A Do-It-Yourself Retreat Book from the Author of The Woman's Comfort Book
Do you yearn for time to rest, dream, listen, grieve, celebrate, stretch, or just be? Then you -- like most women today -- need to retreat: to make time to get away from it all and reconnect with yourself. With the wit, humor, and style that have made her Comfort Book series so popular, comfort queen and modern-day pioneer of women's well-being Jennifer Louden offers a practical and inspirational handbook -- the first to focus on the needs and stresses of women -- that walks you step-by-step through planning and savoring a self-led retreat. Easy-to-do practices and encouraging insights help you:
Find the time to retreat whenever and wherever you are
Decide whether to retreat at home or away, solo or with others
Separate from daily concerns
Counter fear, guilt, and boredom
Reenter ordinary life renewed
A wise and useful sourcebook of ideas and inspiration, The Woman's Retreat Book can be turned to again and again, whenever you feel the need to retreat.
Jennifer Louden, author of The Woman's Comfort Book, gives women a do-it-yourself guide for creating solitude. Because women tend to nurture relationships more than they nurture themselves, it is often a challenge for women to carve out the space and time they need for private renewal and reflection. Louden offers women inspiration and specific advice on how to retreat within their own homes, as well as how to create rejuvenating weekends and vacations. She even devotes a full chapter to the most pivotal stage of any retreat--the successful re-entry into home, family, and community.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
From Library Journal
Louden (The Woman's Comfort Book, HarperSanFrancisco, 1992) has written a how-to book for women interested in getting in touch with themselves and working on specific issues by using a retreat format. She points out that a retreat is an attitude, not a specific place, and that it can last from less than an hour to several days. Lots of lists and cross references are provided to carefully plan and select the right ingredients for a successful retreat. This practical guide to an increasingly popular subject will be useful in public libraries where self-help and women's psychology titles are in demand.?Marguerite Mroz, Baltimore Cty. P.L. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Jennifer Louden is the best-selling author of The Woman's Comfort Book, The Couple's Comfort Book, The Pregnant Woman's Comfort Book, The Woman's Retreat Book, and Comfort Secrets for Busy Women. She is both a personal coach and social commentator, who has taken the concept of "comfort" and self-care, and made these essential concepts irresistible and essential to women around the world. Jennifer is a cultural visionary, harnessing her extraordinary ability to recognize women's comfort as both a fundamental need and an innate desire.
As women's roles and voices have evolved, so has Jennifer's mission, transforming from a well-read self-help author to a cultural leader and life guide, inspiring women to develop their own recipe for emotional, physical, spiritual and work-life balance. With Jennifer's prompting, women are encouraged to find their personal truths, to explore and unearth their purposes in life, purposes that resonate most authentically with their innate wisdom, creating the truest comfort of all.
Jennifer's books have been translated into nine languages and have been bestsellers in both Germany and the U.S, reaching hundreds of thousands of women. Jennifer has taught her lively workshops and delivered her humorous and motivational keynotes across the U.S., Canada, and Europe at hospitals, women's health centers, corporations, and universities. She has created and led innovative women's retreats since 1992, from the Omega retreat center to the wilds of Canada to corporate retreats. She is also a certified coach, and graduated from Newfield Network's program.
Jennifer has been featured in major publications and regularly shares her voice with an enthusiastic national audience. Her media appearances have included the Oprah Show, Later Today, as well as MS-NBC, CNN, and Fit TV. Articles about her work have appeared in Glamour, Shape, People, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Self, New Woman, Ladies Home Journal, Yoga Journal, Health, InStyle, and Parents, as well as many local papers.
Jennifer's name has become synonymous with comfort and the multi-minding woman. Recognizing the genuineness of Jennifer's vision and the depth at which people have bonded with her message, major forward-thinking companies - from Proctor & Gamble to Martha Stewart's Omnimedia - have seen the value of utilizing Jennifer as spokesperson, editor, or purveyor of truth, and always as an embodiment of authenticity.
Jennifer lives on an island in Puget Sound with her husband, cinematographer Christopher Mosio, and their daughter, Lillian.
Lively and personal, The Women's Retreat Book is challenging, inspirational and above all full of practical ideas for retreating with and to ourselves. The book is definitely not a glib self-help manual on "how to retreat and heal your life in five easy steps." Louden's concept of retreat is different from th historical one of separating oneself from life, going off with a guru to pursue some artistic or spiritual quest. Instead her book focuses on short, inexpensive withdrawls from daily life. What makes a mini-retreat--many she suggests are less than half a day--restorative she says is not where or for how long but rather the quality of the time out/time away. Louden's book is full of encouragement, humor, reality, perspective. The book is full of creative suggestions, nitty gritty lists("Good Supplies to Have on Hand"), many personal examples from her life as well as those of many other women. A delightful and valuable back-of-the-book bonus is a series of resource guides to recent films, books, audio, video and music tapes that could be used in retreat. Although I eventually read all of the book, I don't think it is meant to be read straight through as a text. Rather it is a framework, a transition into the reader's being in retreat. I made many annotations and personal references in the margins and the book which I go to over and over now becomes a kind of collaboration. I would think that Jennifer Louden would feel the book had achieved its purpose. I've made it mine and it becomes part of my retreats.
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I appreciate the thoroughness of this book, as well as its outline structure. Each chapter addresses various aspects of the retreat, breaking down the how, where, why, what, etc. in an understandable and useful way. Even more importantly, each chapter stands on its own, and you can skip around, looking for specific answers, or read the whole way through, while still gleaning the essence of the book. I am reading the book all the way thru, in order, yet have already been able to do a retreat that was useful even though I haven't gotten to the end. This aids the process of retreating, since it takes the pressure off the retreatant, and doesn't create added pressure that would dissuade one to retreat in the first place. An undaunting, very informative book.
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Bravo! I applaud this author's message to women everywhere. It's time for us to learn to say "no" and take the time to fill ourselves back up again without feeling guilty. So many times I have asked a fellow mother or career woman, "How are you?" and the typical response is, "I'm so tired...I have 100 things to do..." And you know the rest of the laundry list they spout. For once I would love to hear one of them say, "You know what? I feel great! I just took a nap, or I read a novel I've been meaning to finish, or I'm going home to soak in the tub." Perhaps if more women would receive Jennifer Louden's books as gift they would begin to see how they can make this time for themselves no matter what kind of life they are living. Thank you Jennifer for spreading the word. I'm going out for a walk now for no other reason except to see how many more trees have changed their color this weekend.
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