We did not design the retreats with returning in mind. The first cohort surprised us; several wrote within a few months asking when they could come back. We had not anticipated this, and we sat with it before answering. Was the work supposed to be done in a week? If they came back, what were we offering them that was not the same week again?
The answer, we have learned, is that the same week is never the same week. The body that arrives the second time is not the body that arrived the first. It carries the work it has done in between, and it brings new questions that did not exist before.
What the first time gives you
The first retreat is, for most practitioners, a recognition. They had been carrying something, and the week shows them what. The work afterwards is largely the slow process of putting it down. This is enough, for many. They come once and that is the right answer.
What returning gives you
The second time — and the third, and beyond — is something else. The recognition is no longer the project. The project is the practice itself, and how it has held up across the seasons of the year. Practitioners who return often arrive with a precision they did not have the first time. They know what they are here for.
You do not come back to the same week. You come back as someone who is now able to receive what the week was always offering.
We have a small set of practitioners who come every year, sometimes twice. We do not promote this. We do not encourage it actively. It is, simply, what some lives need — a deliberate marker, set into the calendar, that says: here, again, I return to my own center. We hold the room for them when they ask.
