110. Can a Retreat Transform Your Recovery Journey?

In this video, I share my top five reasons to go on a silent meditation retreat. The benefits include a digital detox, experiencing joy in seclusion, appreciating small moments, changing the habit patterns of the mind, and cultivating wisdom and compassion. I explore how these retreats provide opportunities for personal growth, fulfillment, and inner peace.

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Shownotes

00:00 Introduction to Habit Patterns of the Mind

00:33 Why Consider a Silent Meditation Retreat?

00:49 Reason 1: Digital Detox

02:33 Reason 2: Joy of Seclusion

03:36 Reason 3: Appreciation for Little Things

04:28 Reason 4: Changing Habit Patterns

06:04 Reason 5: Cultivating Wisdom and Compassion

08:04 Conclusion and Final Thoughts



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ABOUT JEREMY LIPKOWITZ

Jeremy overcame addiction, shame, self-judgement, and depression in his early twenties with the help of mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness not only helped him let go of destructive behaviors, it also allowed him to connect with deeper meaning and purpose in his life.

For the past 10 years Jeremy has been teaching mindfulness and emotional intelligence practices at universities, recovery centers, and companies throughout Asia and the US. He holds a Bachelors and Master’s degree in Genetics and Genomics, and spent several years at Duke University working towards a PhD in Genetics & Systems Biology before he turned full-time to teaching mindfulness.

Jeremy is also an ICF certified Executive Coach. As a former scientist and academic, Jeremy has a great passion for bringing his EI based coaching skills into the corporate and professional world. He realizes how powerful & transformative these practices can be for skeptics and senior-level managers. He is known for his calm and grounded demeanor, his expertise in habits and high-performance, and his compassionate approach to transformation.

Transcript

  So hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Unhooked podcast. My name is Jeremy Lipkowitz. Happy Sunday to you all. I'm recording this a day early because tomorrow I'm actually heading into a silent retreat. So I won't be able to record on Monday.  And I wanted to use this as an opportunity to revisit this topic of why it's so valuable, to consider going on a retreat of some sort, whether it's a silent Vipassana retreat, or a psychedelic retreat, or just a therapeutic retreat, or maybe a men's retreat.

There's so many retreats you can go on, and so I wanted to revisit this topic of why it's so important. to go on retreat. So what I'm releasing here is actually the audio from a video that I made  almost, gosh, six years ago or so, when I was teaching meditation in Thailand. And I created this video on the top five reasons why you should consider going on a silent retreat. 

So without further ado, please enjoy this video on the top five reasons to consider going on a silent retreat.   📍 

It gives you a technique to change the habit patterns of your mind. You change the habitual tendencies of the mind. It's so important for a life of fulfillment, a life of success, a life of joy. Growing and changing and being skillful and being a good person in the world learning how to see what are the habit patterns of the mind and how can you subtly incline yourself towards more skillful ways of living.

  Hey guys. So in this video, I'm going to talk about my top five reasons to consider going on a silent meditation retreat. So these are the things that make me go on silent retreats and just a few reasons why you might want to consider going on a silent retreat yourself. 

  So the first reason to consider going on a silent meditation retreat is just to have a few days of a digital detox.

So if you're anything like me, you're constantly connected to your devices in some form or another. We might wake up and at least within the first hour or so waking up, we're already connected to our phone, maybe our computer. checking emails, checking social media, and we can live our life in this autopilot mode where we're just sucked into our devices. 

And so going on a silent retreat is a really powerful time to take a conscious and intentional step away from your devices, social media, internet, all of these things that we get pulled into out of habit.  And going on a silent retreat where you give up your phones, you give up your laptops, you put all of that away, is a wonderful time because you're in this big community together.

Everyone practicing this renunciation practice together. It's very hard to do a digital detox on your own if you've ever tried one.  But going on a silent retreat is a nice excuse, you can put it on your email as a vacation responder and say, I'm on a silent retreat, I can't respond to your emails for the next five days.

So it's a nice excuse to have for family and friends and co workers of why you need to get away from your devices.  So that's my first reason of why you might want to consider going on a retreat. And I honestly think if you went on a silent retreat and you didn't even meditate, you just did a digital detox for five days, you would still get a lot of benefit out of the retreat.

So even if you've never meditated before in your life, it's still a really powerful practice. Number two is to have some time experiencing what we call the joy of seclusion. So this is related to taking that digital detox, but there's a great joy in the ability or in the ability Kind of removing yourself from the busyness of our day to day life.

And there's actually a term for this in Buddhist philosophy. They call it viveka or viveka.  And it means the joy of seclusion.  So there's a great joy in turning away from the busyness of life and finding time throughout your life for yourself. for this seclusion, for some quietness isolation, really taking the time to be with yourself.

There's a great joy in that. And getting to experience that joy is part of the retreat practice. So if you've ever been on retreat, you know what I'm talking about. This moving away from the busyness of society and taking time for seclusion and isolation. And if you've never been on retreat, take my word for it.

There's a great joy in seclusion. The third benefit of going on retreat is having some time where we cultivate an appreciation for the little things in life. So what are the, the small joys that we can take throughout the day, that the taste of coffee in the morning of our, or of our breakfast or appreciation of feeling good about ourselves.

the wind and the breeze on our face. There are so many moments in our life that we could be grateful for. But the key understanding is that gratitude or gratefulness is a skill that we need to practice. So it's not going to just come automatically. We actually need to cultivate this skill.  And on retreat, we get opportunities all throughout the day where we're practicing.

Can we be content with what's happening?  Can we appreciate what's going on? Can we be grateful for what is offered?  So having this time where we set aside the time to intentionally cultivate really healthy Mind states like gratitude and appreciation And contentment it's it has, these incredible ripple effects throughout our life so that's the third reason to consider going on retreat is  Just this rekindling of an appreciation for all the little things in our lives The fourth is that going on retreat,  it gives you a technique to change the habit patterns of your mind.

that you are learning a technique, a skill where you can start to change the habit patterns of the mind. You change the habitual tendencies of the mind.  It's so important for a life of fulfillment, a life of success, a life of joy. Growing and changing and being skillful and being a good person in the world is learning how to see what are the habit patterns of the mind and how can you subtly incline yourself towards more skillful ways of living. It's one of the reasons I started going on retreats is that I realized I was having so many of these habits and tendencies of my mind. that were leading me towards suffering. Things like addiction or things like comparison, like comparing myself to others the inner critic self judgment.

So learning how to change the habit pattern of the mind is so powerful. And this is why it's my number four reason to consider going on a silent retreat at least once in your life.  Now, number five is that we get a chance to cultivate wisdom. And this, something that, especially in the tradition, you know that I train in and the tradition of Vipassana or insight meditation, it's almost, it's all about the, balancing these two things of wisdom and compassion.

And so I guess number five is actually not just about wisdom, but that we're taking time out of our life. to cultivate these two very important qualities of wisdom and compassion.  So how can we see more clearly the nature of the life we're living? How can we grasp less at things that are inherently unstable and impermanent? 

How can we cultivate more love and kindness and compassion and care for the people in our life? So this is, one of the most powerful and important reasons why we go on a Vipassana retreat, especially. There are many kinds of meditation retreats, but  in the context of a Vipassana retreat or an insight meditation retreat,  it really comes down to cultivating wisdom and compassion.

Can we take this time out of our day to cultivate these really wholesome qualities of the heart and mind.  And, one of the most selfish things you can do is cultivate wisdom and compassion because  the amount of inner fulfillment and inner peace that you can experience when you're cultivating these wholesome mind states is beyond any other kind of pleasure you can experience.

It's beyond sense pleasure. It's beyond even spiritual pleasures. The state of wisdom, of equanimity, of seeing clearly, being at peace with yourself is so profound. And so  I hope you choose to go on a silent retreat at least once in your life so you can begin to taste what that kind of freedom is like.

Begin to taste, the kind of freedom that you can experience from going on a retreat like this.  So those are my five top reasons to consider going on a silent retreat.  I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, give it a thumbs up, or consider hitting the subscribe button down below somewhere.

 That's it for today. I hope you all have a wonderful day.