photo by miketually
This is the introduction to a series on planning your own creative mini-retreat.
1. How to Make Your Own Creative Mini-Retreat: Introduction
2. How to Make Your Own Creative Mini-Retreat: Exploring a New Medium
3. How to Make Your Own Creative Mini-Retreat: Journaling and Visioning
4. How to Make Your Own Creative Mini-Retreat: Creating Tangible Inspiration
Free time is a strange thing.
Some of us struggle for a mere 20 minutes we can call free time. Some of us have flexible schedules that allow us ample free time. Yet whether you identify with the former, the latter, or somewhere in between, the free time somehow never seems long or satisfying enough.
It doesn’t feel like “me time.”
I am one of those people with a flexible schedule. I am usually quite busy with my own projects and working with others, but the flexibility of my schedule gives me a certain level of freedom. Yet whenever I find myself with an hour or two to do as I please, I somehow end up doing nothing. And I don’t mean the intentional, relaxing kind of nothing — I’m talking about the irritating mess of scattered somethings that ultimately make for a completely unfulfilling hour.
Our creative endeavors often suffer at the hands of this scattered mindset. Although we may start making interesting connections among these scattered tangents, it’s pretty unlikely that we’ll create something fulfilling. So how do you center your mind and bring your creativity to a space where it can flourish?
Book Yourself a Mini-Retreat
It would be great to hop on a plane and spend a week at some eco-detox-yoga retreat in Costa Rica. But for many of us, that’s time and money we don’t have. Fortunately, you can reap many of the same effects with a small, concentrated dose of “me time.”
When you create your own creative mini-retreat, the focus is on the quality and intensity of time, rather than the quantity. When you spend two hours intensely focused on a single meaningful purpose, the focus and inspiration of those two hours will spill over into the rest of your day. If you create a regular practice of mini-retreats, this focus and inspiration will echo throughout your daily life.
Finding the Right Time
It’s important to choose a day that you know will be relatively obligation-free. If you have a few client calls to make in the morning, or a swimming lesson with your kids, you can just block off the rest of the day for your mini-retreat — it doesn’t need to be an entire day.
For some of you, this will mean a Saturday or Sunday. But if you are a freelancer or someone with a flexible schedule, consider choosing a weekday so that you don’t have people calling to invite you to brunch or stopping by your house for a coffee. Choose a six- to eight-hour block of time that will be free of interruptions.
Choosing the Place
When deciding where to do your mini-retreat, size is not terribly important. But it is important that you choose a spot that you’ll enjoy for long chunks of time. Consider noise, lighting, and seating options. If you can claim your entire house or apartment for this block of time, that’s great. If not, consider staking claim to your bedroom, the living room, a patch of grass at the park, or a table in your own backyard. You can choose to do the mini-retreat with a friend, but make sure you are in tune with each other about the space you want to create and your expectations. If you’re doing the mini-retreat with a partner, decide whether you need separate spaces for the times of intense concentration, or whether you are capable of retreating into your own world in each other’s presence.
Choosing Your Focus
There’s a broad range of things your mini-retreat can focus on. Some ideas include:
- Exploring a new creative medium: If you’re a writer, try spending the day with sketchpads, colored pencils, charcoal, and the works. If you tend to sit in front of a computer all day, make sure you spend this mini-retreat using your hands.
- Doing journaling and visioning exercises: Use a series of prompts to do some free-flowing journal writing. Explore your values, your goals, and your motivations. Envision scenarios and futures that exhilarate you, and explore what you need to get there.
- Creating tangible reminders of your inspiration: Make a vision board of words and images that inspire you. Make a slideshow of photos that elicit strong emotions and inspiration. Draw a map of the things that cultivate and stimulate your past, present and future.
The next three installments of this series will explore the three areas of focus above. Check in tomorrow to read more about exploring a new creative medium.
If you want to join in and plan your own mini-retreat, jump into the conversation and tell us about it in the comments!
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I have been practicing this the past 2-3 weeks and have written 15,000 words of my novel in about ten, 2-3 hour long sessions – as well as having a full-time job and a house to tend! I love your part on “focus”, its so important to be able to concentrate on one thing at a time
curiousjessica´s last blog post..The Darkness within
This sounds AWESOME, but… er…. what about the kids?
Writer Dad´s last blog post..7 Steps to Squeaky Clean Copy
This is a great idea, just reading this made me realise that this is exactly where I am going wrong! I am hopeless at relaxing, so cordoning off a few hours of time that is a different kind of ‘doing’ which is both restorative and productive seems like the way forwards.
Hrm, I will give this some serious thought!
Emma Newman´s last blog post..Persistence really is everything
@ curiousjessica – Wow, that’s incredible progress! Your example is the perfect example of what this kind of focus can create
@ Writer Dad – It’s only appropriate that you would ask about the kids
Hmm… that’s something I definitely need to address… Mom? Grandma? Babysitter? What are the kids usually up to when you’re writing?
@ Emma – That’s a good way to think of it — it’s not just relaxing, it’s being productive in a completely different and fulfilling way. Let me know what you work on
It’s such a great idea for anyone into creativity for whatever reason to try these out. I’m so fortunate to have different arts I love doing like playing musical instruments, drawing and of course my favorite: writing. I admit that because of your recommendations recently, I’ve been writing out mind maps on paper:)
Bobby Revell´s last blog post..My Upcoming Transgressional Fiction Novel
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