The half-day retreat at home
A small monthly practice — four hours, one Saturday morning a month, no phone, no plans, no errands.
I take, on the second Saturday of every month, a four-hour retreat at home. The retreat runs from eight in the morning to noon. The phone is off. The laptop is closed. There are no plans. There are no errands. The flat is the retreat centre and the four hours are the practice.
I have been doing this for about two years. It has become, of all the small contemplative structures I have, the one I would give up last.
What four hours allows
More than you would think. A four-hour block of unstructured quiet is, in my experience, longer than the sum of two two-hour blocks. The mind has time to fully arrive, which it does not in shorter blocks. By the second hour the mind is in a different gear from the gear it was in at breakfast. By the third hour it is in a gear I do not access during normal weeks at all.
What I do during the four hours
Nothing strict. The retreat is not a programme. I usually start with thirty minutes of meditation. Then I make a second cup of tea and read for forty-five minutes — slowly, often the same kind of book I would not read at any other time. Then I take a long walk, two hours or so, through whatever part of the city the weather suggests. I come home, sit in the meditation room for another thirty minutes, and the four hours are done.
What this is not
It is not a discipline I am proud of. The four hours are easy hours. They are, in many ways, the easiest hours of the month. The discipline is in the protection of them, not in the doing of them. The work was done at the start, when I decided that the second Saturday morning was reserved, and when I started saying no to the small invitations that wanted that morning.
What the four hours have changed
They have lengthened my available attention span. The week before the retreat, my attention is, on average, broken into smaller and smaller pieces by the small demands of work. The week after the retreat my attention can hold for longer. This is not magic; it is the natural consequence of giving the mind, once a month, a period in which nothing is demanding of it.
If a four-hour block sounds impossible, start with two. Two hours, once a month, in which the phone is off and the plans are none. The two hours will, after a few months, feel essential. You can extend from there.