Ultimately, it becomes an eccentric story we share at a dinner party.
For those that pursue a path of deep sādhana, however, a retreat is something different. Yes, a retreat is an opportunity to go very deep inside. Yes, a wide range of experiences can happen. But the deeper and more sustainable benefits of retreat are the discipline, inspiration, and insight that we cultivate for our lives beyond retreat.
For those of us who are sādhakas – that is, those who strive to integrate practice fully into our lives – retreat is a kind of ritual. It is a ritual of replenishing the resources of our own commitment, stabilizing ourselves in a clarity about what it is we’re doing in sādhana, and developing a resilience and knowledge around the why of sādhana.
Like with any ritual, it requires repetition.
Obviously, many of us can’t all afford to go to a 3-day, 4-day, or 7-day retreat in Costa Rica or some other expensive place. But devoting certain times of the year to practicing more deeply in a container with less distractions, less everyday responsibilities, and perhaps in a place that isn’t saturated with our personality and personal preoccupations, is a way that we preserve the depths of our practice for the times in between periods of deep retreat.
The retreat helps our practice not become so shallow and ossified that it starts to feel negotiable, optional, or an indulgence we can trade away and engage with just when we feel like it. We are reminded in the depths just how important our connection is to that for everything that happens at the surface.
While you don’t need a fancy retreat center or exotic ceremony in Peru to develop this kind of ritual in your life, it can help to learn what that kind of ritual looks like and feels like. If we take the time to participate in at least one retreat with a supportive energetic container, we discover ways to organize our lives for the deepening, anchoring, and grounding of our daily sādhana.
Thank you for reading.
This July, grounded in the spirit of replenishing the resources of sustainable householder practice, Embodied Philosophy is running the Heart of the Yoginīs retreat July 11th - 17th 2026, and you are invited.
While live and in-person in Taos, there is also the option to join us online – if it isn’t possible right now for you to travel.