Retreat, Reflect, Get the Lesson

The pause nobody wants to take, and what to actually do with everything you just lived through before it costs you the goal.

Retreat, reflect, and then ask yourself what the lesson was.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

That is almost never the advice someone wants when they are mid-sprint toward something big. When a client is chasing a goal — a promotion, a launch, a move, a version of their life they have been circling for years — the last thing they want from me is a suggestion to stop. They want the next step. They want the plan, the structure, the thing to do on Monday. Telling a woman who is already convinced she is behind that the move right now is to sit down and think about what just happened is almost insulting.

It is also, very often, exactly the path.

The energy we are actually in

We’re nearing the end of the 33 (in human design) and astrologers are ramping up for the big Lion’s Gate. I want to talk about this through human design, and specifically through gate 33.

Before you close the tab: if you are the person thinking ‘well, what if I don’t believe in that stuff’ — what if you don’t believe in astrology, or human design, or Jung’s collective consciousness — my answer is that it doesn’t matter. Who cares. No problem.

Here is why I mean that sincerely rather than as a dodge. I’m a licensed therapist, certified in ADHD and career coaching and trained in Jungian shadow work, and I have spent over a decade watching people try to change. What I have learned is that the framework matters less than the structure it gives you. Human design and astrology give me a beginning, a middle, and an end to every stretch of time. They give a season a shape. And when you have ADHD, or any of the tendencies that come with living in a world engineered to fragment your attention, a container for that attention is valuable. You can take the framework and leave the metaphysics entirely. I will not be offended.

Gate 33 sits in the throat center, between roughly 7°37’ and 13°15’ of Leo — the middle point of the season. You may have been thinking that Leo means shine, perform, get on the stage. Gate 33 is the retreat. Privacy, reflection, and then the remembering and the telling of what you found. I feel like it’s built into the season on purpose.

So tell me, even if you don’t believe in any of it: is taking a deliberate pause to reflect a bad thing to do, particularly if you have ADHD?

I think not.

Why your attention needs this more than your calendar does

There are more things built to take your attention than at any point in human history, and I do mean ‘built’. That is the business model. The longer a platform holds your attention, the longer it can engage you and sell to you. This is not a moral failing on your part.

Which is why one of the real goals of your life — not this quarter, your life — is to make good friends with your attention. To get genuinely in touch with your emotions and your cognitions, your actual thought patterns, and to see how all of it keeps leading you back to where your attention goes.

Because most of us are leaking it.

You know the movie where the hero gets shot early and has to finish the mission anyway? They keep moving, dragging themselves from room to room with one hand pressed hard into their side. And at the end, when they finally lie down and someone moves the hand away, everyone realizes how much they have been bleeding out the whole time.

That is what is happening with our attention. We press a hand to the wound and limp from one area of life to the next, wondering why nothing feels satisfying, why We can’t achieve our goals and even when we do, the goals we hit don’t feel the we expected them to.

This is not a lecture, because I am not above any of it. I just want you to understand what the resource actually is before I ask you to spend an hour of it sitting still.

What the retreat actually looks like

It’s not a silent meditation retreat in the desert. It’s just is a chair, an hour, a journal, and a cup of coffee. Okay 30 minutes…some of us have ADHD.

It’s raining here in New England as I write this, which is convenient, because everybody needs a reason to chill out and weather is the only one most of us will accept without arguing.

Sit down. Give yourself the time. Then work through some version of this:

“What has been happening?”Not the summary you’d give a coworker. The real inventory. The vacation, the cookouts, the birthday parties, the deadlines, the week you didn’t sleep/got shitty sleep.

“What did I learn about myself?” I know, such a ‘therapist ask’, but this is the one that does the work.

And if that feels like a little much right now — try, “what do I appreciate?” About any of it. Did you take a trip. Did you finally have coffee with a friend you hadn’t seen in two years? Did you work yourself into the ground?

That last one is where it usually gets interesting. Because you might sit with it and arrive at something like: ‘I spent this entire summer covering for everyone else’s vacations, and I am not doing that again next year.’

That’s a lesson. It’s specific, it’s behavioral, it’s actionable, and you just can’t get to it while you are still inside the thing. You have to step back far enough to see the effects of what you have been doing, who you have been being. This is the part we often skip, and it’s the reason so many intelligent, self-aware people accumulate experience without accumulating wisdom. The experience happened. Nobody ever sat down and extracted anything from it.

This wasn’t useless mindfulness; we’re gonna do something with it

Here’s the second half, and it is built right into gate 33: the reflection is only half the mechanic (is that a dumb word? Please let me know; I’m experimenting with ‘mechanic’ because I say ‘framework’ way too damn much). The other half is the remembering and the sharing.

If your work already involves teaching — if you are an educator, a manager, a parent, a leader of some sort — the sharing is obvious. You take the lesson to your team, your clients, your kids. You let what you learned become something someone else gets to use.

But if that is not your role, the lesson turns inward, and that is not a consolation prize. Ask yourself: what did I learn about what happens when I put myself out there? What did I learn about what happens when I am running around giving to everyone and secretly hoping someone notices? What did I learn about how I actually operate when the pressure is on?

Then take that and apply it directly to the goal you were sprinting toward before I asked you to stop.

This is why the retreat is not a detour. You go back to the goal carrying something you didn’t have before, and you move faster than you were moving, because you’re no longer running the same play that already cost you a summer. It’s why athletes watch tape of games they’ve already played. So that they don’t let the play that lost them the game repeat and cost them the whole season.

The lesson was always sitting there in what already happened. You just have to stop long enough to pick it up.

If you want the full structure for this season — the six gates of Leo, week by week, with the practical framework I use with clients (good to implement anytime of year, btw!) — Subscribe for free and I’ll send it straight to your inbox!