If you’re feeling overwhelmed and burnt out, then it may be time to reap the benefits of retreats. Checking out and taking time for self-care and self-nourishment is important for a healthy personal and professional life. In this episode, Elliot Begoun interviews the founder of She Glows Retreats, Brie Doyle. Brie organizes and hosts retreats, and she talks about self-care and how taking a retreat helped her business and personal life. Take some time to listen and begin your own retreat plans. 

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Listen to the podcast here

Brie Doyle: Preaching The Benefits Of Retreats And Self-Care

Before we start, a founder shout-out. I want to talk about the team at Tia Lupita. Tia Lupita Foods is a revolutionary brand that is making ethnic and good food synonymous and that’s a rarity so people can enjoy the heritage of true good ethnic food and do so, feeling good about the quality of food and the nutritional impact of it. Hector and Amy have taken Tia Lupita, Hector’s mom’s famous hot sauce recipe that has been handed down to Hector, entrusted into his control and made it one of the top-selling hot sauces here in the United States.

They’ve also introduced a line of authentic tortillas made with nopales and also their new grain-free tortilla which is made with Upcycled Renewal Mills’ Okara Flour, which is an upcycled byproduct of the tofu-making process. They also have a great line of nopales and corn tortilla chips that featured the same flavors as the hot sauces. Mostly, it’s a brand that’s trying to show up in the right way, be there for the next generation of Latinx consumer and be there in a way that feeds them, both their heritage and great nutrition. It’s the kind of founders and business that we all should be supporting in this industry. Check out Tia Lupita Foods online, Sprouts, Whole Foods or any other natural channel that you sell on.

I want to introduce Brie and tell you a little bit about her background and story. Before I do tip it over to her, I’ve been looking forward to this episode for a while. As many of you who read my stuff regularly, you know that one of the drums that I’ve beating of light is the importance of prioritizing self-care. In this craziness and environment especially now where we’ve been almost in constant fight-or-flight mode, nourishing yourself is as important as the products that you’re building to nourish others. I want to encourage you all to read deeply to what Brie has to share and maybe walk away from this episode with the intent to do something for yourself whether that is to go on a retreat which is what we’ll talk about to create your own or instill a little bit more mindfulness or self-nourishment in your daily routine. With that, I’m going to turn it over to Brie to introduce herself and then we’ll get going.

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Brie, thanks for joining me.

Thanks so much for having me, Elliot. I’m Brie Doyle and I’m the Founder of She Glows Retreats. I host transformational retreats all over the world and US. I’m also the author of the book You Should Leave Now: Going on Retreat to Find Your Way Back to Yourself. I’m a mom. I have three kids. I live in Boulder, Colorado. This is my life work. I’m super excited to talk about it with you.

We’re super excited to have you. I’m going to take a host prerogative and ask my own question first. How did you discover the importance of retreats? Where did that all come from for you?

I was raised religious in the Catholic religion. My mom was our CCD teacher. She told us about how Catholic nuns would go live in solitude to focus on their inner life. That always spoke to me but I liked boys a little bit too much to become a nun. That didn’t work out. Later, when I studied abroad in college, I met a Buddhist meditation teacher in Nepal and would go to his sessions. I felt like speaking to him, I was blown away by the power of meditation and retreat. I became invested in Buddhism at a young age and took refuge. Part of the Buddhist practice is to do regular retreats. That was my deep dive into the practice of retreat. I did that for lots of years and then I had kids and things shift. When you have kids, it’s harder to pull away.

How I got back into retreating was that I was in a tough spot in my life. I had my third kid. I left my career as a teacher and I was struggling. I felt low energy, depressed and sad all the time. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. I remembered back to when I was younger. I was like, “I need to go on a retreat and pull away.” It was my pain that led me to retreat. What I realized when I was on retreat is not that there was something wrong with me. It’s just that I had been hemorrhaging all my energy on everyone around me. I needed more of myself. I came back from that retreat and I was like, “I know I’m not the only one who feels like this.” It was my pain that led me into retreating as a necessary tool and practice.

As a busy mom of three, how did you give yourself permission to do that, pick up, go on retreat and check out?

It’s hard because there’s a lot of guilt especially societally too. When I said I’m going on a retreat, people will be like, “That must be nice.” There’s this feeling of how entitled and selfish you might be to do this kind of thing. I was a bit nervous to have kids. I was a freedom-seeking independent gal. I was worried that once we had kids, I would lose all my freedoms and liberties. We made this pact when we first had our first kid that each of us would go on a retreat once a year. No matter what people said or thought, we were going to take space even if it was only for a weekend because we felt like in order to be the best parents, lovers or professionals, we had to take care of ourselves first. We have an ethos in our relationship where that’s acceptable. I would come home and people would be like, “Was your husband okay with that?” It takes some prepping.

I am somebody who has done retreats more than a few times. It’s the same conversation with my wife especially when our kids were younger. It took us longer to recognize that but this recognition that generosity requires some selfishness. In other words, to be able to give, you have to receive, nourish and re-energize. If your goal is to be a great giver, be generous or make a difference then the first place to start that process is to prioritize you so that you can do that because if you don’t, you’ll eventually hammer all your energy and you’re going to see diminishing returns. That was an epiphany. It was a tough thing to accept and the guilt was still there but very true.

Our culture doesn’t support this. Part of my mission is to change that conversation that parents should leave for a little bit. Partners don’t have to be together in every waking moment. You’re not the same person. You’re better if you have little space. Intimacy goes up when you come home from your retreat because you want each other again. It’s important not just as parents but also for intimate partnerships and careers. It spans all categories in our life.

Those reading, I can hear them already in my inner voice saying, “I don’t have time for this. I’m a busy entrepreneur. This sounds a little bit woo-woo. I don’t get it.” What would you say to that narrative?

This is an important narrative because a lot of my clients are people who have high-power jobs. A lot of people who come to my retreats are busy people who want to drop into a schedule and pull away in an organized fashion that they don’t have to drive. If productivity and creativity are what drive you, this is critical. For you to access your full creative potential and power, you have to step back. You can’t be driving all the time. It’s the interplay between masculine and feminine energy, push and pull or receiving and giving. You can’t be one thing all the time because you’ll completely burn yourself out as you alluded to.

There’s some data that I talked about in my book. There’s a gentleman named Graham Wallas. He was the first person to put a creative trajectory on the map, like what it takes to have a creative output. He said there are four stages for creativity to bring something to life. The first stage is preparation. You’re preparing and gathering all different ideas. The next one is incubation. That’s where you’re sitting with the ideas. You’re not thinking about them per se but you’re sitting with them.

The next one is illumination. This is where the a-ha moments come from. This is like a sudden insight or burst of new ideas. The final stage is verification, which is where you test your new creative idea into the world. My belief is that we don’t have any time for incubation. We don’t just sit and be and allow something and ourselves to marinate. Forget the ideas and allow ourselves to relax. If we’re going to access that full creative power, we have to step away. It might not seem like it but truly it’s a discipline.

I get it is the way this started. How is this going to help my business?

I want to link it back to the creative power. What you bring to your business has everything to do with who you are as a person. I can completely relate. I’m an entrepreneur myself. My business started with one retreat a year and that was manageable. Now, it scaled and I have multiple retreats a year and kids also. I’m also trying to juggle these same things but I know that frenzied energy and pace that I tend to live my day-to-day life in because I’m trying to manage so much can exhaust me. I’ll burn out way quicker. I have to reboot. It’s a way to reboot and recharge. You know that if you bring yourself to your business feeling healthy, in shape, strong, energetic and full of new ideas, this has implications on your business. It’s hard because for some people it’s not so tangible right away but the outputs become tangible as a result of the practice. It’s an intangible practice and discipline that shows you tangible results.

That’s always hard when you have a quantifier’s mind because you want to be able to check it off a list or put an ROI to it. It doesn’t always show itself right away. Here’s another question. I’ll let you answer this first but then I’ll share my answer. What has been one of your biggest takeaway surprises about yourself that you’ve learned on a retreat?

I’m an achiever and a doer. I bring that energy to my retreats and I always hit a wall because retreating is like the meeting of that nervous and frantic energy with complete steadiness, calm and quiet. Even though I know all the science, have written a book and know the data, I still come in every time with that same buzzy energy. Even though I know on an intellect level, I still have to do the practice because it has to be experienced somatically in my body as well for there to be a real shift. The biggest learning is that no matter how many times I do it, I still need it.

For me, it was about the difference between the narrative and reality. I’ll explain the story. The first retreat I went on was a ten-day silent Zen Buddhist retreat. I sat next to the same guy for ten days, hours upon hours, never having spoken to him one time. Sitting next to him by day three, the way he sat and was breathing annoyed the shit out of me. He was driving me crazy. By day eight, I hated this guy. Every story in my head was, “This guy was a jerk.” The retreat ended. We came together and had a conversation. It turns out he is one of the most delightful guys I’ve ever met. We’re still friends to this day. It was amazing to me to recognize how much our narrative and self-story create a false reality.

I walked away from that recognizing how to take myself a whole lot less seriously. More than likely, a lot of what I was putting energy into was just a story and not real. That’s the fun thing about doing things like this. I say this a lot. I’m a student and one of the things I say is, “My favorite place to go on vacation is inside my own head. I love to go there and watch.” Most of the time, we spend all of our days in the midst of the rapids in the river. When you go and sit, what you’re doing is climbing to the shore and watching the river go by. It’s a very different feeling. It’s important that you learn a lot about yourself and the reactivity of yourself.

I talked about this in my book too. I call it hitting the wall. Your story is a perfect example of hitting the wall. Every time, no matter how many times you retreat, you’re going to hit a wall. What’s so great is whatever the internal challenge is, it’s showing you it externally. The challenge is like, “Do you get taken down by your wall? Do you pull out of the retreat? Do you run away and start talking about this annoying guy and his breathing? Do you stay in it?” There are gifts on the other side as you alluded to of sticking with your wall but it’s hard because we’re used to running from them. We start to feel uncomfortable and blame it on something external. It’s always internal. That’s the beauty of retreat. You see like, “What am I working on here in myself?” It comes about it. It doesn’t always feel good and pretty but you come away with great learning as a result of it.

Sometimes it’s painful and uncomfortable but there’s always growth. Here’s another question. This one was given where we are. It’s not that we’re fully emerged but between COVID, the election and the challenges we’ve had societally, we’ve been in this terrible fight-or-flight state. Many of us have and there are a lot of people. This person here is admitting that they are feeling very run down and burnt but yet are fearful of extracting themselves from what has already been tough and making this time. What advice can you offer them?

First, thanks for your honesty and you’re certainly not alone. You’re representing so much of the country. I honor that. Our nervous systems, all of us, as a result of all of these stressors, our external traumas are peppered up. We’re living in fight-or-flight. That’s stressful on the body. The benefit of pulling away from the retreat is that one of the things that I talked about a lot in my book is reconnecting with your basic needs. To me, one of the very first things that happen when you go on a retreat when you pull away is to allow yourself to sleep as much as you need to sleep.

You’ve carved out this time. Whether it’s a weekend or if you’re lucky to have a week or even a night, allow yourself to take care of those basic needs, like sleeping enough, eating nourishing food, going outside, putting your face in the sun and your feet on the dirt or spending time in nature. They are so simple and yet we have fallen out of practice with a lot of these. That’s why we’re peppered up is because we’re dialed on all of our Zoom calls. We’re constantly online. The way back to starting to feel that strength and power in yourself is to realign the nervous system first. That’s what happens on retreat. It might feel like a luxurious idea but it’s an essential way to come back to feeling like you’re stable and steady.

I love this next. It’s more of a statement than a question. I love this because you have a unique perspective on it. The statement is, “If I told my investors that I was willing to check out to go on retreat, they would freak.”

My thoughts are if we’re going to be leaders in the world, we have to model true and livable healthy behavior. A lot of what’s normalized in our society is toxic. A lot of the foods we eat, behaviors we have and the expectations of our workplaces are completely toxic. The vacation policy here in America is way different than in Europe and even then we could use more. Nevertheless, my point is if we’re going to be leaders, we have to start to model this work. They don’t have to know the ins and outs of everything you do but once you start to have this practice and do it regularly. I suggest at least once a year put a retreat on your calendar.

You don’t talk yourself out of it. You just have an agreement with yourself like, “Every year, I go for a weekend.” If your investors are concerned, maybe you start with a weekend so it’s reasonable and they don’t have any say anyway. You can grow it over time because you’ll see the benefits of even a weekend. My feeling is that a week gives you so much more but that’s not possible for all people. You can craft it in any way you want. It’s essential to form a new leadership, one that’s a little more balanced and sane than this toxic normalized pace that we’re living.

Investors in this space, ultimately, they’re investing in you. If you’re investing in you then you’re doing what they need you to do, which is taking the time to make sure that you’re cultivating and bringing the best version of yourself forward. I would be honest with that investor. I’ve had 3 or 4 phone calls. All of them have been with founders who quite frankly were either in tears or near tears. “I know that many of you listen to this are exhausted and worn down. You’re giving, trying to make things happen, hit milestones and move things forward. That is already a state of depletion. You’re not going to be able to accomplish what you’re wanting to accomplish if you don’t replenish and take care of yourselves.” I say this like, “I know what the hell I’m talking about. Trust me. I had reprioritized it myself.”

Fred Hart with Interact in a passing comment in one of our group conversations right after Expo West was canceled at the beginning of the outbreak of the COVID pandemic and he said, “We can’t let a crisis go to waste.” To me, that was the wake-up call I needed to go, “I’ve pushed myself self-care aside.” I’ve been able to dismiss it and say, “I need to be here. I need to do this. I need to make this happen. I can’t afford this time.” I looked up in the mirror and I was the heaviest and most stressed I had been in a long time. I was not eating well. I was drinking more than I should. All of the wrong things that I dismissed as busyness but what it really is was trying to find other coping mechanisms to what was a much better priority if I prioritized self-care. It has been a journey for me to reprioritize but it has also been one that has re-energized me and brought me back to being able to be what I hope is a better version of myself.

If your investors don’t understand that then you’ve got the wrong investors because at the end of the day, they need to give you that latitude to make the smart choices with how you allocate your time. If part of that allocation is in replenishing what you need in order to be the best version of you then that’s a good use of time. I’m happy to have a chat with any of your investors to tell them that. I can’t wait to dig into your book and thank you for sending me a copy. As we are preparing to leave, how do you recommend if somebody is going to do this that they set themselves up to have not only a good experience but a good experience in leaving?

There are two main pathways you can go with retreating. You can either join an organized retreat or go it alone. I walked through my book. I have a little checklist that you can test like, “What do I need?” It might be different every time. At one time, you might need to go by yourself. At another time, it might be nice to have some fresh stimulation ideas and do it with a group. Figuring out that at first like, “Am I going to do this by myself? Am I going to go stay in a cabin in the woods? Am I going to join an organized program and do a ten-day Vipassana retreat?” Answering that question first is important and figuring out what your intention is like, “Why do I need this now?

Sometimes we use retreating as a tool for healing or inspiration. Retreating can be fun. It depends on what’s your intention right now. It’s getting clear about what that is. My book walks you through how to do that. Once you have that then you can decide which path to go, an organized group or go by yourself and then having a conversation with important people in your life. I suggest and say this specifically to women but I’m sure for men too, not asking permission but from a loving space, saying, “I’m going to do this. I need this. I appreciate your support.” When we start to ask permission, there are a lot of reasons or people who have a lot of questions.

We’re already having questions ourselves. There might be guilt involved if you have kids or an investor that’s barking down your back. When we ask permission then we welcome their opinions. This is taking a firm stance for yourself and being the leader that you want to be in yourself. Not asking permission is something that I say as well. There are all kinds of logistical preparation. Those are the bigger internal questions to ask yourself before and the actions to take with the important partnerships in your life as well.

Here’s a cool question. What should I expect from a retreat or on a retreat?

This is another thing I have. The third section of my book is called the Internal, Emotional and Energetic Trajectory as Retreat. I recorded this for many years of taking retreats. I would write in my journal what happens to me while I was on retreat. Psychology is my background so I’m obsessed with thinking about the mind and how it works. I have years of journals of what it felt like to be on retreat. What I noticed is that I hit the same stages every time on every retreat no matter where I am. Even if it’s a different retreat, an organized one or a solo one, I go through the same stages while I’m on retreat.

What you can expect is you’ll arrive and be excited. You’re doing this and finally here. I should say even before that. You make the decision to go on a retreat. There might be some regret, fear or trepidation. I’ve had people leading up to retreats. I’ve had women break their fingers or men have a huge issue at work. All of these are tests like, “How committed are you to going on this retreat of yours?” You will probably face some pushback from yourself or an external source before you go on retreat. Prepare for that. That’s a stage of retreats. When you get there, you’ll feel excited and elated. I call it a false summit because you’re bringing this energy from home. It’s a buzzy and achieving energy. You’re feeling excited because it’s a new setting.

Immediately after that, you’ll hit a wall because you’ll be met with like, “These people are stinky. I hate this instructor. My bed at home is so much softer.” Whatever it is will show itself to you. There’s a whole trajectory. What happens after you hit that wall is then the trajectory starts to go up because you start to open. Your energy starts to calm down a little bit and become more consistent. I talked a lot about the brainwave states in my book that we live from the beta-brainwave state, which is erratic, fast-paced and inconsistent. We get into these deeper and more fluid patterns in our brainwaves and that influences our energy levels as well. The intention is you go home with a calmer sense of energy and much more capacity by the end.

I can tell it from my experience. Those first few days can be tough because you resist, at least I did. Many of the people I’ve spoken with resist letting go of the busyness and frenetic pace of life because it seems unsteady and unfamiliar. Once you work your way through that and you flatten out and things slow down then it’s almost blissful and then the opposite happens. It seems counterintuitive but time seems to go faster. Let’s say on 7 to 10 days, the first 2 days feel like 2 months and the remainder feels like hours because you’re much more content.

There’s no better way to get to know yourself. I would love to get your take on this. We spend an inordinate amount of our time trying to avoid getting to know ourselves because we’re afraid maybe of what we’ll find out or learn in the retreat setting. There’s no avoiding that. You’re going to get to know yourself, the good, bad and ugly. You’ll find all three I promise. The data in your research, do we try to obfuscate the inner knowing?

I love how you framed that. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms but I certainly see that. There’s pain and pleasure. We continue to move towards pleasure and avoid pain but there are lessons in pain. Not all pain is horrifying, dark and dangerous pain. There is some pain that only by going through it, you come to this next evolution of yourself. If we’re committed to growth, that’s how we evolve as people is to go into those dark spots and be there. We’ve spoken about this. This doesn’t feel always good but it’s critical because that’s how we continue to evolve our state of consciousness and what we have to share with other people.

The world is set up to be a constant barrage of the next seduction after the other. Whether it’s something on your phone, a new relationship or a new business idea, we’re onto the next. It’s like this Hungry Ghost. It’s insatiable like you eat and fill in this consumerist way of living. When we don’t stop and interrupt the pattern that has so much information for us. That’s what retreating is all about. You break away from your daily life and drop yourself into a new environment. There are many interrupts. You’re being rubbed in so many different ways. You’re seeing all the proliferation of the inner strife. It’s showing you yourself and how you clean that up. How you allow for the lightness of being is by going to those dark spots and sitting there. It sounds hard but it’s worth it.

You referenced the metaphor of the Hungry Ghost, which is one of my favorites in Buddhism. For those reading, if you can envision this creature with this large belly and a tiny mouth and they have this insatiable hunger that they can’t ever fill. It’s what many of us face. There are two questions here I’m going to pull together because they’re similar but nuanced. The first one is it sounds like you and your husband have a great understanding. What if my partner doesn’t get it? How do I explain to him or her that I’m going to go on retreat? The second question which is similar is how do I tell my team that I’m going to check out for a while?

I go back to what we spoke about. If we’re going to be leaders, we have to be path pavers and risk-takers. We have to model the behavior that we believe is important to see in the world. This can be hard at first in a relationship for sure because it feels like, “That’s not fair. What am I supposed to do? Watch the kids and you get to go do this thing?” The beauty of having this kind of conversation and relationship is that your relationship expands. Our relationship is an organism constantly changing. It can either stay the same all the time and we fizzle out but we’re constantly changing individuals. We need to shift and allow for changes, too. If you do this for yourself then you can allow your partners to do their own kind of retreat or whatever it is they might want to do for themselves. It’s a beautiful and healthy way to have a relationship.

I would say the same thing for a team in business or whatever line of work you’re in. Modeling this allows other people to say, “That’s interesting. I wonder.” Maybe at first, they judge it like, “That seems too out there.” Over time, they see the benefits after you come back. That’s where this all comes together is when people see you come back. I find that every time I come back from a retreat, people are drawn to me because I’ve taken care of myself. I’m lighter in my interactions. I feel better and cleaner. There are many shifts that happen on a subtle level that people see the results. People will ask me like, “Are you using a different shampoo? Have you stopped eating gluten?” All these things that are so external and I’m like, “It’s not that.” People see the shifts but it takes a bit of risk to have the first conversation or put this in place and be the first one.

I talked about that in my book, too. It is a risk and it’s important that we start to take these risks. If we don’t start to take charge then we’ll continue to live with our heads down. Like you were saying, Elliot, all of us can relate to what you’re saying. We lose touch with ourselves. We lose track of our weight, health and spirit. This is a proactive, mental and emotional practice. All we hear about mental health is the horrifying statistics. “1 in 4 adults has a diagnosable mental health disease. 10.3 million adults have suicidal thoughts.” This is all we hear about mental health. We don’t hear anything about how to be proactive. We hear about all the pills you can take and all the things you can do for your mental health problems. We don’t hear like, “What are proactive ways to deal?” This is a proactive way and tool that I want to put on the map for people to use.

I’ll chime in with two things here. One, from a spouse standpoint. My practice is different than my wife’s. I’m a Buddhist. I have been for not all of our marriage but for probably half of our 30-plus years of marriage. The first time I wanted to go on retreat was something I was afraid to broach. “We have young kids and I want to go disappear for ten days.” The two things I said are, “I need to go nourish me so I can come back and be a better me for you and the kids. I want you to do the same in whatever way you want to. Whatever that means for you, it can be whatever.” It was an easy conversation and not a problem. She was thrilled to get rid of me for ten days. The kids had a great time without me. They’ve been encouraging me to do 100-day retreats ever since.

In terms of a team, it is harder for me. It’s not so much for the team. Even for the brands that we serve in our community, I still struggle with taking time for myself because I don’t want to let them down, feel that I’m not available and feel like I’m not prioritizing them. Fortunately, the people that work in our community are constantly reminding me and each other to get over that. “We need you to be taking care of yourself. We want to take care of ourselves.” Part of that too is a good way to assess whether you are surrounding yourself on your team or community with the supportive people that you should be surrounding yourself with.

It’s a good check and balance because if you can’t go to the people that you are working and collaborating with and trying to build a strong, mutually beneficial professional relationship and saying, “I need to nourish myself, take a little time for myself and get my shit together,” and not have any fear of reprisal or pushback then you have to question whether those are the right people. Bobby has a question here. “Does taking care of ourselves mentally and physically have to go hand in hand? How do you address taking care of yourself physically day-to-day? Retreat addresses mental health seems like running twice a year and thinking you are staying physically fit.”

Every retreat is so different. There are passenger retreats, meditation retreats and yoga retreats. They’re all kinds of different retreats that have different focal points. If you’re joining an organized program, it’s worth looking into like, “What all do they offer? What do I need?” Some people have a strong physical practice. I live in Boulder, Colorado. I’m surrounded by athletes and people who are very physically inclined here. Mental and emotional wellness are lower on the rung than physical health but that’s different in different places. You have to assess what a program might have for you. If you build it in yourself, movement is essential. Emotion and movement are tied together. Every one of my retreats has movement. We have dance and all different somatic healing and moving. You have to assess what you need and if that’s it then you have to figure that out.

I’ll add a few more. We’re talking about retreat which is mental and spiritual and the physical need for physical well-being but that comes with physical movement and nutrition. To me, you have to have a practice around all three. The physical side sometimes gets done more routinely because you can get it done. You can fit a 45-minute run into a busy schedule. It’s also important and you talked a little bit about this in your book. You and I talked about it first. A retreat doesn’t always have to be 7 or 10 days and be organized with a group. You could create your own retreats to start. Talk about that a little bit too because maybe it is a big leap to say, “I can’t check out for this long but I can create a monthly one-day retreat where I would go find someplace to sit and be.”

You can do a retreat anywhere. You can stay in a room in the city, a cabin in the woods or a tent. Where you retreat is not so important. Joining an organized group is not necessary. I spelled out the nine elements of retreat in my book because there are certain things that need to be included in every retreat where it’s really a retreat and not just a friend’s weekend away or a trip with family. I know people will say, “I don’t need a retreat. I went on vacation with my family.” That’s a different experience. This is a separate thing entirely. You can’t do it in any way. As long as you follow some basic precepts, you can do it anywhere in any way on any budget. It can be one day, a weekend day or a full week. It’s flexible and adjustable to who you are and what you need at that time.

I also want to give him props for asking a question and being able to also intertwine a shameless plug for his business simultaneously. That is true entrepreneurialism. Congratulations. Last, West with Snooze. His question is what do you encourage and tell your retreaters about sleep? We have a sleep drink business and I was curious how you explain the importance of sleep, rest and relaxation.

One of the nine elements is to reconnect with basic needs. One of the first things that I tell participants to do on retreat is to focus on the things that you need on a body-level first. Sleeping as much as you need to sleep, first and foremost. Rebuilding what we deplete on a regular basis here back home first. Sleep is critical. I’ll have people who come and there will be a yoga class in the morning. If you’re sleep-deprived I’m like, “Do not show up to yoga.” Basic needs first so eating nourishing food and all of those things that we spoke about a bit but sleep is critical.

The retreat is the place where you rebuild that. We have off-time during the day for my retreats as well. Some people go back and take naps. Resting is critical. On my longer retreat that I offer, I have one full day of silence. That’s an important piece of this is total silence and no input from other people outside. I know you said you’ve done the Vipassana retreat, which is silence the whole way through. Silence has a lot to offer us, too. We have to allow ourselves to sleep, be silent and do these things. They’re critical components in retreat.

The last question and this one is mine. What was it like trying to put all of this experience into a book? How did you weave it into something that can help people understand what is a very deeply personal process and something that isn’t the easiest thing to articulate?

I’m a writer. Even though I run a business now, I identify more as a creative type. I’ve been writing for much longer. My view of the world is always through words and writing. I’m studying, too. I’m a student and researcher. For years, I kept notes in my journal about what would happen on retreats. It was on a retreat that this complete download of how the book would be structured came to me. I was furiously writing in my journal all the ideas.

Also, now that I’ve led retreats for so many years and also done them myself, I have a lot of practice and experience witnessing people go through a transformation, understanding what it takes and what really happens. I could pull from stories and I had a lot to pull from. It was a spiritual experience in itself. I got my book deal and then I started writing right when COVID hits. All three of my kids were home from school and I was like, “This could not have come at the worst time.” Thankfully, we worked it out. I got up early but it was a challenge. I’m so grateful to be on the other side of it and super delighted to get to share it with the world.

How would people learn more about you and the book?

I have a website, BrieDoyle.com. From there, you can get my book and learn about the retreats that are on there. I’m in the process of creating a self-retreat kit so people who want to go by themselves can take this information. It’s like a principal manual. It’s everything that you would need to do your own retreat. That’s coming. My website is a great springboard. I’m most active on Instagram @WellBeingByBrie.

For those reading, Brie is planning up to send me an advanced copy which I’ve not had a chance yet to read but I’m excited to read it. If anyone reading wants to read with me, maybe we’ll do a little informal book club around it and have some conversations especially those of you in our community. We can do it in the online community. Thanks so much for doing this with me. I’ll ask you one last thing and that’s to share with those reading to give them some encouragement if you would prioritize their own self-nourishment and self-care. What parting words would you like them to take away from this?

The people who other people think we are selfishly leaving for are the very people for whom you’re retreating. The people that you’re so nervous to pull away from, your work, family or spouse, that’s who you’re doing this for. This is an act of servants. My intention is to flip the script on how we take care of ourselves because you’ll start to see the results. When you take care of yourself, you have so much more to offer to other people and your business. Please, in the name of other people, if it’s not going to be yourself then do it in the name of other people.

Thanks for joining. Please share this episode with others who would benefit from it because the message is super important. Brie, thank you very much. Take care.

Important links

• Tia Lupita Foods

• She Glows Retreats

• You Should Leave Now: Going on Retreat to Find Your Way Back to Yourself

• BrieDoyle.com

• @WellBeingByBrie – Instagram

About Brie Doyle

I host Transformational Wellness Retreats, am a Breakthrough Coach, and Writer. My company offers transformational retreats in sacred places. We curate framework for reflection and self-awakening through various modalities including but not limited to personal growth curriculum, yoga, meditation, cultural immersion, reading, writing, cleanses, ritual, and movement.

As a writer, my passion is contemporary novels. I write both YA and adult. I also run an active blog (www.briedoyle.com/blog) and write articles for conscious companies, parenting websites and humor columns.

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