International Holistic Centers' Gathering

By Margaret Critchlow (formerly Rodman), York University, Toronto

Draft 10 Feb 2008 for comment prior to final revision for publication

On a broad, sun-drenched rock overlooking Cortes Bay, a day’s journey and three ferry rides from Vancouver, internationally acclaimed yoga instructor, Rodney Yee, assumes a triangle pose for the camera. In a DVD promoting Hollyhock, one of the holistic centers I’ve been studying, Yee says, ”Hollyhock is a special retreat center to come to for a yoga teacher. The body is at home right away. … For Hollyhock to have ongoing yoga classes and ongoing meditation really sets the fertile ground to give a person time to let all the busy-ness of their normal life drop away.”1

What makes the body at home at Hollyhock? A physician in the DVD says, “I think it’s because nature is part of who I am. So being here is like coming home.”  An author delights in ”The full moon when it comes shining on the ocean, and the old growth forest and the walks in the woods. But still, even though you can name the parts, you can’t name the magic of it.” (more…)

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By Margaret Critchlow, Ph.D.

28 April 2008, written for submission to Alternatives

Have you taken a workshop at a holistic center? There are many advertised in this magazine, ranging from yoga teacher training to How to Sing in the Shower. Have you spent quiet time at a center on a personal retreat or a holiday? Perhaps you’ve been to Breitenbush Hot Springs here in Oregon or to one of the fourteen centers represented at the Holistic Centers Gathering, held at Breitenbush, April 20-24, 2008?

Even if you haven’t visited a holistic center are you curious about what goes on at these places? Do you wonder whether the people in charge “walk their talk”? I did, and that’s what led me to begin an anthropological research project on the cultures of holistic centers.

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By Margaret Critchlow

The news that Queenswood Retreat Centre in Victoria, Canada is closing after forty years (Monday Magazine, June 18, 2010) comes at a time when retreat centres matter more than ever. Why?  As an anthropologist studying the culture of retreat centres for the past five years I have been asking: What is the value of holistic centres as the second decade of the twenty-first century begins?

In my research, I have visited nine centres, mainly on the west coast of North America and attended three Holistic Centre Gatherings, annual conferences for owners, managers, and staff. Some centres are religious, many are not, but all participate in a global, holistic movement, seeing all beings, the planet, and universal energy as interconnected and interdependent. (Holism, a concept also important to anthropology, is the idea that any system is greater than the sum of its parts and that the parts make sense only in terms of the whole.)

In the best anthropological tradition I have participated in the culture of these centres, taking workshops, talking with several hundred people, and learning the local “language.” I’ve done a lot of what we anthropologists call “deep hanging out:” overlooking the ocean from a hot tub, chatting with guests under shady trees, sitting in meetings and in meditation with staff. This has been some of the most enjoyable and deeply rewarding fieldwork of my career. And, I suggest, it is has profound significance for understanding the human condition.

That significance comes down to one simple question: What is the value of being there? This is not to question the value of being here. The power, indeed the necessity, of being fully present in the here and now is indisputable. The precious, impermanent beauty of the present moment is all we humans have. But what I have touched is the power of retreat centres to disturb the comfortable “here” of day-to-day life.  Centres create a “there” in which to be fully present and from which to envision and ground that most precious and elusive goal, a positive future.

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