Stress Therapy with Cheri Flake: Meditation & Stress Relief for Real Life · Meditation Teacher & Mental Health Counselor, Cheri Augustine Flake, LCSW: Meditation, Stress Relief, Healthy Habits, Spirituality, Mental Health, Self-Care, Self-Help, Happiness, Mindfulness

Be Still & Know: Why You Need a Retreat

·31 min·1 clip

A Jekyll Island retreat continued through a hurricane with no electricity, no cell service, and shared food.

Sherry Flake opens with her usual direct, chatty welcome and jumps straight into retreat life. She treats the idea as ordinary and a little outrageous at the same time. Why would anybody choose silence on purpose? Why put yourself through that? Her answer is simple enough: a meditation retreat can change a life. She widens the frame beyond meditation alone. Yoga retreats count too, and she says there is yoga on her retreats as well. She also includes retreats built around a special skill, like art or cooking, where the place and the practice fit together. The episode keeps circling back to attention and distraction. Sherry brings up a small device called a Brick, which lets you choose which apps to block and then turn them back on later. She uses it as a stand in for retreat itself. A retreat, in her telling, is a way to stop living on default. You pick one thing and give it your attention on purpose. That is the opposite of the day to day scatter that keeps pulling people away from practice. She talks about doing this with other people as well. Sometimes people bring a best friend, a mom, or a kid. Sometimes they come solo. She is clear that a solo first timer is not her recommendation for a silent retreat. Then she tells a story from her own history. Her very first retreat was silent, and she went with her best friend. It was a disaster. She had expected something more playful and easygoing because the place was called Yogaville. Instead, she found herself in a beautiful, serious place in the middle of nowhere in Virginia, where Satchi Dhananda is buried and where his practice and holiness felt very present. Silence made everything feel sharper. That story does the work of the episode. She does not pretend retreat is effortless. She makes the case by admitting it can be awkward, uncomfortable, and funny later. She keeps the tone light with little side remarks and conversational pushback. Of course people think silence sounds impossible. Of course it seems strange at first. She meets that resistance before asking the listener to try anyway. The lesson underneath is about training attention. Retreat is not just an escape. It is a controlled way to see what happens when distraction drops away. Her examples stay grounded in everyday life. She reaches for phones, apps, notifications, work, and ordinary habits rather than abstract wellness language. That makes the advice feel usable instead of ceremonial. By the end, she is back in invitation mode. She points listeners toward the retreats she offers in Georgia, in the mountains and at the beach, and invites them to connect through her site and social accounts. The episode closes with the same warm insistence it started with: this is worth trying, and you do not have to be a naturally silent person for it to matter.

As heard by us

A brisk case for retreats that treats distraction as a practice problem.

Sherry Flake frames retreats as a reset for attention rather than a luxury, and that keeps the piece grounded. It moves cleanly from silence to the discomfort of being alone with one’s own thoughts, then lands on a plain example of taking charge of the phone instead of letting…

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Why you'd press play

If your attention keeps getting pulled by your phone, this retreat talk may land hard.

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