You Went to One Retreat. What Did You Expect.

Are men’s retreats worth it? Depends entirely on what you do when you get home.

 

A few weeks ago I drove to meet a guy for lunch.

He lives in another state, but he’s in California for the week. He reached out.

He came on one of our Alchemy of Men Retreats a few years ago.

And here’s what’s cool, he’s still here. Not literally here. But here, as in, he stayed connected. He kept practicing the things. He texts the guys. He shows up in the group chat. He’s been doing the slow, unsexy, deeply unglamorous work of actually applying it, and his life looks different now. Not in a “before and after photo” way. But in the “he’s happier, doing more aligned work, more peaceful, the people around him has noticed” kinda way.

We’re meeting today because of who he’s become since the retreat. Not because of the retreat.

 

Here are a few questions a lot of guys ask me before signing up for a men’s retreat:

“Is this actually worth it?”

“What’s really gonna change?”

“I’ve done other things. They didn’t stick. How is this different?”

These are all fair questions. The kind of questions a man should be asking before he hands over a credit card and a weekend of his life.

And here’s my take:

The retreat isn’t going to change your life. You are.

The retreat is the invitation. Your life is the answer.

If you come, do the work in the room, cry the cries, have the breakthroughs, learn from the experience, and then go home and don’t change a single thing about how you live, your life will, shockingly, look exactly the same in six months.

That’s not a flaw in the retreat. That a gap in you applying what you learned.

 

Here’s what I cannot believe I have to say out loud, but apparently I do:

You cannot go to the gym everyday for a week and be mad your body hasn’t changed.

You went for one week. Maybe you even worked out really hard, and even ate clean for the week. You took a mirror selfie under the good lighting. But after one week you never went back.

Three weeks later you’re saying, “The gym didn’t work.”

The gym worked fine, my friend. You went for one week.

This is the part where men get silly. Because we wouldn’t dream of saying this about the gym out loud, we know exactly how dumb that sounds, but we say the equivalent about retreats, therapy, coaching, men’s work, and personal development constantly. With a straight face. With serious conviction.

Nobody downloads Duolingo on a Monday and is mad they’re not fluent by Friday. Nobody reads one chapter of a book and complains the book “didn’t really do anything.” Nobody goes on one great date and expects to have a thriving twenty-year marriage by Tuesday.

But somehow with retreats, with inner work, we expect the weekend itself to do the heavy lifting. We expect the room to do what only we can do.

It doesn’t work like that. It has never worked like that. It will never work like that.

The room can crack you open. You have to do something with what comes out.

 

In my experience, guys who go to retreats fall into three loose archetypes. At times I have been all three of them. I am not above this. I am writing this from my personal experience but also what I’ve witnessed.

The Vacationer.

He comes for the experience. He’s blown away. He opens up, he cries during the closing circle. He posts the carousel, sunset, fire pit, vague caption about brotherhood. He hugs everyone at the airport. He flies home glowing.

But then, he does nothing.

Not maliciously. Not lazily. He just… slides back into the busy day to day of his life. The texts go unanswered. The practices go undone. The journal he bought sits on the nightstand untouched. Three months later when you ask him about the retreat, his eyes get warm and he says, “Dude. It was amazing.“

His life is identical.

I have been this guy. I went to a Dr. Joe Dispenza meditation retreat, got obliterated, in the best way. I was doing the meditations before the retreat. I was on fire. Came home, did them for about two weeks, swore we’d keep going, and then…

Life. Schedules. Excuses.

I had the tools. I had the experience. I had the room cracked open. I just didn’t keep it up.

The Obsessor.

This guy went the opposite direction.

One retreat became three. Three became eight. He’s done plant medicine in four different countries. He’s sat with seven different shamans, two of whom he refers to by first name. He has more certifications than friends. He has more workshops than weekends.

Ask him to name a modality and he’s done it. Ask him to name a teacher and he’s sat with him. Ask him about integration and his eyes go a little dim.

Ask his wife if anything has actually changed at home.

She will laugh. In a tired way.

He’s chasing the experience because the experience is the thing he understands. The cracking-open is familiar. The staying is foreign. So he keeps booking the next thing, hoping this one will finally take.

I’ve had small versions of this too. The hunger for the next workshop, the next teacher, the next experience, anything but sitting with what I already learned and doing it.

The Practitioner.

This guy doesn’t look that impressive from the outside.

He doesn’t have the carousel. He doesn’t have the certifications. He’s not name-dropping shamans at parties. He’s just… doing the things, day in and day out.

Texting the guys he met. Every week. Not because it’s fun, mostly it isn’t, but because he committed.

Doing the breathwork even when he doesn’t feel like it.

Having the conversation with his wife he’s been avoiding for three years.

Calling his dad.

Mapping out what he learned and actually applying it to his actual Tuesday.

Asking for support, which, by the way, is the hardest one for men. It is the thing we are most trained out of. Reaching out and saying “hey, I’m struggling” is the single most underused tool in men’s work, and the guys who pick it up are the guys whose lives change.

The Practitioner isn’t doing anything flashy. He’s just choosing it, again and again, on the days when nobody’s watching and there’s no closing circle and no sunset and no hug from a spiritual conscious bro with a bun.

That’s the work.

I have been him too, on my best stretches. After certain retreats I came home and stayed in it. Daily. The practices. The check-ins. The honest conversations. And every time I’ve actually done that, my life has moved. Not magically. Just inevitably. Because that’s what consistency does. It just compounds.

 

The guy I’m meeting today has also been all three, but mostly he’s been the Practitioner.

That’s why his life is different. That’s why he flew across the country and reached out to grab coffee on a random Tuesday, because he’s still in it. The retreat isn’t a memory for him. It’s a foundation. A thing he built on, instead of a thing he attended.

And here’s the part that’s going to make some guys uncomfortable:

The retreat isn’t the work. The retreat is the doorway.

What you do on Monday is the work. What you do six weeks later when no one is watching is the work. What you do when it stops being fun is the work. The Tuesday at 2pm when you don’t feel like it and you do it anyway, that is the work.

The Vacationer wants the doorway to be the destination. The Obsessor keeps finding new doorways. The Practitioner walked through one and started building something on the other side.

 

So, is a men’s retreat worth it?

Yes. If you’re willing to do something with it when you get home.

No. If you’re hoping a weekend will do the work for you. It won’t. It can’t. And if anyone tells you it will, run.

The retreat is the invitation. Your life is the answer.

Show up to the room ready to be cracked open. Then go home and stay in it. Text the guys. Keep the practices. Have the conversation. Make the call. Ask for help. Be the guy who came back from one retreat and slowly, quietly, unspectacularly built a life that looks different.

That guy exists.

I’m driving to meet one of him right now.

— Alex