Our Faith in Writing’s Guide for Planning Your Individual Spiritual and Creative Retreat
Our Faith in Writing’s Guide for Planning Your Individual Spiritual and Creative Retreat
Thanks so much for your interest in this guide for individual spiritual and creative retreats. If you share any portion of this guide online, with a friend, a spiritual direction client, or a writing client, please link back to my website Our Faith in Writing and credit me, Charlotte Donlon, as the original creator and writer of this guide. My preference is that you send others to the Our Faith in Writing website to download their own free copy. This is a working document that I will be updating and revising on a regular basis.
I’m happy to share this resource with others who will find it useful, but I also want to protect my spiritual and creative work as much as possible. If you have any questions about how to honor my spiritual and creative work, please email me. I’m happy to discuss different ways to do this and to provide permission for wider use. My email address is charlotte@charlottedonlon.com.
A Note from Charlotte Donlon, Spiritual Director for Writers
Sometimes it’s difficult to give focused attention to our spiritual life and creative work with everything else we need to tend to during our typical days and weeks. Even if you’re able to set aside significant chunks of time on a daily or weekly basis for prayer, contemplative practices, and creative work, having an individual retreat for half a day, a full day, a weekend, or longer will nourish your body, mind, and soul and help you connect with yourself, God, and your creativity.
Most of my clients are writers, so that’s my primary audience for my spiritual direction work and resources. But this guide for planning a retreat will be helpful for anyone who wants to include spiritual and creative rhythms in their individual retreat.
It’s important to be alone, or as alone as possible for your retreat. Long periods of silence and solitude will help you engage with the spiritual and creative rhythms suggested in this guide. If going away by yourself for half a day or more isn’t an option, ask God to give you some ideas for how to plan a retreat that suits your current season of life.
If you’d like help creating a custom retreat, visit Spiritual Direction for Writers™ and schedule a custom retreat session with me. I enjoy helping clients plan retreats and am able to offer several personalized suggestions based on my clients’ spiritual needs and specific writing and creative goals.
However you choose to use this guide, I pray you will notice God’s presence in your life and the world around you during your retreat and beyond.
Please let me know how your retreat goes! I love to hear what works well for others during their individual spiritual and creative retreats.
Peace,
Charlotte Donlon
M.F.A. in Creative Writing
Spiritual Director for Writers
www.ourfaithinwriting.com
charlotte@charlottedonlon.com
Before Your Retreat
Read through this full document. Take notes. Pray through the different options. Make some plans but be willing to be flexible. Over-prepare and under-perform.
Decide how long you want your retreat to be, where you’ll be during your retreat, and other logistical details. This plan is useful for half-day retreats, full-day retreats, weekend retreats, or longer retreats.
Make sure you have all of the supplies, journal, notebook, etc. you’ll need for the retreat activity and contemplative prayer options you might want to do.
Make a playlist or playlists of songs for different moods, activities, walks. Maybe make one for meditative prayerfulness, one that’s fun with more energy, one with classical music. You might want to listen to music while walking outside or before or after praying, journaling, or writing. You don’t have to listen to music, though. Silence is also a great option. We all need more silence.
Pack some things to read. A novel, some nonfiction, a book of poems. Print some articles or essays you’ve been meaning to read but keep putting off.
Pack stationary or postcards and stamps in case you want to take a few minutes to write to someone who comes to mind while you’re on your retreat. Have everything stamped and ready to mail before you go home to increase the likelihood of everything actually getting mailed.
Pick out a movie you might want to watch if there’s internet access.
Pack a candle or a few candles and a lighter if those things are allowed where you’re staying.
Pack a few nutrient-dense snacks that can get you by if you’re hungry but don’t want to stop doing what you’re doing for a full meal. Nuts, protein bars, apples with nut butter, etc. You know what you enjoy and what satisfies your hunger. Splurge a bit if you can afford to. Buy a few things you love but don’t usually purchase.
Pack a few favorite tea bags, a bottle of wine (screw top or don’t forget a corkscrew), fancy sparkling water. Take one of your own wine glasses for wine or water or another favorite beverage.
Plan ahead for caffeine needs. If you need coffee to wake up and get started in the morning, what’s your plan? Is there a portable option you can take? Tea? Instant coffee (there are some decent versions out there), Check out Celsius drinks or other energy drinks that don’t have a ton of chemicals or sugar.
Take comfortable clothes and layering options. Take a scarf. I always use a scarf when I’m traveling, even in the summer. Sometimes it makes me feel a bit cozier while writing at night.
Pray for specific needs and desires leading up to your retreat. Ask God to help you belong more to yourself, others, God, and the world while you’re away. Ask God to use your creative work to deepen your belongings to yourself, others, God, and the world during your retreat.
Ask God to show you what you need before, during, and after your retreat. You can make plans and then ditch them if you need to watch Netflix and take naps the whole time. Please honor the needs of your body, mind, and soul. Creative work nourishes us, too. If you don’t have it in you to do the creative work you need to do, is there any creative work you want to do? Maybe you can dream about writing career goals or brainstorm ideas for new writing projects. Maybe you can use an hour to play around and research books you want to read. I highly recommend following the rhythms outlined below--at least for 10-15 minutes each--but give yourself grace if things fall apart. Like I said earlier: over-prepare and under-perform.
Find a few prayers from the Book of Common Prayer or other prayer books that you want to pray for yourself and others during your retreat.
Decide ahead of time how available you want to be to other people, how to handle screen time, phone usage, social media, etc. You’re an adult and can make your own decisions about all of this. Prayerfully consider an approach to screens and technology that will help you belong to yourself, others, God, and the world. I definitely recommend having less screen time than you usually have. Try turning off your phone and putting it in a drawer for at least a few hours each day and see how that goes.
Rhythms for Spiritual and Creative Individual Retreats
How to Use the Four-Hour Cycle
I recommend doing at least one cycle of all rhythms and components in the order listed below. It will take around four hours to do a full cycle as suggested. If you prefer to give less time to each rhythm, that’s fine too. A full cycle can also take more than four hours. But aiming for four hours should work well.
Because the full cycle works well with a four-hour chunk of time, you can use one cycle of these rhythms for a half-day retreat, two for a full-day retreat, etc.
This is a gude that can help you determine what might work best for you. Please use it in any way that’s most helpful for you for this particular retreat. If you don’t want to follow these rhythms as outlined below, maybe you can aim to include each component at least once during your retreat.
If your retreat is for at least a full day, you can repeat the cycle twice in one day. Or you can do the full cycle once then some of the components the second time around.
If you make a plan for your retreat then realize you need a nap after praying, take a nap. If you accidentally fall asleep while praying, recognize that you needed a nap and celebrate the fact that you were able to give yourself what you needed.
Be gentle with yourself and pay attention to what your mind, body, and soul want and need. If you catch yourself being harsh or having a scolding tone towards yourself, ask God to help you release those expectations and to give you more flexibility to enter into the work, creative, prayer, and rest rhythms that are best for you in that moment, for that day, for that retreat.
If you fail to do what you planned to do, give yourself grace and be curious. Consider these questions: Why didn’t I do what I planned? What is God showing me through that experience? What does God want me to notice about myself and God through that experience? What sort of retreat plan would’ve been more appropriate and more doable for me? What can I do now and in the coming days to engage with the rhythms I wanted to inhabit during this retreat?
Take notes during and after your retreat. What worked well? What do you want to try next time? What surprised you? What activities, prayers, etc. helped you feel closer to God? Use these notes while you’re planning for your next retreat.
The Four-Hour Cycle for Spiritual and Creative Individual Retreats
Sit with God: 50 minutes
Walking Break: 10 minutes
Creative Work: 2 hours
Walking Break: 10 minutes
Pray: 20 minutes
Rest: 20 minutes
Walking Break: 10 minutes
Begin again with sitting with God and repeat the whole cycle or portions of the cycle.
Ideas for Rhythms for Individual Spiritual and Creative Retreats
Ideas for Sitting with God and Other Times of Prayer
Sit quietly with God and yourself. Notice how you notice God and how you notice yourself. Notice how God seems present in your life in this particular moment, under these particular circumstances, in this particular place.
Take a few minutes to be present to the place you’re inhabiting. Notice the furniture, decorative items, walls, floors, ceiling, lights, windows, views.
Centering Prayer (If you’ve never done centering prayer, do a bit of research ahead of time. There’s plenty of information online about centering prayer and how to do it.)
Read psalms or other Scripture slowly, meditatively, taking notes. Read the same passage a few times. Pray through the words and sentences and notice how the passage is different this time compared to the last time you read it.
Journaling Prayer. Write to God specifically while journaling whatever comes to mind. Or use the questions listed below.
Journaling Lists--Create lists of worries, anxieties, hopes, fears, writing dreams, disappointments, etc.
Sit. Just sit. Don’t worry about what you pray or think.
Drink coffee with God. Chat with God while you drink. Imagine God’s partaking too, drinking some sort of heavenly brew you’ll get to have in heaven. (I know this one sounds cheesy but I enjoy it!)
Drink wine or tea with God. It’s like drinking coffee with God but different.
Questions to Consider for Journaling and Journaling Prayers
Please add anything that comes up during our spiritual formation or spiritual direction conversations.
If you were going to have a regular writing rhythm, what could it look like?
How does writing help you belong to yourself, others, God, and the world?
How do other forms of art help you belong to yourself, others, God, and the world?
What has been nourishing you the past few weeks and months?
What is depleting you the past few weeks and months?
How has God been present in your life, your creative work, and in the world around you during the past few weeks and months?
Ideas for Creative Work
Make sure you think through this ahead of time. Pray about the things you want to write, revise, and explore, and be ready to do those things during your retreat. Feel free to incorporate more than one idea below for each session of creative work.
Write new essays, stories, poems, or chapters. Or revise some things you’ve already written.
Journal using stream of consciousness writing. Write whatever comes to mind. If nothing comes to mind, write “I don’t know what to write” until something else comes to mind.
Brainstorm new ideas for new essays, poems, stories, or book chapters.
Use writing prompts from a favorite book about writing.
Engage with someone else’s art (music, an essay, a poem, a piece of visual art online that you picked ahead of time) and respond. Or see what new ideas others’ art sparks.
Write something outside your genre. Don’t worry about the finished product. Don’t even worry about completing it.
Read something in your genre. What’s one thing the writer did well? Find two or three specific examples. Think about how you can apply this to your own writing.
Play with art supplies. (Take some with you if you think this might be a good one to do.)
Draw something in the room where you’re staying. (You can use this as a guide if you like. It’s a contemplative drawing exercise I recorded for a podcast. You don’t need any fancy supplies. Just a pen or pencil and paper.)
Sit or walk outside for at least 30 minutes. Before you go outside, pick a color. While you’re outside, try to find as many things as you can that are that color and make a list or take photos with your phone. Use that list to write a poem, if you like. (Thanks to Epsicopal Priest and Author Lauren F. Winner for this idea!)
More Ideas for Prayer after Creative Work
Pray in any way that feels suitable or comfortable after your creative work. Some ideas are below. You can also use ideas from the “Sit with God” list.
Sit quietly for 20 minutes immediately after you finish your previous session of creative work. Ask God to give you new insights and ideas for what you just completed and what you might need to do in the future. Read through what you wrote or made. Prayerfully take notes.
Confess and Be Repented--Release and surrender and confess one thing right now. What’s one thing that sometimes gives you life that was never meant to give you life? Say a brief prayer of confession and ask God to turn you away and repent you from seeking life from that one thing. (I love the idea of being repented by God. I stole this from someone but can’t remember his name right now.) That's it. That's the prayer practice.
Blackout Poetry Using a Psalm--Find a psalm that feels appropriate for the season you're in right now. Write a few verses down on a piece of paper. Then play with blacking out certain words and see what's left. This isn't necessarily about the words that are left after some words have been marked out. It's more about giving your attention to a psalm in a way that's different from how you usually approach Scripture. You can rewrite the verses or write a few different verses and keep playing with it. Even working on this for five minutes will give you a new way of seeing. You don't have to "finish" or create an end-product that feels finished. (Thanks to Epsicopal Priest and Author Lauren F. Winner for this idea!)
Receive and Release--Stand up and hold your hands out in front of you with your palms up. Bend your arms a bit or do whatever you can do to make sure you aren't uncomfortable. Close your eyes and say aloud something you want to receive from God. Then say something you want to let go of while turning your palms over like you're dropping something to the ground. Repeat this however many times you like, asking God to give you different things that you want and telling God different things you want to release. I appreciate how this one uses body movements to help us engage with more of our whole selves. (Here are some examples of things you can ask to receive and try to release: Receive grace and release fear. Receive peace and release anger. Receive wholeness and release fragmentation. Receive rest and release busyness.)
Walking Breaks
Take a short break every hour or two. Move your body, rest your mind.
Adapt a prayer idea from above to do while you’re walking outside or walking around in circles inside or while standing still.
Name Prayers. For 10 minutes, walk around outside or inside and say (aloud or silently to yourself) any names that come to mind. That’s it. That’s the prayer. Start with the obvious ones—family, friends, neighbors, etc. Then try to open your mind a bit and let go of the barriers we create around certain groups of people we know and don’t know. Other names of people you know will come to mind. I’m always surprised by some of the names I pray. I’m like okay God, I didn’t really want to pray for that person but I guess you wanted me to.
Record a voice memo. Talk to yourself or your mom or your best friend or your nemesis. Talk to your novel’s protagonist or villain. Talk to God. Talk to your favorite writers. You can talk to anyone. They may never hear what you have to say, but that doesn’t mean you can’t say it.
If you want to get really active, do some walking lunges or Rockette-ish high kicks to the front (or the kicks you do when you’re unable to do Rockette-ish high kicks). Circle your arms or head or shoulders or wrists. Circle them one way. Then the other way. Do some air squats. Do a plank.
Delete emails from your inbox or your email folders. While walking. For 10 whole minutes.
If it's part of your plan, check social media. Twitter, IG, FB. Take a selfie of you taking a 10-minute break and share it so other people will be inspired to take a 10-minute break.
Breathe. Just breathe. In and out. In and out. Or you can breathe fancy with 4/7/8 breathing. (You can google it.)
Ideas for Play
Before you go on your retreat, think about ways you play and be prepared to engage some of those things you enjoy. Also, when it’s time for intentional play, what feels playful right now? Items from the other sections may feel playful. Creating, praying creatively, journaling, walking, etc. Or maybe some ideas below will feel playful.
Make lists. Silly lists, fun lists, wish lists. Places you want to travel. Meals you want to prepare or share with others. Musicians you want to see perform live. Ten favorite books. Ten favorite songs. Ten favorite TV shows. Ten weird things people have said to you. You get the idea.
Read some light, fun fiction without judging yourself (or the author).
Dance like no one's watching. Because no one's watching.
Write some limericks.
Create a wild and fun character for a short story you may never write.
Create a character that’s the exact opposite of you for a short story you may never write.
Play with a slinky or modeling clay.
Ideas for Rest
What feels restful right now? Items from the other sections may feel restful. Creating, praying creatively, journaling, walking, etc. Or maybe some ideas below will feel restful.
Take a nap. (I know you know this but I’m including it anyway. Naps are good.)
Watch a movie or TV show.
Listen to music with your eyes closed.
Listen to a podcast.
Listen to an audio book.
Sit. Just sit.
Have a glass of wine or cup or coffee or tea without doing anything else. Give your attention to your senses. What are you tasting, smelling, feeling, hearing, seeing? Don’t take any notes. Just enjoy the process of being present in this moment.
Enjoy Your Retreat!
Thanks so much for your interest in this guide for individual spiritual and creative retreats. As a reminder, if you share any portion of this guide online, with a friend, a spiritual direction client, or a writing client, please link back to my website Our Faith in Writing and credit me, Charlotte Donlon, as the original creator and writer of this guide. My preference is that you send others to the Our Faith in Writing website to download their own free copy. This is a working document that I will be updating and revising on a regular basis.
I’m happy to share this resource with others who will find it useful, but I also want to protect my spiritual and creative work as much as possible. I’m happy to discuss different ways to do this and to provide permission for wider use.
Again, if you’d like help creating a custom retreat, visit Spiritual Direction for Writers™ and schedule a custom retreat session with me. I enjoy helping clients plan retreats and am able to offer several personalized suggestions based on my clients’ spiritual needs and specific writing and creative goals.
However you choose to use this guide, I pray you will notice God’s presence in your life and the world around you during your retreat and beyond.
Please let me know how your retreat goes! I love to hear what works well for others during their individual spiritual and creative retreats.
Peace,
Charlotte Donlon
M.F.A. in Creative Writing
Spiritual Director for Writers
ourfaithinwriting.com
spiritualdirectionforwriters.com
charlotte@charlottedonlon.com
Charlotte Donlon helps her readers and clients notice how they belong to themselves, others, God, and the world. Charlotte is a writer, a spiritual director for writers, and the founder of Spiritual Direction for Writers™ and Parenting with Art™. She is also the founder and host of the Our Faith in Writing podcast and website. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Curator, The Christian Century, Christianity Today, Catapult, The Millions, Mockingbird, and elsewhere. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University where she studied creative nonfiction with Paula Huston and Lauren F. Winner. She holds a certificate in spiritual direction from Selah Center for Spiritual Formation. Her first book is The Great Belonging: How Loneliness Leads Us to Each Other. To receive Charlotte’s latest updates, news, announcements, and other good things, subscribe to her email newsletter.