Personal Renewal and Balance with John Lionberger

I had the opportunity to chat with John Lionberger of Renewal in the Wilderness about the importance of personal renewal and balance.

Why is personal renewal so important?

Well, I can only speak about my life with great authority, but sometimes my life goes on spin cycle and I need to stop the spin cycle, so I guess another way of putting it is, sometimes I just needed to hit my personal reset button.  Getting away from the daily pressures we all face is really important to stop the spin cycle and to just hit your reset button.  A lot of people say it’s recreation, which I certainly agree with.  I love that the word "recreation" or "recreate," [which] really means re-create.  If you can get away from what put you on spin cycle, you have a chance to look at your life and begin recreating what you want out of your life, but I think you need that break in routine to do it.  We all need that time just to restore our batteries.

It seems like a luxury even having an entire weekend off.  Do you kind of force yourself to take certain days off, certain afternoons off, etc.?

Well, that’s a delicate question.  I am not as good at it as I would like to be, because I am a one-man operation, and almost everything that gets done, only gets done if I do it.  Having said that, it’s kind of a poor excuse.  I do find it difficult to just let go, but I am getting better at it, because I find myself getting burned out, and I hate that, because I do something that is meant to invigorate and enliven peoples' lives.  There is a real and profound disconnect with that.  I try to get better at doing that by taking what the ministers call and intentional Sabbath, taking one day off at least once a week, and boy, does it feel good when I can do it.

What are some of the symptoms that crop up when you don't take enough time off?

There is a sense somehow that my brain is wrapped in a fuzzy sweater.  I always envision a thick angora kind of sweater where my brain is just wrapped in it, and I have a hard time setting priorities and making good decisions.  Sometimes it is like a deer in the headlights.  I get anxious.  I have a sense of burn out, which is a sense of, "I just don’t want to do this anymore."  Sometimes I find there is a smoldering anger that really doesn’t reflect who I am, and it makes me very uncomfortable, because it’s kind of a universal anger.  I am angry at everything and everybody.  Fortunately, that doesn’t happen very often, but it’s happened enough that I’ve taken note of it.  I also find that I disconnect from my friends and my loved ones.

You and I had an opportunity to talk a while back about the "trappings," that we get caught up in all the different technologies, all the different conveniences that we consider them to be, and it can kind of get hard to disconnect from all of that.  Especially when you go on your retreats, how do you get people to turn off the cell phones and completely disconnect for the duration of trip?

I think everybody has a certain withdrawal, if they are used to cell phones and PDA’s and computers and all the stuff we have access to now, and I think most of them in the beginning think, "Oh my God, what am I going to do?"  A very small proportion of them, say the first day, continue to have those symptoms, and those people tend to be the really raging Type A’s.  One of the things that forces them to do this is, by and large on the week-long trips, we go to places where there is no cell phone reception.  At that point, they realize that they have no options but to be offline, and you can see their reaction by their bodies.  Their shoulders, which may have been hunched around their ears, begin to drop.  They take on a more natural position in their bodies.  Their eyes aren’t so slit-like, so narrow.  They have their eyes open, and they begin to smell the pine trees.  They just really begin to appreciate the natural world, where technology had kept them from appreciating the things that have been provided to them.  It’s a really remarkable transformation.

Well, when you wrap up one of those trips, you’ve got people now that have kind of let go of all that.  They have relaxed, but now they have to get back to the daily grind, back to reality, if you want to call it that.  What suggestions do you have for them at the end of those trips to keep them from slipping back into old habits?

Well, first of all, I think it’s really too bad that almost all of us, myself included, talk about going back to that as our normal lives, but it takes twenty-one days to make an action a habit, so what I suggest people do is to compare how they felt on our trip verses how they feel when they are back in their normal lives.  Be mindful of the symptoms beginning to gang up on them and then take steps to get outside, you know, just walk around the block for a refresher.

We do practice meditation on our trips as something to take back into their daily lives.  Meditation is quite amazing.  During the trip, I encourage people to write in journals, which people often do not do in their daily lives.   I encourage them to continue writing in their journals when they come back to their daily lives, as a way to retreat, but also to keep it in perspective.  It’s a great release.  It’s a great pressure valve. 

It all starts with making a comparison on how they felt on the trip, which is almost always really good and really whole and grounded, and compare it to what they are getting themselves into and just realize that there is a different way.

Do you find that, even in your own life, you have to be really intentional about it and almost make a concerted effort to incorporate these things into your daily life?

I really do.  Yeah.  One of the advantages of having a pet (a dog, you don’t have to do it for cats, so I recommend dogs for this), but if I can get out two or three or four times a day and just walk the dog and get away from the spin cycle, get away from all the stuff that’s calling me to do other things, after I come back from the walk, I feel infinitely better and have a better perspective on what my next priority is and what I really don’t have to do.  As I said, I am trying to set up that one day a week where I do virtually nothing except just be.  I am good at doing.  I am a better human doing than I am a human being.  My goal is to get more toward the human being part, but society has asked us to be more productive, so we become human doings.