A lesson I learned from creating my first retreat.

What if the things we create are actually creating us in their own mysterious way?

“What a cool, deep, and rich time you created,” he said to me after the weekend.

First, let me say, I'm writing this to encourage you to create that thing you're thinking about. Even if you don't have all the details together, even if you're scared, and especially if you haven't done it before.

I’m writing you this because I did that last weekend. A somewhat rare occasion for me of having an original vision and following through to bring it to life.

It was, in some ways, what I expected or hoped it to be. It was also much more, in other ways, than I ever could have expected it to be. **If you keep till the end, you’ll see photos that capture the life of what the following words attempt to communicate.**

View off the cabin deck from the story I’m about to tell you.

Allow me to set the stage.

If you’re new here and don’t already know, I’m a counselor and I have my own private practice outside of Nashville, TN. I love doing the work I get to do. And, it can be lonely.

As therapists in solo practice, we don’t have a team that we get to work with and bounce ideas off. We pour out consistently and in a very intentional way which requirers a lot of emotional weight. Maybe you can relate, to some degree or another, in the work you do.

My wife works for an organization and she’s part of an amazing team and they work very closely with each other. She works at a church, so it is inherently a very interpersonal team.

They work less with spreadsheets and more with relationships (not that there’s anything wrong with spreadsheets!).

At the beginning of the year she went on a couple different staff retreats. When she came home and talked about their time together, I noticed a desire within myself for something similar.

A longing. A little flicker of a flame. Something worth paying attention to.

The little flicker turned into a greater flame (a greater desire) as I paid more attention to it.

Not the intense flame of desire and passion that’s ready to take over the world. More like the this is an interesting candle and I’d like to put it in my office for a few weeks and see what its like type of desire.

The hope was this:

• A space where we could rest, connect with other like minded therapists, be in nature, work on our business (maybe), and some participate in some experiential group exercises.

• To have good conversations. Connections with like minded therapists. Fun hangs.

That was my hope.

I’m grateful to be connected to therapists in the area, so I just started to float out the idea to them.

Which in and of itself, felt risky. I know all of these guys individually, but they didn’t all know each other. I was simply hoping they would get along and connect with each other well. Maybe it would lead to a new colleague they could refer clients to. And I was trusting my intuition that it would be a good group.

The response when I asked them was a resounding “YES!”

I then connected with a friend who has a cabin out in the woods, landed on a date a few months out, and boom…

The first Refuge Retreat was born.

The outcome was this:

• Laughed and told jokes, nearly crying at some.

• Integrated play and connected to our inner kid (something we don’t often do as men), which looked like skipping rocks on the lake and taking turns chopping down a giant tree that had blocked the path down to the lake with an axe.

• Played guitar and sung songs on the patio that overlooked the lake from about 150ft up.

• Smoked cigars, conversed by the indoor fireplace, and partook in some delicious 13 hour smoked pork shoulder.

• Participated in a group exercise that transformed into two and a half hours of processing very vulnerable parts of ourselves. Most of us crying, on the verge of weeping, as we witnessed each others pain and hope.

I had moment, during this group processing, of realizing that the thing I thought I created mainly for others was in fact something I needed in a very deep way.

A way I never would have expected, and had I done so, might have been too afraid to lean into it.

Seven guys, who came into the first day shaking hands, some having met each other for the first time, left on the last day with hugs that communicated more than words could.

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Here’s the lesson:

Create the thing, then slow down enough to become aware of the unexpected ways it is transforming both yourself and others, beyond what you could have anticipated.

The awareness of that transformation provides fuel to the flame - in the good sense of that metaphor.

I’ll likely create and facilitate more of these weekends. But I don’t have some grand plan of what I want it to turn into. Or endless ideating of how to monetize it. And that feels really good.

It’s less like I stumbled on this candle that smelled great and now I’m eager to create a new candle brand with various scents, and more like I really liked the smell of that candle. I think I’ll get it for my office again.

Who knows, maybe it will turn into a new brand one day. For now, it’s nice to not think about that. It’s nice just to create.

It’s healing in its own mysterious sort of way to create and then witness the ways in which that thing I created is, in fact, creating me.

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Just a few photos I shot from the weekend: