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Retreats are a necessity these days because the pace and pressure of life strip our nervous and immune systems of their resilience. This means that we operate with cognitive and emotional deficiency most of the time! It’s not just you, and it’s only partly a lack of sleep! (Read more: Tips for a good night’s sleep)

Retreats give you the opportunity to reset your physical systems and gain a sense of perspective. Decisions made on retreat tend to be the life-changing decisions. Indeed, even when they are just small course corrections, those adjustments accumulating over time, lead to real shifts.

For me, a solid retreat practice means that I get to live with clarity about what I’m doing with my life! We only get this one precious life, “what are you going to do with it?” seems the most important question we can ask. Being able to answer brings peace of mind and provides direction – for any question you may have or change you want to make.

There is great benefit to getting away and going on a retreat away from your normal life. It will give you an enforced break from your routine, allow you to look at things afresh and also in the power of a group. Even in a reflective retreat, where you spend little to no time in discussion with each other, being away with a group of like-minded people intent on the same purpose magnifies the effect and creates natural accountability for those who wish it.

However, there is also great benefit in learning how to create a retreat at home

This way, you can return to yourself again and again. This will give that neural pathway the definition to serve you quickly and well when stress arises in the day today.

So today, I thought what I would do is share some trade secrets about what makes for a great retreat, so that you can build these ideas into your daily life.

In my experience over the last decade, I’ve found that there are five elements to a great retreat:

1. Time
2. Space
3. Beauty
4. Restorative practices
5. Reflective practices

For simplicity, I will take each in turn.

Time

I think this is the hardest for people sometimes – to feel that they can afford to take the time out. As a small business owner, I have so much sympathy for this. But the truth of the matter is if you don’t take time to periodically check the direction you’re heading, it is very easy to go wrong.

In her book describing her experiences looking after the terminally ill, Bronnie Ware identifies the top 5 regrets of the dying. I want to take the time to share these with you, because they have profoundly affected the way I live my life, and I hope it will affect you too.

They were:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
   “This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams. They had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise until they no longer have it.”
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
   “This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.”
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
   “Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.”
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
   “Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.”
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
   ”This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.”

Taking time out – regularly – will help you to check-in with your dreams, know whether you are missing people, feel your happiness or lack thereof. It will give you time to decide what changes to make.  Taking the time now makes the time that you have more worth it.

Space

For me, time and space are two sides of a coin. So, all the arguments for taking time out of your busy life apply. Also, we add the dimension for space of removing yourself from your daily distractions. This is why getting away can be so effective. There, you won’t be in the midst of the demands of your work, your chores, or even your loved ones.
Space gives you YOU. It gives room to breathe and feel like yourself again. It is a perspective setter.

So, when taking time out at home, make sure you identify a space that gives you the most respite from life demands. Perhaps there is a nook in the garden, or in your bedroom, or an easy chair that looks out the window, or perhaps you can go to the park. Whatever you choose, just know that the space you choose to retreat to is important.

Beauty

Beauty is in my belief a basic human need. I am not alone in this belief. Talk to any architect or designer, talk to a neuroscientist or an artist. Talk to a person on the street, in the shop, on the train. Above all, talk to and listen to yourself about what beauty means for you.

For me, beauty inspires me that life is worth living. Beauty helps me step out of my petty worries. It encourages me to lift my head up, to be the best I can be. Beauty helps me to love people better. To forgive and understand my sense of place and belonging. It helps me to be.

In sadness, beauty has sat with me and helped my heart to go on. In joy, I see only beauty – in you and me and everything.

Beauty is of almost unexplainable importance in the process of retreating because beauty connects you to you. And that is the entire purpose. So whatever beauty is to you, focus on that when you take time and space for yourself.

My morning retreat is as simple as a cup of tea sitting at my balcony, watching the seasons change in the trees outside my flat, watching the squirrels and the birds, and feeling the air on my skin and the warmth of my cat against me.  Beauty inspires presence.

Restorative Practices

We need to become disciplined about giving back to ourselves as well as continuously giving to others. If you treated your wellbeing as a bank balance, you would soon run out of money if you continually gave to others without ever depositing more.

This is a direct analogy – your wellbeing functions exactly that way, arguably, until you learn how to draw on resources beyond your own, which is a subject for another article. You MUST put in in order to continually take out energy.

So if we discuss how to create a retreat at home, it is imperative that you build in practices that you know to be restorative for you.

I use yoga nidra, meditation, gentle yoga, chi gung, art, reading. You may knit, write, arrange flowers. The restorative possibilities are creative and varied, so have fun with it!

Also, consider all the layers of your self in your restorative practice:

• your physical,
• energetic,
• emotional,
• mental
• and spiritual restoration.

One day it may be your spirits that need lifting, another day your body. The nuance of listening to your needs each day is itself a restorative practice.

Reflective practices

We’ve done so much good, by giving ourselves time and space, by focusing on beauty and restoring ourselves – mind body and spirit. Now, it comes to reflection.
In my experience, there are times when sitting quietly without focus, allows what I need to reflect on to rise to the surface without prompting.

It’s a process that takes place over a couple of days sometimes – of sitting quietly and letting my thoughts form. And often, the biggest changes I’ve made have come to their culmination in just this quiet way. I get up and find the resolve has been made, and just like that, I have changed.

And at other times, we can benefit from having prompts for reflection. You can take prompts from anywhere, or you can be very structured about it. A prompt I might give myself if I wanted to look at how I am living is:

“What do I need to be at my best today?”

or “What part of myself do I most want to express this week?”

or “What is the message I want to give in my life?”

From time to time, I will review how I feel life is going in each area – like a wheel of life coaching exercise – and take direction from that. Also, more than once, I have used the practice of imagining being on my deathbed and asking

what would I want to be able to say and feel about how I have lived?

Will I be able to say that?

If you think that changing your setting could help you get more from your retreat, then why don’t you book one of the next Retreats that we will run in the exquisite Stanton Guildhouse?

Surround yourself with the natural beauty and spend a weekend in the Grade II Listed Manor House, with stunning views stretching over the Vale of Evesham to the Brecon Beacons.

Here’s a recent Testimonial of one of our retreat participants:

“Jo has an innate gift when it comes to creating beautifully restorative and therapeutic retreats. My time at the retreat last November in the Cotswalds was at a very difficult point in my life and proved to be an important catalyst in my personal and spiritual development. The work we did together, as a wonderfully supportive group led expertly by Jo, has helped me navigate some very hard times since. Everyday I reflect on what I learned at the retreat and am so thankful I attended. I can’t wait for the next one, which I have no doubt will be as powerfully moving as last time. Thank you, Jo, the gift you have given me in helping me understand myself better has changed my life.”

Lottie

In this second article on Tips for Yoga for sleep, I would like to introduce you a few changes in your routine that can help you sleep well.

The main hormone that contributes to your good sleep is melatonin.

You may have heard of that, it’s actually available in these days to buy over-the-counter for example and to actually help good sleep is really really helpful for avoiding jet lag for example.

We reduce melatonin in the mornings and so actually it’s really important if you possibly can to stimulate it by daylight. To get outside in the morning is really helpful for building up the store of melatonin in your body so that when you come to want to go to sleep, there’s enough to help you go to sleep.

In order to achieve this, one thing I’d love to invite you to introduce into your routine is just going outside in the morning.

Especially in the beautiful sunshine that we’re experiencing at the moment, go out and get those melatonin stores.

Also, exercise is a fantastic contributor to sleep – so long as you’re leaving a three or four-hour gap between any really energetic exercise and your bedtime.

Make sure you got that through three or four-hour gap between going to the gym and when you want to go to bed.

This relates to a general point about timing that I  wanted to share with you. If you think about a car, it takes a few seconds to get from nought to sixty. It’s not completely instant. It might take 10 seconds or 15 seconds, according to the different cars.

What I find when I’m working as a meditation teacher and a yoga teacher is that people do expect an instant switch! They stop work or looking after the kids, they stop making dinner and they sit down and expect an instant stop or an instant start in the morning. Either way, we don’t work like that.

What I see works best for people, for example, in meditation practice is actually really giving time for relaxation.

That has a very specific application in yoga for sleep which is actually building in a good hour of time to just do the wind-down and that needs to not be screen time.

I know that’s really frustrating and in fact, you shouldn’t be sleeping with your phone or any other Ipad or computer in your bedroom.

I’m going to be a bit strict here in thé. If your complaint about that is that you use your phone as your alarm clock, so do I but I just put it on a plug outside the bedroom. I could get a little desk just in the hall where my bedroom is, not in the bedroom with me I still use it as my alarm clock, although you can buy a specific alarm clock.

The problem is that screen light, blue light is stimulating for the brain.

Even just five minutes are enough to delay your sleep cycle by up to 90 minutes! So you might think that quick moment checking Facebook before going to bed isn’t having an impact, but it can have up to a 90-minute delay on your sleep time! So that is something I’m banning from the bedroom.

Recapping, we have 3 tips on how to sleep well today:

1. Please get outside in the morning and, if you can, combine that tip number 2:
2. Exercise is fantastic for regulating mood, to promote the right balance of hormones in the body that work amazingly well for sleep. Exercise in the morning would be awesome but have at minimum 3 to 4 hours without exercise before bed;
3. No more sleeping with your phone in your room, no more screentime in the last hour before bed!

As you might know, I’ve been running Yoga classes in Ealing for 10 years now and today I’d like to share with you some very simple tips on “Yoga for Sleep”.

In my previous article, I shared some tips for a good night’s sleep and today I’m starting a series of posts aimed at really helping you get the absolute best out of yourself by nourishing yourself at night.

The core principle of Yoga For Sleep is the deep nourishment of both body and mind.

The reason why we want to do that is to allow the body enough time to rest, to digest and to repair from your day’s activities. Actually, we want the mind to have the same opportunity to rest, to digest what experiences you’ve had and any sort of repair and restoration that you need. That can happen at night time.

The first idea that I really want you to take on board today is that

It is so unhelpful when talking about sleep, to obsess too much about how much sleep you got and whether it is good quality sleep.

When you’re having a challenging amount of sleep, you can really start to think:

“Oh, I only got 3 hours (or 4, or 6 hours…),  I should be getting 8 hours every night”.

I’m going to ask you, as my first tip, just to put that obsession to the side. You don’t need to create performance anxiety around sleep. It’s not going to help.

Also, if you are perhaps only getting 3 or 4 hours at night, setting this target for yourself straight away to 8 hours, it’s just too much! It’s too much of a leap to go straight from 3 or 4 hours, to suddenly:

“I’m supposed to get eight hours of sleep”.

So, my tip number 1 on Yoga For Sleep is let go of an idea of how much sleep you need to be getting.

You should progress gently and steadily from wherever you currently are. For example, from getting 3 or 4 hours, let’s get you to 5 hours. If you’re getting 5 hours, let’s get you to 6 or even from 5 to 5 1/2 can make a difference.

My tip number 2 is: if you’re experiencing the feeling of just lying there, trying to sleep and you can’t sleep, if you’re obsessing about the fact that you can’t sleep, I want you to switch your mindset into:

“I am still resting my body”.

Yes, I’m not resting my mind so much, perhaps, but I am still resting my body.

“I’m just going to release the need and anxiety that I should be sleeping and allow my body to rest as best as possible. My body will rest better if my mind is more relaxed”.

It’s a core yoga principle that mind and body are really intimately intertwined.

So, if your mind is anxious and running fast and turning things over, your body can’t fully let go. We’ll talk a little bit more in the next articles about what’s happening hormone-wise.

Today, I wanted to begin this “Yoga For Sleep” series with the basic idea of: let’s start with releasing performance anxiety around sleep.

We just take wherever it is that you’re at now, and we’re just going to add a tiny bit.

So, tonight I encourage you, if you find yourself awake in the night, to tell you just:

“OK, so, I’m awake. Yeah, that’s fine. I’m just going to focus on resting my body, then, and allow myself to get as much as possible from just gently lying”.

Check the video version of this article:

I’ll be back with you next week with the next couple of tips on Yoga For Sleep!

Getting enough sleep is a perennial problem for some, and I sympathise. I’ve had two stress-related periods of exceptionally poor sleep in my life, and as a result, I began to dig deep into the science to help myself and others get a better night’s sleep. Here is what I found.

Tips for a good night’s sleep: environmental factors

Our circadian rhythm is influenced by external factors such as light and darkness in the environment.

So one thing we can do is to manage exposure to light to ensure that it works for our biological and mental processes and not against them.

For example, the hormone melatonin is responsible for good sleep and is produced in the mornings. Getting outside in the morning, therefore, can help your body to create more melatonin, which will help you get your snooze on at night.

Similarly, ensuring that you use blackout blinds and turn off blue light devices (phones, tablets, laptops) at night will mean that you are creating the right environment for your body to understand it’s time to rest. Especially given that reading on a tablet, say, can stimulate your brain so much it delays sleep onset for up to 90 minutes!

Finally, in terms of sleep hygiene, it’s important to keep your bedroom cool and to use the bedroom for sleep not work, housework or storage.

No more working from bed or watching the TV while you do the ironing in the bedroom. Make it a sacred space and have a ritual at bedtime instead. Perhaps, you fold your clothes away, get into bed and spend a few minutes thinking about what went well that day. Then, turn the bedside lamp off and go to sleep.

Photo by Tan Danh from Pexels

What we eat or drink

You probably know what’s coming next… the bad boys of beverage stimulants – caffeine and alcohol.

As you may know, caffeine stresses the body through the impact it has on your blood sugar, causing spikes and collapses that make your energy levels rollercoaster through the day. The general advice in relation to improving your sleep is to avoid caffeine (e.g. in tea, coffee, chocolate) after midday and perhaps switch over to herbal tea. I found drinking Chamomile very helpful, and also the last thing at night a combination of Limeflower and Passionflower helped me to drop off.

The advice on alcohol may be trickier in some ways.

The “ideal” time to drink alcohol from the perspective of a good night’s rest is actually 5.30/6pm.

So that’s good news for the after-work drink and bad news for the drink with or after dinner. It is best avoided close to bedtime too as, whilst it can appear to help you to get to sleep – it can also cause you to wake in the night. The best advice is not to drink every night, and especially to avoid drinking on consecutive nights if possible.

Tips for a good night’s sleep in terms of what to include in your diet.

Magnesium can be very useful. You may even choose to get checked for magnesium deficiency as too little can reduce the production of neurotransmitters that help to balance mood. Supplementing with magnesium works for many people I talked to. Generally, professionals seem to recommend 500mg, especially when combined with a specific amount of calcium. You can find a professional near you by searching for the British Association of Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine website.

Mental factors

One of the most important things I learned during my flirtation with insomnia was that the more I worried about not being able to sleep the worse things got.

Cultivate a determined attitude that your body is still getting some rest if you lay down for several hours. Refuse to count how many hours sleep you feel you actually got. This will slowly but surely begin to work. With that in mind, I’m not a great fan of the smart devices that show you your sleep pattern. Use them sparingly in my view – perhaps as a source of information – but watch out for obsessing over how much and what type of sleep you did or didn’t get.

In general, I recommend focusing on relaxation and breathing exercises instead.

My own favourite breathing exercise: imagine that your breath is like a wave, entering through your feet and washing up the body to the crown of your head. Then, on the out breath, it washes back down the body and out the feet. You can imagine that the incoming wave brings anything you need more of in your life – my go-to is calm – and then the outgoing wave carries out of you anything you don’t need any more. It’s a beautiful relaxing visualisation. Breathing out my worries, disappointments, tensions, busy-ness, helps me enormously to wind down and let go. And then I find I can sleep.

And the remaining thing you can do is get help – talk to a professional if you are concerned. I have found Reiki has helped many clients get better rest, as does yoga nidra (yogic sleep) and yoga itself.

So please do contact me to discuss how you could benefit and get a better night’s rest, or go ahead and book an appointment.

The land of nod awaits!