Just This: The Art of Taking Yourself on Retreat
Tempted to escape to Tuscany to write and write and write? Yeah, us, too.
Did we mention the organic food and wine? Which is why we’re hosting the Stories + Songs Writing Retreat at a 13th century villa.
But first, a meditation that will help you master the true art of retreat—without leaving home.
This week, writers and songwriters will arrive at Spannocchia, a 13th century villa in the Tuscany region of Italy, for the Stories + Songs Writing Retreat. It will be lush. It will be calm. It will be inspiring. And we will write.
I’m putting this on with novelist/lyricist Karen Leslie Mills and Grammy-nominated songwriter Clay Mills. My talks are about:
Great Beginnings. How to Make a Contract with the Reader.
How to start close in. How to seed your story with momentum.
Italian Food As Muse: Arousing Your Senses, Awakening Your Stories.
Our stories about food are intricately entwined with the narrative of our lives, what we hunger for, what we dream of.
From Song to Story to Screen to Stage: How to Be a Literary Alchemist.
Where does inspiration start, where does it go and how does it find its form? It may be a story, a song, a screenplay or a stage play. Inspiration begins anywhere. And it can go everywhere.
How to Write Hot Scenes.
Hot scenes are scenes with white-hot clarity that move the story by leaps and bounds. In this talk, I’ll give nine ways to make your story unstoppable.
If writing in an inspiring place, surrounded by fresh, organic Italian food and wine, with no one to trouble you or distract you sounds like bliss—it is!
If this is how you define retreat, then do two things right now!
1. Join our mailing list.
http://www.storiesandsongsretreat.com/
Or: https://www.carolynflynn.com/contact-me/
We’re planning Stories + Songs Writing Retreats for storytellers and songwriters in Ireland for June 2027 and Santa Fe in November 2027.
Each will have a different theme and shore you up with different skills and craft. Ireland will be immersion (finish your book! finish your songs!) in the mythic landscape of Ireland on the Wild Atlantic Way. Santa Fe will offer practical ways to set yourself up for success, all while steeped in the art, history and tricultural influences of The City Different.
2. Create your own retreat with the Just This meditation practice. The following meditation will be the first set of writing prompts our writers and songwriters receive upon arriving to the 13th century villa in Tuscany. You can adapt this to suit wherever you are in the world.
The ‘Just This’ Meditation: How to Settle into a Vibrant Writing Session
This meditation, adapted from Father Richard Rohr’s book, Just This, speaks to the inner work that prepares you to tuck yourself away and give attention to your deepest reflections. Which are the foundation of writing that’s startling and original.
We have learned through the years, as retreat leaders, that we must do more than offer the invitation to write in such a beautiful space.
First, we find the space and prepare the space.
And foremost, we prepare our writers.
Travel awakens your mind so that you are more fertile and imaginative. You are encountering new face and tasting new foods. Have you noticed, though, even if you’re committed to escaping, you have carried along your old thoughts and modes, such as the habit of distraction. You can take a plane, train or automobile, but your mind can feel just as full of chatter as it did when you departed.
So, we start here, with Just This.
We include it in our welcome packets, which I call Enter the Day Writing practices, because we find that writers and songwriters are most productive when they cultivate the calm, fertile and unflinchingly honest mind.
When they consciously release what was and be in what is.
When they leave behind the there and settle into the here.
This is our way of softening our writers and songwriters into the retreat so they are more welcoming—and more prepared to act on their intentions and goals for their writing while they are here.
It’s not something you need to corral or label or explain.
It’s just this.
Garden in the courtyard, Spannocchia, Italy [PHOTO BY CAROLYN FLYNN]
THE ‘JUST THIS’ MEDITATION
Take a stroll and settle into a place.
Choose a place that is familiar to you but you don’t often let yourself pause and notice.
Or choose a place that is fresh to you and let yourself soak it up.
We begin as we always begin, with the sensory experience of this place. Once you find a quiet place where you can settle in, move into a relaxed posture, legs uncrossed, shoulders down from your ears, heart open.
You may want to settle your eyes with a soft gaze on what’s before you. Or you may want to close your eyes.
Take one breath deeper than the one before.
Take one breath deeper than the one before that.
Take one breath deeper than the one before that.
Say, whisper or speak with your inner voice: I am here, I am here.
Note one thing you hear.
Note one thing you taste.
Note one thing you smell.
Note one thing you see.
Note one thing that you touch (or is touching you).
The magic of this meditation is that it is true and beautiful everywhere.
The Just This meditation is about awe, and surrendering to it. It’s about a new kind of seeing that is more than looking because it includes recognition, greeting, welcoming. It includes appreciation. And it includes invitation or belonging.
In Just This by Father Richard Rohr, he writes that to begin to see with new eyes, “we must observe—and usually be humiliated by—the habitable way we encounter each and every moment.”
To escape—to cultivate the art of retreat—to revere your beautiful writer mind that creates things—we must look at, truly look at, how we are meeting the world. And realize that’s the way we’re meeting it most of the time. Oops, we didn’t mean to be doing that…
Over time, the Just This practice trains your brain (there is neurological evidence of this) to greet the world the way we want to greet the world. (Right now, many of us feel the world is kidnapping our brains…)
To practice just being here now, we are allowing the moment to teach us. To do this, we must about ourselves to be slightly stunned by it. This is the magical, natural unfolding of travel. It draws us into the moment. All we need is one single moment of gratuitous awe to begin.
Take about 10 minutes to write about your arrival here—your here, your now. What brings you alive? What stunned you?
Stories + Songs Writer Refuge
We offer free monthly online writing sessions on the last Monday of the month. We call them pristine writing time—when we just write. After we write for 50 minutes, we share for 15 minutes.
You’re welcome to join the next one. And let it feel like a mini-retreat from the world.
5 p.m. MT/7 p.m. ET Monday, June 29
Start Your Author Journey Now!
Do you have an idea for a book that won’t let you go? Have you been jotting down ideas and writing scenes for years?
Want to get clear on which book to write first?
Do you sometimes think, ‘If I could only find a structure for this, I could finish it?’
Or, do you have an outline that’s alive with possibility, and you mostly know where you’re going with your book. You have a road map, and you’ve got enough chapters drafted that you know your signature voice.
Now it’s time to start cranking out chapter drafts.
Or, do you have a full manuscript and you need an editor who can provide a developmental edit -- the most crucial edit in the process. This is the edit that dials in your vision for the book and captures the compelling reasons your book needs to exist in the world. This is the edit that aligns your narrative structure and your voice with that vision. This is the edit that tells you what works, what doesn’t and how to fix it.
So, let’s start a conversation here, and you can book a free call with me. (Or, it you’ve already booked a call, this gives us a great way to start the conversation.)