August 11, 2023
I am still metabolizing my experience at the Quarterlife Retreat on San Juan Island last week, held at the very beautiful Saturn’s Return Farm + Inn (go visit!).
Over four days that felt like four weeks, twelve participants between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-eight gathered for beautiful food, deep conversations, self-exploration, and community.
We entered mythic time, experienced countless synchronicities that shook us, and had poignant encounters with creatures from Bald Eagles to Black Foxes; we read poems and prose and talked all about the experience of being human. Everyone came with their own particular life questions and we did our best to explore all that arose.
After years of relative isolation through a pandemic, I was struck anew by the power of community. With minimal attention to the clock or tasks or places to be, we sunk in with each other. With nearly everyone a stranger to one another, the ground was leveled for new interactions and new bonds. Meals were held at a large farm table or on blankets in the grass. The downtime was leisurely. We were gathered for self-exploration and self-understanding, to be released from grief and depression, and to find answers to what we most needed to understand. The result was a blend of uproarious laughter and breakthrough tears, full emotions that could melt frozen states of stuckness, avoidance, neurosis, and the busyness of daily life.
Our extraordinary chef at the retreat, Gracie Gardner, had written a beautiful and prescient piece on community prior to our gathering. In it, she told a story she’d heard in a podcast with Dr. Thema Bryant, president of the American Psychological Association. It’s a story that has really stayed with me. I’ll let Gracie’s words tell the rest:
They were discussing this idea of decolonizing psychology, meaning moving away from the assumption that the individual is the unit to be therapized, and moving towards considering one’s social, economic, and political context. Highlighting cultural or indigenous ways of healing, which is often healing in community.
[Dr. Bryant] recounted a story about American psychologists who went to Rwanda after the genocide with the intention of offering aid.
“One of the community leaders reported that ‘these people said they were going to help us heal so we let them in and they did not have any music, they did not have any dancing, and they separated us and put us into these dark little rooms and wanted us to re-tell all the terrible things about our lives. That was not healing so we had to ask them to leave.”
I asked Gracie to share this poignant story at the retreat as we gathered in our closing circle on Saturday.
As each person conveyed the very individual, very personal things they were taking away from our gatherings, we also felt deeply what it is to not be isolated—and not just from a pandemic, but also not from pain, uncertainty, and the surprisingly isolating experience of existence. The healing power of community was with us not to erase the individual, as happens in mobs or unconscious collectives, but to support its full emergence. And that was the key.
xo, Satya
Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies