Guided Personal Retreats with Murshida Saki Lee
“Retreat is a dress rehearsal for daily life.”
— Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
For many decades I have had the privilege of accompanying individuals on personal retreat in places of great natural beauty and silence around the world. These have included the deserts of Rajasthan, the Swiss Alps at the Zenith Sufi Camp, the forests of the Caduceus Centre in Germany, the quiet shores of Crete, the wilderness of Cala Jami in Sardinia, and the peaceful dunes and nearby beaches surrounding Lioba Monastery in the Netherlands.
Retreats may be offered either in person or online. In either setting, they provide a sacred space to step away from the demands of everyday life and listen more deeply to the quiet guidance of the heart.
A Time Set Apart
A guided personal retreat is a sacred gift to yourself.
Beginning with a minimum of five days—and sometimes extending over several weeks—you gently step out of the familiar rhythms of daily life and enter a quieter space where body, mind, heart, and soul can settle into a more natural harmony.
Retreat is not about becoming someone different. Rather, it offers the opportunity to remember who you already are beneath the many demands, expectations, and distractions of outer life.
People come for many different reasons: to deepen their spiritual practice, to find healing and renewal, to discern an important life direction, to navigate a period of transition, or simply to spend uninterrupted time in silence and the presence of the Divine.
Each retreat is lovingly shaped around your own intention and unfolds according to what gradually reveals itself along the way.
How the Retreat May Unfold
Each day includes a personal meeting together, generous periods of silence, and time for reflection, rest, and walks in nature.
As the retreat unfolds, practices and guidance are offered in response to your own needs and inner process. These may include:
- meditation and contemplative prayer
- Buddhist mindfulness and contemplative awareness
- sacred breath, wazaif, zhikr, and other Sufi practices
- healing practices and subtle energetic attunement
- contemplation in nature and elemental attunement
- dream work, journalling, reflection, and spiritual inquiry
Rather than following a fixed programme, the retreat evolves organically, allowing space for your own deepest wisdom to emerge.
About Your Retreat Guide
My own path has been profoundly shaped through many decades of personal retreat and contemplative practice.
Since the mid-1980s I have been immersed in the sacred art of retreat under the guidance of my teacher, Sufi mystic Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, who entrusted me with the transmission of alchemical retreat work. Alongside this, my path has been nourished by the wisdom of Taoism, Traditional East Asian Medicine, Buddhist mindfulness, contemplative Christianity, and other streams of universal wisdom and mysticism.
Over the years I have had the privilege of accompanying hundreds of people through retreats of healing, spiritual deepening, life transition, discernment, and inner renewal. Each retreat has been as much a journey of listening as of guiding.
Rather than offering answers or directing your path, my role is to hold a compassionate, contemplative space where you can listen more deeply to your own heart and soul, and discover the quiet wisdom already present within you.
Returning Home
The true fruit of retreat begins when you return home.
What has been discovered in the quiet solitude of retreat now asks to be lived. The insights, practices, and inner stillness cultivated during these days become an invitation to continue the retreat in the midst of everyday life—with intention, faithfulness, and an ever-deepening awareness of the sacred.
Gradually, the boundary between retreat and daily life begins to dissolve. Life itself becomes the path, and every moment an opportunity to return to the heart.
An Invitation
If you feel drawn towards a guided personal retreat, I would be happy to explore with you whether this is the right time and what form it might take.
You are warmly welcome to write to:
The fulfillment of spiritual practice is diving deep within oneself; it is communicating with each atom of life existing in the whole world; it is realizing the real ‘I’ in which is the fulfillment of life’s purpose.”
— Hazrat Inayat Khan