About Seclusion

If you’ve never taken a seclusion before, it’s best to start slowly. Try taking just a day or two days at first. Then when you are more used to short seclusions, try for a longer amount of time.

It is possible to seclude where you live, especially if you live alone, or if the rest of your family will be away for a time. However, most long-time “secluders” will tell you that when they tried to seclude in their usual environment, it didn’t work as well. Most find they need a different environment—to get away from it all.

“Seclusion is the price of greatness,” said Paramhansa Yogananda. Why would this be so? Well there aren’t many of us who have lived and worked in society that haven’t found themselves saying “God if I could just get some time alone.”

If you’re feeling unhappy you should probably book yourself into a spiritual retreat. Filled with meditation, the trendy getaway designed to reset someone’s daily life can improve your mood within a week, new research suggests. Scientists claim the peaceful practice increases levels of feel-good chemicals to the brain, allowing many to feel spiritual.

In today’s constantly connected world, finding solitude has become a lost art. In fact, Western culture tends to equate a desire for solitude with people who are lonely, sad, or have antisocial tendencies.

Write out your lists and proposed daily schedule ahead of time. Decide what you want to do, then decide what you want to take with you to make that possible. What reading materials do you want? Highly recommend would be reading about the lives of the great saints of all religions.

“Between a human and a tree is the breath. We are each other’s air.” —Margaret Bates

Did you know that trees are among the world’s greatest healers? Forest Bathing, or Shinrin-yoku, is the Japanese practice of going to the forest to receive mental and physical healing.

Forest plants emit essential wood oils and airborne chemicals to protect themselves from insects and decay. Research has shown that forest aromas benefit humans as well.

The joy of listening to nature is the basis of Joseph Cornell’s work in helping people to become centered in themselves by carefully listening and observing nature. By becoming very still, one can easily feel the flow of creative power in everything around us, and in the center of our own heart.

I just took my very first seclusion. What is seclusion, you might ask? Seclusion was strongly recommended by my guru, Paramhansa Yogananda, as a means for deepening your inner communion with the Divine.

Ah, sweet seclusion! If you’ve never tried it—well, you must and the sooner the better! Most likely, you’ll find it so enjoyable that you’ll soon be trying to take a day of seclusion more often, perhaps even one day a week, once a month, or even longer seclusions once or twice a year. Here are some suggestions that might help you to have a better time of your seclusion.

Stay in complete silence and alone. Obtain and wear an IN SILENCE badge whenever you go which might cause you to encounter people. If you see someone, lower your eyes and keep walking and/or point at your badge. If you need to communicate with someone, write a note.

I am eating lunch in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains when the director of a retreat center hands me a blue badge encased in plastic. It reads, “I’m in Silence.” I stare at the words, absorbing the implications of the vow I’m about to take for the next three days, and wonder if I’ll be able to shut up for that long. If so, it will be a first for this chatty Kathleen, a wife and mother of two teenage boys who works full time in communications at a college. Even worse than not talking, I was forced to surrender my cellphone and laptop upon arrival, severing all connection to the outside world.

I soon made arrangements with the college staff to take my seclusion in silence, undisturbed, and without meals. I figured I could buy my own groceries and cook on the single burner in the girl’s dorm, which was currently being used to heat tea water. To make a long story short, my week long seclusion lasted about an hour or two. First of all, the weather was the most gorgeous it had been all winter.

I was really ready to go on seclusion. I’d been looking forward to it for ages. I had my days all planned out: plenty of meditation, extra energization exercises, starting a yoga habit again, spiritual reading, the works. I did that on my seclusion last year, and loved it. So when I arrived at the Ananda Meditation Retreat a week and a half ago, I just hit the ground running. Or so I thought. I stepped right into my routine on day 1.

My “headquarters” was a tiny, 7-by-15-foot wooden shack, located on a large, remote section of private property. It was precariously constructed about 25 years ago on a wooded bluff, about 100 yards from the river. It has two doors, two windows, an outhouse, a picnic table, and no electricity or water. It’s cozy but primitive and very isolated, located at the bottom of a scarily steep jeep track, off a gravel road, which is off another rural road.

For over two years I spent one out of every four weeks in silence. At the time I was living at a Zen Monastery and every month we would have a week-long silent retreat. During this retreat we sat meditation in silence, ate in silence, worked in silence, and only communicated through hand gestures and written notes

Everyone in the world wants happiness. There is no one alive who really prefers to be unhappy—though moods can cause strange twists in people’s minds, temporarily! The desire for happiness is because all beings are projections of the consciousness of God, whose nature is ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new Bliss (Satchidananda).