What Draws People Back to Retreat a Second (or Third) Time
Every so often, someone gets in touch a few months after a retreat and says something along the lines of, “I know this might sound strange, but I think I’d like to come back.”
I’ve always found this interesting. There seems to be an assumption that a retreat is something you do once. You go away, take some time for yourself, hopefully get something out of it, and then return to normal life. Job done.
So if you want to go again, does that mean the first time wasn’t enough? Are you chasing a feeling? Or are you simply trying to get away from everyday life?
Having run retreats for a number of years, I’ve seen people return for all sorts of reasons, and I don’t think it’s as straightforward as any of those explanations. In fact, I think there’s something quite interesting about what happens when you return to the same place, the same practices, and sometimes even the same people.
The First Retreat Is Mostly Arrival
Think about what happens in a first week away. For the first day or two, most people are still carrying home with them. The shoulders haven’t dropped yet. The mind keeps drafting replies to messages that aren’t coming or rehearsing an imagined future. There’s a low hum of am I doing this right? that follows people onto the mat, into the silence, even down to the beach.
Then somewhere around day three, something tends to loosen and not dramatically either. A breath seeps deeper into the belly than it has in months. A long walk stops feeling like exercise and starts feeling like a refreshing stroll. People tell me they slept properly for the first time in a long while, or that they noticed the colour of the light on the volcanic hills and realised they hadn’t looked at anything that slowly in years.
That’s the first retreat: arrival. The nervous system, given enough uninterrupted days, remembers what it’s like to stand down. It’s real, and for many people it’s enough to change the direction of a year. But it’s also, by nature, an introduction. You’ve met something but you maybe haven’t yet had time to know it.
The Second Time, You Already Know the Door
This is the first reason people come back, and it’s the simplest one. The second retreat starts further in.
You don’t spend the first two days working out what a morning practice here feels like, or whether it’s okay to be quiet at breakfast, or what the group dynamic is going to be. You know what the week asks of you and what it gives back. That familiarity frees up an enormous amount of attention. The body that took three days to soften the first time often does it in a few hours the second, because it now has a felt reference point for what softening is.
I’ve watched people arrive for a second visit and settle almost immediately, with a kind of recognition in how they walk across the space. They’re picking up a thread from where it was left rather than repeating an old experience, and that’s a different thing entirely.
For many, this is when the work gets more specific. The first week gave them the general sense that something needed tending. The second lets them go to the exact place. If your first time at a yoga retreat in Fuerteventura was about rest, your second is often about what the rest revealed.
What Rest Uncovers
Here’s something I don’t think gets said enough: rest is not always restful. When you finally stop, whatever you’ve been outrunning tends to catch up. Not as a crisis, usually, but as a quiet presence. A grief that was waiting for a gap. A question about work or a relationship that you’d been too busy to hear. A tiredness underneath the tiredness.
On a first retreat, a lot of people brush against this and then, understandably, go home. The week ends, ordinary life closes over the surface again, and whatever stirred goes back under. Months later, it surfaces again, and that’s often what the email is really about.
The second retreat becomes the place where you turn toward it deliberately. This is where many people find their way to the Somatics Retreat, because what rest uncovered doesn’t respond well to being thought about. It lives in the body, in how you hold your breath when a certain subject comes up, or in the jaw that tightens before a hard conversation. Insight got you to the door. Staying with the sensation, slowly, with proper support, is what moves you through it.
Life Has Moved, and So Have You
Another reason people return, one that’s easy to overlook, is simply that they’re a different person from the one who came the first time. A year passes and in that time a lot can change as we know, Someone changes jobs, ends something, begins something, loses someone, has a child, leaves a city. The retreat is the same place but you are not the same traveller.
The same week meets you differently depending on what you’re carrying. A person who came the first time feeling burnt out may return a year later in a period of real transition, no longer needing to recover so much as to work out who they’re becoming. That’s a different question and it asks for a different kind of attention, which is why some people pair a second retreat with transitional coaching, so the week isn’t a pause from the change but a way of moving through it.
I find this reassuring, honestly. It means a retreat isn’t something you consume and finish. It’s a place you can bring whatever you’ve become, and it will have something to say to that too.
The Group Is Part of the Pull
I’d be dishonest if I left out the people. Ask anyone who has come back and they’ll mention, sooner or later, someone they met, though rarely in a networking sense. It’s the kind of connection that forms when you’ve spent several days in shared silence, shared meals, a hard hike, a hard conversation, and have seen each other without the usual armour.
There’s a kind of friendship that forms in those conditions that’s very hard to replicate in ordinary life. Nobody’s performing, and nobody’s trying to impress anyone. People say true things at sunset that they’d never say across a dinner table at home.
Some guests return partly to see those people again, and I think that’s a perfectly good reason. We underestimate how much of healing is relational, and how rarely adult life gives us a setting where we’re simply witnessed. Others come back because the group they had last time shifted something in them that they want to experience again, this time with new faces and a new dynamic.
This is also where Community Mentorship tends to matter. A retreat community doesn’t have to dissolve when the week ends, and for many people, staying connected between visits is what turns an experience into a practice.
You Can’t Take the Place With You, But You Can Take the Practice
Something worth being honest about: the effects of a retreat do fade, if left alone. Not completely. The felt reference point stays. But the body is a creature of habit, and old environments carry old cues. A few weeks of ordinary life with its notifications and obligations can quietly wear down a calm that took days to build.
That’s not a failure of the retreat or of you, just how nervous systems work: they learn through repetition, not through single exposures, however profound. So part of what draws people back is a wise, instinctive recognition that this learning needs reinforcing. It’s more that they’re recognising, often without quite articulating it, that one week of safety, however deep, plants a seed rather than grows a tree.
That’s why I tend to frame returning less as repetition and more as deepening. Each visit lays down another layer of knowing in the body. The second time, the stillness comes faster. The third time, you start to bring it home more easily. At some point, people notice they’ve begun to create small pieces of the retreat in ordinary life: a morning that begins slowly, a phone left in another room, a walk taken without a podcast.
The Slow Letting Go of Devices
One of the clearest patterns I see between a first visit and a later one is how people relate to the digital detox. The first time, it’s often the hardest part of the week. There’s the reflexive reaching, the phantom buzz, the restlessness of a mind used to constant input.
By the second or third retreat, it’s frequently the thing people look forward to most. They know what’s on the other side of that first uncomfortable day. They know that the quiet which follows isn’t emptiness, it’s space. The Re-enchantment retreat holds this gently, without rules shouted from a podium, and for returning guests it often becomes less of a challenge and more of an exhale.
I think there’s something quietly hopeful in that. It suggests our relationship with constant connection isn’t fixed. Given the right conditions and enough repetition, it can loosen, and the loosening lasts longer each time.
Going Deeper Into Practice
For people with an existing yoga practice, a return visit often has a specific shape: they want to go further in. The first retreat showed them what daily, unhurried practice could feel like. Now they want to explore what lives below technique, in breath, in sensation, in the subtler layers of the work.
This is where the yoga immersion retreat often becomes the natural next step. It holds a more concentrated rhythm, with room for sadhana and for the kind of sustained attention that’s hard to find in a class that ends after seventy-five minutes. Teachers and committed practitioners in particular tend to say that a deeper retreat clarified something about their own practice that years of regular classes hadn’t quite reached.
When Returning Isn’t the Answer
I want to be fair, because it would be easy to write a piece that quietly says everyone should keep coming back. That isn’t true, and I wouldn’t want anyone to feel it.
If the pull to return is coming mainly from dread of ordinary life, from a sense that nothing at home is bearable and the retreat is the only place you feel alive, that’s worth sitting with honestly. The aim is for the quality of presence you find there to start living in the rest of your days, rather than staying confined to one island and one week.
Similarly, if someone returns hoping for the exact feeling of the first time, they’re often disappointed. The first time has a freshness that can’t be repeated, and chasing it tends to miss what’s actually available now. The second and third retreats offer something different: more depth, more steadiness, more of an unforced knowing. They’re quieter, usually. The fireworks give way to something that lasts.
A good test is to ask what you’re moving towards rather than away from. If you’re drawn back by curiosity, by a specific question, by wanting to go further into something that has begun to open, that’s a good reason. If you’re mainly running from home, that’s worth exploring with support, perhaps through coaching or mentorship, rather than resolving by booking another flight.
I’ve come to think the question isn’t really why would someone go back? It’s why do we assume we should only go once? We don’t expect to read a meaningful book a single time, or stop walking in a landscape after one visit, or know a friend completely after a weekend. The things that matter reveal themselves slowly and differently each time we return to them.
They’re simply taking the change seriously enough to keep tending it.
If you’ve been once and feel that quiet pull, or if you’re simply wondering whether a retreat is something you’d want to return to, you’re welcome to read more about my approach and background or write to me directly. I’m always glad to talk through what might suit where you are now, which may well be different from where you were last time.
FAQs
Is it normal to want to go on the same retreat more than once?
Yes, very. Returning guests are common, and they come back for different reasons each time: to go deeper into something that opened, to bring a new life chapter into the space, or to reconnect with the community. Wanting to return doesn’t mean the first retreat didn’t work.
Will a second retreat feel the same as the first?
Usually not, and that’s a good thing. The first retreat is mostly about arrival and rediscovering rest. The second tends to start further in, because your body already knows what settling feels like, which leaves more room for deeper work.
How long should I wait before returning?
There’s no fixed rule. Some people come back within a year, others after two or three. It helps to let the first experience settle and show you what’s still unfinished, so the next retreat has a clear intention rather than a vague wish for more.
Should I choose a different retreat the second time?
Often, yes, if your focus has shifted. Someone who came for rest might now be drawn to the Somatics Retreat or the Yoga Immersion retreat. Others prefer to return to the same one and notice how differently it lands. Both are valid, and it’s worth talking through what you’re hoping for.
What if I feel a pull to go back but also feel I’m avoiding my life at home?
That’s a fair thing to examine honestly. Ask whether you’re moving toward something, like a question or a deeper layer of practice, or away from something at home. If it’s mostly the second, ongoing support such as coaching or Community Mentorship can help you bring more of the retreat into everyday life instead of relying on the week away.
Can I stay connected to the retreat community between visits?
Yes. Many people keep in touch with others they’ve met, and Community Mentorship exists partly to give that connection a lasting home, so the experience continues beyond the week itself.