Don’t let a perfectly good crisis go to waste
Almost everyone comes to a time of great difficulty in life. You may be overwhelmed, unable to manage your emotions, negative thoughts, or reactions to stress. You may be confronting patterns of addiction.* Perhaps a relationship may be in crisis, or you're coming to a major life choice or transition. Or you may simply know the way you are living must change.
If therapy by the hour isn't the right fit, and you don't want a cookie-cutter institutional experience, individual counseling retreats offer a different way.
Click the video above to learn more. To see additional videos, click here.
“My experience with Doug was nothing short of life changing. The time, care, and mindfulness that he put into my retreat was exceptional. He listened to everything I said about loving nature, and created a one-of-a-kind journey for me. I will never forget it or him. I couldn’t have been in better hands. He sent me home with many tools to help make it through the stressful times that may come. ”
A unique opportunity to experience a one-to-one stress management, addiction recovery, counseling, or mindfulness retreat
Maturity involves understanding that at key moments, we must devote time, energy and treasure to working on ourselves
Taking time for self-reflection isn't egocentric navel-gazing. It's a process of self-study, to better see patterns of thinking and reacting, to reduce self-sabotage and increasingly live according to what matters most. The deceptively simple power of a retreat is that in immersing oneself in a setting free of distraction, new ways of thinking and living naturally emerge. This is one reason retreats have been used by wisdom traditions for centuries.
Personal growth coaching in a place that inspires
Locations include USA/New England and Europe
How your retreat is designed
After a phone consultation to discuss your goals, needs and preferences, I create a proposal for you that details your personal retreat. Some retreats focus more on counseling, others on learning Mindfulness, and still others on spending time in nature. Most often, a retreat center is used as the base as it provides easy access to healthy meals and other supportive services such as yoga and massage. Some clients prefer to work in their own home or another favorite location. A daily plan and rhythm is created around your unique objectives. A typical day combines individual counseling, meditation instruction and practice, time outdoors, and time for quiet reflection, reading or journaling. Retreats are typically two to five days, but can be longer or shorter. Locations include the New England area, as well as Italy and Switzerland.
Areas of focus during
your retreat
Anxiety, stress and issues of distraction
Marital or family problems or crisis
Addiction/dependence regarding alcohol and substances*, media, work, sexuality, relationship, etc.
Life decisions
Loss of inner direction, meaning, and matters of spirituality
Grieving losses and changes
Emotional balance and self-regulation
Cultivating wellness
An alternative to addiction rehab or psychiatric hospital
Empower the better angels of your nature
It's a very valuable moment when you see that you're a bit of a mess. The value's not the mess part—it's the seeing it. Personal work begins with the courage to acknowledge we're not operating from our best place inside. Everyone's got an inner teenager—impulsive, self-doubting, self-centered. And we all have a wiser, steadier part of us, but it's all too easy to lose touch with it. You can make it more of a habit to connect to your own clarity and wisdom. This isn't woo-woo spirituality. It's taking time to stop the noise so you can tune in to your own insight and values.
Take time to reflect, regroup and renew
A personal retreat creates a priceless disruption of business as usual. You unplug from normal ways of living that reinforce the behaviors that are getting in your way. Stepping away from the habit patterns brings new perspective. Self-limiting ways of thinking and behaving become clearer. You increasingly understand how you feed into your own stress. With the clarity that mindfulness brings, you learn to respond, not just react. You practice the skills you will use going forward to meet your challenges more skillfully. Your self-respect and self-confidence say thank you.
Mindfulness-based couples counseling retreats
One of the main challenges of couples therapy is the complexity of issues between two people. It's often difficult in a conventional 60 or 90-minute time frame to create real impact. The all-day structure of a retreat allows the space to work with highly complex issues in a continuous way.
Couples Retreats are typically 3 to 5 days and cover a lot of ground, but focus primarily on a few key aspects of your relationship:
identifying unhelpful patterns of communication, behavior and beliefs
understanding how each person's family of origin experiences, especially childhood neglect, trauma and other stresses, continue to play out in the relationship- and how to work with them skillfully
having the support of a neutral party to constructively work through highly charged issues
learning and practicing simple, effective, structured patterns of communication and non-reactive listening
developing the skills of mindfulness to reduce interpersonal reactivity and increase self-regulation in each of you
getting clearer about what needs to be changed, versus accepted
Detailed take-home action steps, practices and supports are developed, to support the progress made during the immersion.
Therapeutic approach to retreats
So often therapy can be a drawn-out retelling of your past. Instead, we begin where you are now. Sufficient history is taken prior to the retreat to prepare us to begin working immediately on the first day of your retreat. Using research-supported therapy approaches such as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, Internal Family Systems, Acceptance Commitment Therapy, and others, we focus on struggles in your present life, rather than lengthy analysis of your past. Of course, there's value in understanding your history and how it influences you. This process creates a concise summary of important past events while building skills to better respond to present-moment challenges. We also use research-supported body-based practices drawn from yoga and meditation to help you self-regulate from the ground up. It's an empowering and practical form of therapy, leveraging mind and body, with the focus on preparing you to meet difficulty with a more comprehensive resourcefulness.
Mental health and wellness coaching for high-achieving humans
Highly-competent, driven people tend to be equipped with an achilles heel. They devote so much energy in the pursuit of excellence that their inner life is often neglected, and gets way out of balance. Emotions tend to be ignored because they're inconvenient, messy, and don't boost productivity. But neglecting one's emotional life brings inevitable backlash. The messenger can come in the form of addiction, stress-related symptoms, mood instability, relationship turmoil, and other unpleasantness. Shameful? Embarrassing? No, just human. If you're receiving wake-up calls, consider- maybe don't send them to voicemail.
I’m Doug Baker
I had the good fortune to train in traditional psychiatric care with excellent, tough-love mentors, including in a hospital psych emergency service. There, we served people with acute mental suffering, in frequently chaotic conditions, around the clock. Boot camp for therapists. At times it was anyone's guess who was closer to the edge- staff or patients.
In those 4 am ER moments, and in doing my own personal therapy work, two things stood out: Every human being has their demons; and it requires a kind of fierce courage to look them in the eye. If courage is in short supply, simple willingness is enough. This work has shown me that fear and self-condemnation are the primary hindrances to become more self-masterful. If those can be set aside, even temporarily, our demons, wounds and inner crazies are workable. Much positive change is possible.
My experience has shown that a good therapist isn't someone who's allegedly transcended their issues. I certainly have not. Rather, they're willing to work on their own sh*t. In my case, meditation and yoga, and going on my own retreats, helps me work through my stuff. Great colleague relationships are a crucial support. Long days in snowy forests (preferably in the Alps), good coffee and cashmere sweaters- my drugs of choice -don't hurt either.
I'm genuinely blessed to do this work. To my continued amazement, people tell me their deepest doubts, fears and secrets, and trust me to help and not to judge. That trust is a gift I can never repay.
(Conventional bio:)
I've taught courses training therapists and regular folk in mind/body approaches in a variety of settings, including:
Boston College
Boston University
Smith College
The MIT Sloan School of Management
Harvard University
Lesley University
The Harvard Medical School conference on Meditation and Psychotherapy
Massachusetts General Hospital
The Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy
I've also led groups and trainings in a variety of corporate settings. I'm currently serving as President of the Board of Directors of The Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, and I'm also a lucky graduate of the best yoga training out there, in my biased opinion, The Kripalu School of Yoga.
Finally, I had the great luck to write and publish a book on walking meditation, which I hear some people have actually read. Click here to learn more about the book.
Learn mindfulness. Become more resilient.
Mindfulness doesn't promise you'll never get stressed or upset. But it teaches us how to ride the waves of emotion and thoughts, and move through a messy, unpredictable world, with more grace and less suffering. Another word for these benefits is resilience. Research associates Mindfulness with lower rates of anxiety and depression, greater life and relationship satisfaction, and reduced bio-markers of stress. A personal retreat provides in-depth coaching to learn and integrate the ideas and practices of Mindfulness. We create a personal plan to maintain your practice post-Retreat, and I guide you to resources to support your growing practice over the long run.
Click here to watch a brief video that describes how Mindfulness practices can enhance the effectiveness of your retreat
Why retreats and intensives
Retreats and Intensives are intended to fill a gap in mental health and wellness services. If you need to address a significant issue, but feel a weekly therapy hour isn't enough, and stay at a psychiatric hospital or an addiction rehab facility isn’t appropriate, a Personal Retreat or Intensive may be a good fit. This model provides time to do in-depth work, while staying present through the full cycle of ups and downs of mood changes and relationship conflicts. The time to dig deep with focused, sustained, professional attention in a counseling retreat is unique and can be very powerful. It's all designed in a time-frame that fits your schedule.
Changing addictive patterns can also be the focus of a counseling intensive.* Habit cessation sometimes requires removing oneself from one's home environment and taking time in an intentional, supportive process to cultivate new habits.
Retreats and Intensives are entirely confidential. No medical record is created.
Mindfulness + Outdoors
As part of the wellness, and nature-based mindfulness aspects of these retreats, activities can include snowshoeing, nordic skiing, hiking, paddle boarding, and swimming, among others. Sample locations include rural New England, and the Hudson Valley in the US; the Dolomites in Italy and the Engadina Valley in Switzerland, among others.
Learn more
Find out if a personal retreat is right for you. Call Doug Baker at 617-331-4654 or use the form below. You will generally receive a reply within 24 hours. If there is urgency, you are welcome to send a text message to the phone number above.
To learn more about my counseling, yoga, mindfulness and stress- management offerings, call 617-331-4654 or visit www.cambridgemindbody.com.
*Potential clients are advised to seek medical advice regarding the need for a medically-supervised detox prior to an Intensive if there is substance or alcohol dependence.
