Why Private Retreats can Change Your Life
If you have ever considered taking a private retreat, whether to recharge your life’s ‘batteries’, to learn some new technique about handling stress or dealing with some personal issues, or to help you overcome an addiction or other mental of physical challenge, but you aren’t quite certain how private retreats differ from the more conventional group retreats, then it’s time that you learned.Private retreats focus on you, not a symptom
When we tend to think about retreats, it can be about anything, from a writing retreat to an alcoholism retreat to a spiritual quest. Most retreats are, in essence, group retreats. One major reason for this is that the cost of private retreats seems to be exclusive or exorbitant. In a group retreat, the cost is spread out over a number of people but for a private retreat, it’s upon the individual alone.
And while group retreats can serve a great deal of good, can be a positive experience for the individual, it is still about the group, not the individual. Think about this for a moment. Any time you are in a group setting, whether it’s for a class in college or therapy or a meeting at work, the group is taken as a whole. Your individual personality isn’t taken into account. If you learn best by reading from a textbook and then discussing that reading, the class setting will pose a challenge to your sense of learning. This isn’t to say that you won’t learn. In fact, you will, as long as you pay attention. But you may not learn as well as you might using a different approach.
In a therapy session, for example, when you’re in a group setting, you are working on issues that you all share in common. However, the individual experiences that you have had in life make your approach to the problem, and the solution, different than anyone else. So, as you can see, in a group session, or in a group retreat, you can be lost as an individual in the entire process. Far too often people leave these group retreats feeling unsatisfied and incomplete. They may even go home feeling as though they wasted their hard-earned money on it.