A Guide to Meditation Retreats

Day retreats, solo retreats and ten-day Vipassana. What each one involves, how your mind may respond, and how to choose.

Type “retreat” into Google and you get beauty clinics, spa hotels and a villa in the Maldives. Like “mindfulness”, the word has been taken over by marketing. Very little of it tells you what a retreat actually does for your mind.

I have run dozens of meditation retreats and taken many solo retreats of my own. This is what I have learned.

What people come for

My booking form asks one question: what is your goal for the day? The answers barely change. Calmness. Focus. Relaxation. Over the years, quite a few people have written a single word: peace.

What’s on offer in the UK

I asked my favourite AI, Claude, to research the UK retreat scene to check my own picture of it. Retreats fall into a few broad types:

• Buddhist silent retreats. Usually Vipassana (insight), Metta (loving-kindness) or Zen. Gaia House in Devon is a well-known example.
• Goenka-style Vipassana. Strict ten-day residential courses with a set code of discipline.
• Secular mindfulness days. Often for people who have finished an eight-week MBSR or MBCT course.
• Wellness blends. Meditation mixed with yoga, sound baths, breathwork, cold-water dipping or a digital detox.
• Nature-based retreats. Mindful walking and woodland meditation.

Weekends are the most common format. Day retreats, usually 10am to 4pm, are popular around cities. Buddhist centres tend to run week-long retreats. Most centres welcome people of any faith or none, and the wellness blends are almost always secular.

Rough prices:

• A day: £35 to £125
• A weekend: £200 to £500, with luxury options far higher
• A week: free at Vipassana centres (funded by past students’ donations), £360 to £666 at Gaia House, and £1,500 or more for commercial retreats

The day retreat

My retreats are one-day retreats in beautiful countryside venues: St Benedict’s in West Malling, which one student called “quite a spiritual place”, the Granary at the Quadrangle in Shoreham, and the drawing room at Beckenham Place Park.

Why leave home? At home, your attention is pulled in a hundred directions before you even sit down. On a retreat, the day is planned for you. All you have to do is be there.

Being there is the practice. We listen to the bell fade while robins, wrens and chaffinches sing outside. We do a mindful walk every time, because walking meditation is something you can carry into ordinary life. We sit, we walk, we talk, and the day carries you along.

It isn’t silent. Most of us live in cities, and a practice that needs perfect silence won’t survive Monday morning. If you need to stretch your legs or take a call, you do.

I also read the room early. In a group of twenty, at least one person will find breathing practices hard, so the day bends to fit who is there. Some retreats are open to everyone. Others, like my September deepening retreat, are for people who already meditate, so we can dig deeper. I don’t tell anyone about the nature of reality. I give you the tools to explore your own.

One student summed it up perfectly: “a retreat for the mind”.

The solo retreat

I have done dozens of solo retreats. No teacher, no group, no conversation. Just me, for several days or weeks.

The same thing happens every time. For the first two and a half days, the mind has a field day. It chatters and ruminates. If you think you have mastered your mind, a solo retreat will put you right.

Then, around day three, it goes quiet. Clear as a bell. Other experienced meditators tell me they experience the same thing.

After that, insights arise and I become incredibly creative. I can see why writers’ and artists’ retreats exist. On one, I spent hours drawing a torus to explore how mindfulness overlaps with art.

I once met someone who spent 57 days meditating in a cave in southern Spain, collecting food left out for her each day. She was thinking of going back for another stint. That tells you how much a calm mind is worth.

Solo retreats aren’t for everyone. Many people find being alone for long stretches uncomfortable, and that’s fine. My suggested test is: could you sit alone for four hours in a familiar room with nothing to do? If not, start with a day retreat alongside others.

Vipassana

Vipassana means insight. In the 1940s and 50s, two schools of Vipassana reached the West. One came through S.N. Goenka and is built on the body scan. The other came through the Burmese teacher Mahasi Sayadaw and is built on labelling, which is a big part of what I teach. I have done a few searches for Sayadaw Vipassana and I couldn’t find anything in the UK.

A Vipassana retreat is a meditation boot camp. Ten days, mostly meditating, usually in silence. Being silent around other people feels odd at first, but it has a purpose: helping the mind go quiet too. I have done a one day silent retreat in a group but if I had the time and wanted to go on a retreat it would be a solo retreat.

Much of mainstream mindfulness grew from Goenka Vipassana, which is why the body scan sits at the heart of so many courses. The body scan does work for some people though I tend to teach variations.

Which one is right for you?

One way to think of it is as a ladder.

1. A day of silent practice, or even a shorter one.
2. A day retreat, to feel what a full day of guided practice does for your mind.
3. A longer residential retreat, like Vipassana, if structure and silence suit you.
4. A solo retreat, once you can comfortably spend days alone with your own mind.

Whichever you choose, the goal is the same. A calm mind is clear and balanced. A busy mind is foggy and biased. A retreat gives your mind time to settle, so you can bring some of that calm back home with you and access it when you need it in future.

My next retreats are in January. Join the newsletter to be among the first to hear when dates are confirmed.