The Urban Retreat Diary
On November 21, at the beginning of your Urban Retreat, we suggest you take the time to reflect on what you specifically want to practice during the coming week. What supportive conditions do you want to set up? What practices do you want to do?
It really helps to make these aims as concrete as possible, and to write them down. Writing your practice aspirations down is an important ingredient of the event, and will help you implement your intentions.
You can use this template to keep a record of each day’s practice, appropriate to what you are going to do that day. You don't have to fill in every box for every day. At the end of the week, It can be really helpful to reflect on what you did each day in order to see what lessons you can learn for the future.
You may start off by writing too many commitments down on the first day of the retreat – don't worry, it is absolutely OK to change the diary during the week. One reason why we are doing this retreat is to learn about how to bring our practice into our lives in a realistic and kindly way – and part of that learning process is to be flexible.
Of course, it is definitely not helpful to feel as if you have somehow "failed", even if you set expectations you couldn’t fulfil. So it might be good at the end of each day to reflect on how the day went, write down something in that day’s diary, and look at the next day’s diary, adjusting in whatever way seems appropriate.
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