“We don’t need more Burning Mans,” a friend of mine said some years ago. “We need more church services.” Could he be right?

According to AP News, there has been a broad post-pandemic interest in going to meditation centers where meditation retreats are being held. I don’t doubt that this is a good thing, especially if the retreat in question is fairly “soft”: meaning that there is a bit of meditating, a bit of walking in the woods, perhaps a bit of wholesome conversation. Yet I’ve come to doubt the relevance and viability of the rigorous meditation retreat for the ordinary person.

What are the problems with the “all-in” meditation retreat, especially for beginners? Firstly, one may very likely not be ready for samskaras (or ego tendencies) to appear out of the unconscious mind. This is likely what The Financial Times found, I’d reckon, when it reported on “the perils of meditation.” It’s quite obvious to me that, for instance, the Zen meditation retreat format–in which one sits in silence for 10 or 12 hours each day–isn’t really “portable” into the modern world because a beginner may be neither metaphysically nor constitutionally prepared for what may come up.

Secondly, rigorous meditation retreats are, I want to argue, actually designed for those who care about waking up (moksha or nirvana). Since it is very rare for someone to care deeply about spiritual awakening and since it’s even rarer for one to actually realize one’s true nature during this lifetime, it’s clear that there’s a mismatch between this particular design and the aspirations of most modern people.

Finally, I don’t think that people really need to “oscillate” back and forth between going into a retreat-like setting and coming back into the world. It’s not uncommon to hear about one who–erroneously–fetishizes such retreats while bemoaning the workaday world. Far better, as I argue in my book Chop Wood, Carry Water: The Yoga of Work, to learn how to live in the world without succumbing to its courser values. Indeed, to live in the world without succumbing to its courser values amounts to wisdom.

If we don’t need the retreat as our go-to, then what do we need? We need the equivalent of churches for open-minded people! Faced with the loss of social capital described in Robert Putnam’s fine book Bowling Alone and coming to terms with “the great dechurching,” a phenomenon that has only accelerated in recent years, we could really use places in which devotion is wedded to conviviality. In such places, we would exercise moral and intellectual virtues with a view to furthering genuine, face-to-face fellowship. There, we’d learn how to be friends.

In short, neither ecstasy nor ayahuasca nor holotropic breathwork but an open door on the other side of which could be seen welcoming, familiar faces.