The Woman's Retreat Book

I cherish my time alone. As a homeschooling mother, it's hard to come by much solitude, but when I do, I want it to be time well spent. This book is an excellent guide to making the most of any amount of time: an hour, a day, a week, or more. From preparation, to packing ideas, to plans for your time, this book is full of useful, inspirational, and exciting ideas for the woman (or man!) who craves a retreat from the busyness of life. I plan to refer to it as often as I get away from home.

We are a manic 24/7 society and Louden is a goddess for telling us to relax. Relax, relax, relax! If you need a retreat, here is a way to begin brining it into your life in baby steps.

Bravo! I applaud this author's message to women everywhere. It's time for us to learn to say "no" and take the time to fill ourselves back up again without feeling guilty. So many times I have asked a fellow mother or career woman, "How are you?" and the typical response is, "I'm so tired...I have 100 things to do..." And you know the rest of the laundry list they spout. For once I would love to hear one of them say, "You know what? I feel great! I just took a nap, or I read a novel I've been meaning to finish, or I'm going home to soak in the tub." Perhaps if more women would receive Jennifer Louden's books as gift they would begin to see how they can make this time for themselves no matter what kind of life they are living. Thank you Jennifer for spreading the word. I'm going out for a walk now for no other reason except to see how many more trees have changed their color this weekend.

I appreciate the thoroughness of this book, as well as its outline structure. Each chapter addresses various aspects of the retreat, breaking down the how, where, why, what, etc. in an understandable and useful way. Even more importantly, each chapter stands on its own, and you can skip around, looking for specific answers, or read the whole way through, while still gleaning the essence of the book. I am reading the book all the way thru, in order, yet have already been able to do a retreat that was useful even though I haven't gotten to the end. This aids the process of retreating, since it takes the pressure off the retreatant, and doesn't create added pressure that would dissuade one to retreat in the first place. An undaunting, very informative book.

Lively and personal, The Women's Retreat Book is challenging, inspirational and above all full of practical ideas for retreating with and to ourselves. The book is definitely not a glib self-help manual on "how to retreat and heal your life in five easy steps." Louden's concept of retreat is different from th historical one of separating oneself from life, going off with a guru to pursue some artistic or spiritual quest. Instead her book focuses on short, inexpensive withdrawls from daily life. What makes a mini-retreat--many she suggests are less than half a day--restorative she says is not where or for how long but rather the quality of the time out/time away. Louden's book is full of encouragement, humor, reality, perspective. The book is full of creative suggestions, nitty gritty lists("Good Supplies to Have on Hand"), many personal examples from her life as well as those of many other women. A delightful and valuable back-of-the-book bonus is a series of resource guides to recent films, books, audio, video and music tapes that could be used in retreat. Although I eventually read all of the book, I don't think it is meant to be read straight through as a text. Rather it is a framework, a transition into the reader's being in retreat. I made many annotations and personal references in the margins and the book which I go to over and over now becomes a kind of collaboration. I would think that Jennifer Louden would feel the book had achieved its purpose. I've made it mine and it becomes part of my retreats.