The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Go on, retreat yourself!
An engaging guide to the £500billion business of ‘mindfulness tourism’
278pp, Bodley Head, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £18.99, ebook £9.99
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The word “retreat” is now deployed not just for the religious ritual of withdrawal from the world to reflect, but also as part of a global mindfulness tourist industry that, according to Nat Segnit, is worth almost £500billion each year. Even with institutional religion in steep decline in the West, the retreat continues to have an active resonance in our self-avowedly secular and sceptical world.
Segnit begins modestly in his search to understand its allure by attending a yoga retreat in Devon. “Smoke rose,” he writes, “from an incense burner like the ghost of a hypnotized cobra.” But if he starts as an outsider looking in with a wry eye, it quickly becomes apparent that there is both seriousness of purpose and something intensely personal about this mixture of memoir, travelogue, history and science.
His childhood “on the fringes of the hippie-ish, self-sufficiency movement” in rural Wales has left him with contradictory feelings about isolated places. That struggle makes him an engaging guide as
he gets away from it all to address his anxieties about health, and his self-diagnosed failure to live in the moment.
He moves from that scruffy meeting room in Devon to the highend Esalen Institute, once a bastion of California counterculture but today somewhere retreatants are encouraged to get naked physically and emotionally as they are fed faddish health food and a cocktail of ideas taken from world religions.
En route he likes to go from one extreme to another, and to juxtapose them in his chapters. So he heads to an ancient Benedictine monastery in France, the all-male environment of Mount Athos in
Greece, a plush writer’s retreat in New England and to Salford for a spell with Buddhists at the Saraniya Dhamma Meditation Centre.
When he visits the novelist Sara Maitland at her hermit’s cottage in rural Galloway, she dismisses his idea that her life represents any rejection of the world. “I really, really do see no renunciation in choosing a life of silence and prayer if it suits me a f---ing sight better than what had gone before.”
Through his labours Segnit teases out the differences between the faith traditions over what retreat is about and can deliver. He is shrewd, too, on how popular mindfulness-based stress reduction techniques strip out the religious elements of meditation at retreat centres, to become “the religion of no religion”.
With so much first-hand research to pack in, some accounts of his visits are disappointingly brief, reduced to a few paragraphs that left me wanting more, but this is an open-minded, elegantly written and comprehensive attempt to gather together the many threads of the global retreat movement that trades on something Segnit concludes is in humankind’s DNA.
“To disentangle from the social fabric is an impulse as old as the fabric itself,” he writes, adding that this ancient idea could scarcely be better suited to our troubled and troubling times.