Blog: everything you need for a self-led retreat and transformational travel
Slow traveler reminder
Practice a slow lifestyle while traveling. Choose a slow travel destination: a slow city, an eco-village, an ecobnb, a cabin in the woods, a family-run guesthouse, or a homestay, etc.
Slow food
Buy at local street markets and from street vendors. Eat fresh local seasonal food. Eat slowly and enjoy every bite. According to Slow Food philosophy, the concept of slow food is defined by thr...
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Top 6 self-led retreat accommodation venues
In addition to the benefits of personal growth, retreat travel is also an amazing opportunity to go off the tourist track and explore non-mainstream accommodation options. Tourist hotels look pretty much the same all over the world. For a self-led retreat aimed at personal transformation, you’d need to step off the beaten path and outside your comfort zone and find something more uncommon.
...
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Mindful walking and reflective journaling – two fundamental activities of a self-led retreat
Mindful walking and reflective journaling are perfect tools for your continued evolution and growth. A self-led retreat helps you extend these practices to your daily life. Here is how these activities can change yours and the lives of others for the better.
Mindful walking
1. Reconnects you with the present moment
Mindful walking connects you to the present mo...
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The benefits of learning through reading over learning through watching videos
As we go on a self-led retreat, we want to discover new truths, learn new patterns, acquire new habits. Today, we have diverse tools and media for learning and acquiring knowledge and information. A more traditional way includes learning through reading. A modern and complementary path to various learning processes and gathering information is learning through watching videos. Which one is better?...
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How to start your day during your self-led retreat and … always
My story
If I were allowed to read only one book on time management and goal achievement, I would pick up this one: "The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM)" by Hal Elrod. Today, I can say with absolute certainty that it is, indeed, a miracle that has the potential of totally transforming anyone’s life. However, I did not fee...
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Sound healing
In the modern world, it’s so easy to get out of touch with oneself and with nature. We get lost in all the hustle and bustle happening around us. How often do you pay attention to the sounds of your own heart and breath in the midst of a busy schedule? How often do you get a chance to be on your own, contemplate silence, meditate, or immerse yourself in the healing power of sound?
A self-...
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Benefits of active visualization and creating a vision board
When we allow our mind to run freely, we make space for various images and scenarios. In a positive way, daydreaming helps us focus on ourselves and gain insights. This process is known as passive visualization. When we direct our imaginative abilities towards the things we want to create in our reality, we use active or creative visualization.
“In creative visualization you use your imag...
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What’s so special about slow travel and how is it connected to Growthcation retreats?
Growthcation’s aspiration is to bring the best of slow travel, creative tourism, responsible tourism, and personal development into one vacation. Growthcation style retreats inspire to travel sustainably, ethically, responsibly, creatively and based on slow life philosophy.
Responsible Tourism
Traveling is an amazing experience. Exciting, inspiring, eye-opening, mind-blowing, life-chan...
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Self-led retreat packing list
What to take with you and what to bring back.
Must-haves and recommended retreat props.
"In what clothes will you feel creative or secure or luxurious or sensual or energetic or courageous?"
- Jennifer Louden
Necessary items
loose, warm, soft clothes from natural fabrics
comfortable clothes for exercise, meditation, and (nature) walk
comfortable underwear
comforta...
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Basic pillars of your retreat: N. E. E. D. S.
Breaking negative patterns, altering old habits, or transforming an area of your life is not a comfortable undertaking. Going on a personal retreat outside your habitual environment to pursue this transformation is even more uncomfortable. To stick with your intention, you need a solid base to build your life changes upon. You must be in a high-energy state, as well as have clarity and focus. The ...
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Guiding principles of an individual retreat: 10 S +10 R
When you craft your own retreat experience, you pave the way for your brilliance and growth. A self-led retreat away from home is a great choice for you because you need a new environment to truly relax, shift your focus and start the transformation. Since each space radiates its own energy, you can gravitate towards one that moves you further in self-transformation. The new space with uplifting v...
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Growthcation is not a home retreat
You cannot become a new person by doing old things. Forget your home for a while. Escape from your old life and old you. Find a different environment for your retreat. Go outside your daily routine, obligations, stress, boredom, comfort trap, unsupportive habits, annoying distractions, pain of unfulfilled dreams. Ideally, go to a place where you have never been before. Open a new page, make a new ...
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How to make transformational decisions?
The importance of decision making
If you were to draw or present a path that led to big changes, what would it look like?
Rarely would it be a straight line.
The entire drawing or map would be full of zigzag patterns. All the events, people you met, and what you went through would be on it as well. In other words, it would be a complex path that started with you making a small decision. A...
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How to use travel and vacation to contribute to personal growth
Sometimes, we may feel stuck in life, tired of the hustle and bustle of work and daily routine. We just want to get away from it all. So, we go on a vacation and get that temporary recharge. However, when we return from our travels, in a flash we go back to our old lifestyle.
But if we managed to pause and ask ourselves deep questions, we would start to shift our views. We would see things in a...
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