Suddenly you have it: I want to go on retreat

Maybe it's because I've seen Eat, Pray, Love too many times and I idealize it a lot or that I can't get out of Europe, but suddenly I'm really in the retreat vibe. Being offline in Finland, doing yoga in Bali, being quiet in Lutjebroek; it all seems incredibly divine and worth trying.

But what is such a retreat actually, because it always sounds a bit mystical. Wiki explains a retreat as follows: seclusion for spiritual self-examination and mental exercise. It suddenly sounds a lot less cozy than I had imagined, but that could of course be due to that piece of seclusion. The fact remains that a retreat is about withdrawing yourself from daily life, which seems very worth trying for one or two weeks. Just some time for myself, after that I want to dive back into my daily troubles.

Of course, the question remains why you would go on a retreat and what it does for you. By taking distance from daily things like being stuck in traffic, vacuuming, or paying your bills, you get space for new thoughts. Maybe you have a big decision to make, you're waiting for a eureka moment but you don't have the peace of mind, or you just want to get away from the stress? All plausible reasons.

You still have to figure out which retreat suits you. I keep thinking of Julia Roberts who within a second pulled the silence label off her blouse because something more fun came along. That could happen to me too. But you have retreats from all-day yoga, non-stop meditation to one where you work on becoming the next world leader. It just depends on what suits you. It's important to do research on this, because it's inconvenient if you book a silent retreat while you're the biggest chatterbox on earth. Or see it as a challenge, that could work too.

I'm still looking for something where I can do all day lazy-people-yoga eat incredibly well and maybe do that on an island with a rather white beach and blue sea. Further, I have few wishes, you know. Who claimed that becoming a yogi went so quickly out of hand? Ai…