You’ve always wanted to be more spiritual.

Commune with nature. Get in shape. Find your Zen.

But you have a real life to live—

who has the time?

No one does, which is why these Southern

self-help retreats are so genius. They infuse weekend

getaways with personal improvement and offer

beautiful settings for professional instruction.

After all, if you’re going to take some time off,

you might as well get a tune-up

while you’re away.

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It sounds like the beginning of a dirty joke: “A lady novelist walks into a monastery . . .” but I am very serious about spending the weekend sleeping, meditating, singing, and praying with forty near-silent, white-robed, celibate men.

Set in Conyers, Georgia, The Monastery of the Holy Spirit was founded in 1944 by twenty-one monks who had departed from Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky to establish a new community in the wilderness just east of Atlanta. Today, the Trappist brothers offer year-round retreats with topics as diverse as coping with depression, discovering God through yoga or photography, and learning the art of forgiveness. Sessions aside, I want to experience the daily rituals of monastic living, practicing silence and praying the hours.

I am not really the contemplative sort. Type A all the way, I run on stress, and I’m so competi-tive I had to give up Words with Friends while I still had a few. I once tried to learn to meditate at home, but I kept getting up to call my husband and report how poorly it was going. I am, how-ever, deeply Southern, with our innate horror at bad manners. The presence of monks will keep me quiet, I’ve decided. If I can’t learn to be focused, I will at least learn to be still.

The monastery air is cool and feels genuinely tinged with peacefulness; it’s hard to be anxious here. The cells (small white cubes with a single bed and shared bath) and the main dining hall are all silent space. I find it oddly comforting to sit in quiet camaraderie with strangers, drinking coffee with no pressure to make small talk.

There is a talking dining room and—my favorite—a talking patio, where I can eat my meal while admir-ing the gorgeous pocket garden dotted with statuary and some spectacular examples of the bonsai trees the monks here grow and tend.

The monks pray seven times a day, and five of these daily sessions are open to visitors: Vigils, Lauds, Midday Prayer, Vespers, and Compline. Most retreat-goers skip a few. They want time to walk the stations of the cross and feed the ducks at the lake, visit the museum or the large gift shop, hike the beautiful paved trails, or go to the cafe to sample the delicious biscotti and peach brandy–infused fudge the monks make in their bakery on campus.

I tell my friend Abby that my goal is to be at every single service. “Are you going to win prayer?” she asks, laugh-ing. Abby is a therapist.

CALL TO prayerSilence, meditation, and a taste of the monastic life in Georgia

BY JOSHILYN JACKSON

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TO BOOT CAMP

welcome

“Shut up,” I say.I keep to the schedule, though at one point I find myself galloping harum-

scarum across the lawn like Maria in The Sound of Music, skidding into my seat just as the bells ring out for Lauds.

I even stagger out of my cell at 3:45 in the morning and make my foggy way to the unheated chapel. Vigils, I decide, has been aptly named. I bypass the comfy pews to perch in one of the booths the monks use, rows of wooden boxes with hinged bench seats. They face each other across the center aisle. The booth is truly medieval, fully embodying the old idea of “mortification of the flesh.” I want the experience, though. Even more fervently, I don’t want to break into snores at Vigils.

The monks begin their antiphonal singing of Psalms, chanting back and forth. The songs are interspersed with solemn readings from Scripture. Their hushed voices reverberate in the lofted space, and the stained glass glows with cool col-ors, rendering the air blue and clean.

My Psalter is open to “The Second Saturday in Ordinary Time,” but this service, especially, feels anything but ordinary. It’s like slipping backward to an era before social media, multitasking, and my ever-present iPhone. In the pre-dawn, there is only the moment and the music.

And now, the part I’ve been most afraid to try: thirty minutes of dead-silent meditation with all light extinguished. The booth pushes me upright, spine aligned, centered and present. My frantic squirrel-brain quiets, and I feel an inner ease that belies my outer posture. It is wonderful. For about five minutes.

Then my back begins to hurt, and I realize I’m sleepy and hungry. Just as I admit to myself that I can’t last another twenty-five, the bells chime. The half hour has already passed.

My weekend revolves wholly around these services. I try to imagine praying the hours while living my real life—family, work, friends, traffic, errands—impossible! But maybe I have it backward. In the world of this monastery, one does not fit real life around the prayerful quiet. It is real life.

MONASTERY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 770-483-8705, trappist.net

Trash your salt and grab some weights—it’s time to get healthy in Miami

BY CARLOS HARRISON

I’m tired. I’m sore. I’m gassy.That, I’m told, is expected.For three days, I have been stretched, scanned,

pushed, and pampered. I’ve been stripped of salt, sugar, and most red meat. And I’ve eaten enough fruits and vegetables to make me a methane machine, which, according to staffers at the Pritikin Longevity Center in Doral, Florida, is commonplace.

Call it a side effect of the Pritikin Program. Devised by engineer Nathan Pritikin after he was diagnosed with heart disease in 1957 and told, basically, to sit and wait to die, it’s a hardcore, back-to-basics approach to eating and exercise. Those who want to immerse themselves in it come here, the Trump National Doral Miami, where the program occupies a wing of the resort’s spa. Advocates extol Pritikin’s seemingly magical results: Some participants quit tak-ing blood pressure medications within days, and 70 percent end their diabetes medications in three weeks, with an average weight loss of eleven pounds.

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The program, however, is singularly strict. “Na-than Pritikin used to say, ‘If it tastes good, it isn’t good for you,’” says director of nutrition Kimberly Gomer. The diet rigidly restricts salt and sugar (“Poisons!” one attendee admonishes), but I’m told recipes have improved over the years. Some. My taste buds beg for more seasoning. All around me in the formal dining area, people at beautifully set tables splash hot sauce and copious amounts of salt-free spice blends on their food.

The diet allows fish once a day, chicken once a week. It limits red meat—if you must—to one small serving a month. It also takes “eat your vegetables” to the extreme: five cups a day. Plus four servings of fruit. It shuns white bread and pasta, butter, and as much as possible, oil. You may drink real coffee at breakfast, but only two cups. After dinner, they serve a hot grain substitute. It tastes like, well, hot grain. I recall a Woody Allen line: “Sure you can live to be 100, if you give up everything that makes you want to.”

Sarah Steves, a participant from San Antonio, tells me: “You do feel that way at the beginning. But after a while, the food is so good.” Her husband Steve agrees emphatically as he blobs hot sauce on his vegetables.

A stay here generally lasts one to two weeks. Me? I’ve dipped my salt-loving toe in with a three-day “Taste of Pritikin” program to see what this whole thing is about. It began with a “DEXA Body Composition Scan” that mapped my fat by body region. This revealed my mirror isn’t a liar and I do in fact have love handles, and, I note, a large concentration of fat between my ears. When fitness director Scott Danberg tells me that’s my brain, I silently wonder if it should be larger.

You may have seen Danberg before, on the U.S. discus team at the 2012 London Paralympic Games. He’s a walking Pritikin ad. I’d guess he’s in his late thirties. He’s fifty-two.

The program calls for ninety minutes of exercise a day. My condensed schedule is a little more intense: I have five to seven daily exercise sessions—from aerobics to Zumba—mercifully broken into forty-five-minute blocks. Most memorable is the water workout, which includes a synchronized “blooming flower” exercise straight from a Busby Berkeley movie. Instructor Jeffrey Berson reminds us: “Smile! You have eighty muscles in your face. You have to exercise those, too.” When I’m not working out, I’m attending lectures. To me, they feel like a “Scared Straight” program for food and fitness: “Do this, to live!”

People usually come here after a health scare. Many come again,

often with people they care about. Mary Lee Jennings, age seventy-three, brought her daughter as a fiftieth birthday present. “To live long and well, that’s a gift we want to give to our children,” she says.

Joan Thorne-Gifford agrees. She first came a year ago after get-ting a pacemaker at age seventy-nine. She was so weak she couldn’t stand. Now she’s up and active and has brought her fifty-four-year-old daughter to join in. “I want her to see how important it is to take care of herself,” Thorne-Gifford says.

After just three days, I’ve noticed some positive changes.

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MY GOODNESSom

Namaste: Yogis get their own retreat in the North Georgia mountains

BY ALLISON ENTREKIN

I feel indulgent. Ice-cream-for-breakfast indulgent. Make that ice-cream-and-Champagne-for-breakfast indulgent.

I am on my way to a yoga retreat in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in a quaint Georgia town called Dahlonega. My husband and two toddlers are back home in Atlanta, an hour south of here. When I left, our kitchen floor was sticky and a pile of mail sat neglected on my desk. Guilt pressed its boot into my heart as I waved goodbye. I told myself it was im-portant to do something for myself, by myself. But guilt’s unrelenting heel kept pushing down.

And now I’m pulling into Dahlonega Spa Resort, an inn-turned–yoga compound, com-plete with clusters of cabins and a 1,200-square-foot yoga studio. It’s almost five, the hour of my first ninety-minute yoga class. My week-end agenda includes three more. Back home, I’m thrilled if I can squeeze in an hour-long yoga class once a week. Four ninety-minute ones? Who do I think I am?

Apparently, I’m someone who can still indulge. As we begin our first yoga class, the sixteen other women adopt serious yogi faces as they bend into downward dogs and reach up to form triangles. Me? I’m smirking like a cat with a mouthful of canary. A quiet yoga studio with floors that aren’t sticky and zero mail? A chance to stretch, to breathe, to sweat? The guilt is gone, baby. It takes every ounce of my resolve to keep my smirk from spreading into a toothy grin.

And that’s before I walk into my one-room cabin. Just for me. It’s nothing fancy, just a comfortable king-sized bed, a small kitchen, a clean bathroom. A thermostat I can adjust without entering into negotiations with my husband. I retrieve the bottle of Malbec I’ve packed, pour a glass, and let the grin come.Y

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A nagging ache in my hands has disap-peared. My pants are loose. When I get home, I head straight for my bathroom scale: I checked in weighing 187.7 pounds; I checked out weighing 183.1.

Now if I can just have some salt.

PRITIKIN LONGEVITY CENTER 888-254-1462, pritikin.com

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Later, I walk to the main inn and join the other retreat-goers for a dinner of grilled chicken topped with mango and sauteed vegetables. I don’t know anyone, but it doesn’t matter. All walks of life are represented: Some women are fresh out of college; others are empty nesters. A few came here together for a getaway with girlfriends; others arrived alone. The instructors leading the retreat are from an Atlanta studio I’ve never tried—Balance Yoga—but they welcome me like we’re longtime friends.

When I return to my cabin after dinner, I imagine I’ll sleep like I used to in my twenties, when my house was quiet, my days were mine to define, and taking a yoga class required zero compromise. But I don’t. Instead, I lie in bed and think of my husband and chil-dren’s faces. They are smiling at me, happy for me. And I miss them.

The next morning, after a breakfast of gluten-free pancakes and a vigorous yoga class, I grab a picnic lunch from the main inn and set off with some of the other women to hike to Dukes Creek Falls. It’s a bright day, the air cool and wet. I walk and talk with my new friends, who, like me, are still in yoga clothes. I’m not sure about them, but that’s all I packed.

We hear the waterfall before we see it, a stunning 200-foot cas-cade. A family with two young children asks us to take a picture of

them on the viewing platform. I stare at those kids, almost the same ages as mine, and a pathetic smile forms on my face. I’m sure the parents are scared of me.

We return to the resort for another yoga class, and by now I can feel the effects of the first two. Muscles I can’t even name are sore. My mind, on the other hand, is just hitting its stride. It usually takes an entire class for my brain to quit reminding me how long my to-do list is, how I don’t really have time to be doing yoga. But this afternoon, it’s calm and fluid. I let the candles, the soft instruction, the rhythm of the poses and my breath take me deep inside.

After a dinner of grilled vegetable lasagna, we gather outside for drinks and a bonfire. One more yoga class in the morning and we’ll head home. I watch the sparks flutter into the night and think about indulgence. A weekend retreat by myself. New friends. Yoga. All of it is a luxury—a blessing, really. And it has made me remember something: Having someone to fight over the thermo-stat with and living with kids who spill apple juice on the floor—those are blessings too.

DAHLONEGA SPA RESORT 706-865-7678, rrresorts.com/dahlonega W

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Spirit walks and sage prayers at a South Carolina “eco-spiritual” retreat

BY MERRELL McGINNESS

As the mother of two small children, my self-reflection time is limited to an occasional glimpse in the mirror, followed by the realization I haven’t showered in two days. But here I am in Kingstree, South Carolina, pulling onto the long, magnolia-lined driveway that leads to Springbank Retreat. My car is empty, save for my suitcase, which contains a wild mix of clothes that illustrates my confusion about this weekend. I have no agenda or schedule, not even instructions for checking in.

But this is how Springbank operates. Things aren’t forced; they unfold. As soon as my feet hit the sandy driveway, Sister Theresa Linehan materializes in a golf cart. After a warm hug, she shows me to my cozy apartment and tells me dinner is just up the path at the main house. And then I settle into silence—nerve-wracking, unscheduled, uncomfortable silence.

Described as a center for eco-spirituality and the arts, Springbank is something of an enigma. It was established as a plantation in the late eighteenth century, then became a hunting retreat, then a monastery for Dominican monks. Today, the eighty-acre campus is staffed and supported by the Adrian Dominican Sisters, who have merged their Catholic roots with Native American practices such as sage blessings and “Spirit Quests” to encour-age self-healing and renewal. (More on those later.)

People come here for all kinds of reasons. Some are tired of city life and want to spend a weekend weaving baskets or learning about Celtic spirituality. Others are in need of longer sabbaticals to reinvigorate their creativity. (Sue Monk Kidd wrote The Dance of the Dissident Daughter while sitting under the Celtic Tree, one of seven “sacred sites” on the property.)

My first morning, Linehan takes me on the Cosmic Walk, an almost two-mile path with stone markers chronicling the creation of the universe. She explains her perspective on how it all began, with something the size of a tear bursting forth in a mysterious explosion of life. Both man and nature come from that same kernel, she says, so we’re all connected. “Right now, the trees are listening,” she says, gesturing up at the live (CONTINUED ON PG. 92)

WHEN NATURE calls

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oaks. “There’s a vibration of energy bouncing off everything. We recognize it as the life force of God.”

I’m struck by this concept, largely ignored by modern society but embraced by indigenous cultures throughout time. I begin to notice the spider webs in the trees, the leaves fluttering in the wind, and the bright green moss carpeting the forest paths.

My visit coincides with three Sisters finishing sabbaticals, and they graciously welcome me into their drum circle. We pray, sing “The Earth Is Our Mother” (well, I listen), and perform a sweet grass bless-ing, where we burn bundles of the aromatic herb, blow out the fire, and wave the smoke toward our faces. This practice, I’m told, welcomes the positive spirits of nature. We then move under the Granddaughter Tree (an ancient live oak) and Linehan plays a Native American flute.

The sun warms us while we chant and drum, harnessing the energy of Mother Earth. My inhibitions melt by the minute, and I feel my inner hippie emerging. As the Sisters share their experiences at Springbank, more than one mentions that a tree has spoken to her here. I’d like to hear one, too.

Later, during my two-hour walk alone in the woods (called a “Spirit Quest”) I find a quiet spot and perform a sage blessing (like a sweet grass blessing, only with smoking sage) to drive away negative energy. The Sisters have given me questions to ponder—including “What place does your Creator play in your life?”—and encouraged me to listen for answers.

My new awareness of the natural world causes a strange shift. Always squeamish about bugs, I don’t gasp and smoosh them for entering my personal space. I wait. I listen. After a while, I decide nature isn’t in a talkative mood, so I keep wandering the woods.

That’s when two trees catch my

(CONTINUED FROM PG. 75)

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eye. Their trunks bear scars indicat-ing they were once strangled by a vine, yet they tower above me like pillars of strength. Hmm. Could these trees be speaking to me? Then I stumble upon the “Nursing Tree,” a felled poplar with several saplings sprouting from its trunk, a beautiful symbol of resurrection.

When I depart from Springbank, it’s with some sadness. Inner peace is easier to find when you’re not knee-deep in laundry and sippy cups. I know I’ll never sell my car, live in the woods, or part with my iPhone. Hey, even Springbank has Wi-Fi. But I’ve discovered if you spend enough quiet time outdoors and open yourself up to new ideas, the trees just might have something to say.

SPRINGBANK RETREAT 843-382-9777, springbankretreat.orgS

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