A session creates conditions for the body to begin. Daily practice sustains it. A retreat gives the body something neither can: uninterrupted time. Seven to twenty-one days of extended silence in which the process that runs in every session and every meditation runs without stopping, without ordinary life pulling it back before it finishes. What sessions begin and daily practice sustains, a retreat completes.
Matthew founded Quiet Retreats in 1994. Since then he has facilitated more than 200 silent retreats internationally across Australia, Asia and Europe. Every retreat is built on Natural Meditation and Matthew’s direct facilitation. It is the fastest and deepest route to resolution available within Matthew’s ecosystem.
People arrive at retreats at different stages of the work. Some arrive directly from clinic work when Matthew determines that extended silence is the right next step. Others come through the app, having engaged with the method daily and reached the point where depth is what’s needed. Some arrive directly: long-term practitioners, previous retreat participants who return, people who have followed Matthew’s work for years. The readiness, however it arrives, is the same: what hasn’t resolved hasn’t resolved because it needs more uninterrupted time than sessions or daily practice can give it.
The outcomes documented at Quiet Retreats include a 25-year-old recovering her sense of smell lost for over a decade following trauma, a woman in her seventies who had meditated for fifty years and described it as more transformative than the previous fifty years of practice, and an Olympic silver medallist who moved through a personal breakdown without being overwhelmed for the first time.
After a retreat, the Undo app is how people stay connected to what the silence opened, through daily meditation and community. Without continued daily Natural Meditation, what a retreat initiates tends to close. With it, the effect extends over months. Matthew observes this consistently in people who maintain the practice after returning home.