c/o Cecilia Foldessy-Stiegemeier

Two weekends ago, I had the opportunity to go to the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. Kripalu is located in Stockbridge, MA (about an hour and a half from campus) and is named after Swami Kripalvananda, a yoga master and teacher who devoted himself to 8–10 hours of yoga and meditation per day—a little fun fact I learned from the walls in Kripalu’s hallways. 

While I did not attend Kripalu with the purpose of devoting myself to yoga, I did go on a retreat there as part of a program as a Wesleyan Interfaith Literacy and Diversity (WILD) intern and a member of the Mega Interfaith Leadership Council, which is made up of leaders and community members from various religious and spiritual communities on campus. This year, 14 student leaders representing 5 different religious and spiritual communities participated in the Kripalu retreat.

My understanding is that the purpose of bringing an interfaith group, along with the three ORSL chaplains, to a place like Kripalu was to be able to bond and learn about each other’s faiths in a space that is freeing, calm, and prompts reflection. One of the specific skills we focused on was mindfulness. By the end of the retreat, everyone was able to identify one skill related to mindfulness that they would take with them back to their faith community at Wesleyan. According to the results of a survey that all the leaders filled out post-retreat, every student who attended reported that the retreat increased their comfort with engaging in dialogue with people of other religious and spiritual traditions about related issues, and nearly all stated that the retreat enhanced their understanding of other religious or spiritual traditions. I’d call that a success! 

When reflecting back on the retreat from start to finish, I remember one profound moment of contemplation. On the very first night of the retreat, Rabbi David said to us, “Think about what you are retreating from… and now think about what you are retreating to.” To be completely honest, when the question was first phrased, I couldn’t fully answer it. I didn’t really have anything I wanted to escape or run from, and I didn’t know what I needed to reach or obtain by the end of the program. My short but meaningful experience at Kripalu allowed me to answer this question by the end of the retreat. 

In pursuit of learning about each other’s faiths, one of the traditions from my faith I got to share with the other leaders was Shabbat on Friday night. I’m not used to doing Shabbat in front of people outside of my faith community, so at first it felt a bit strange. However, my peers were inquisitive, respectful, and eager to learn. For me, Shabbat is a deeply intimate time of the week that marks a separation between business and serenity, and teaching my peers about Shabbat gave me pride in my own faith through this act of vulnerability.  

One of the first activities we did as a group at Kripalu was swimming in the beautiful Lake Mahkeenac. The water was bitterly cold, and there were bushes of slimy seaweed thrashing at our feet; we couldn’t help but squeal and scream every inch deeper we went. I guess you could say we all felt like children again. 

Another activity many of us partook in was dance yoga. When Reverend Tracy first started telling us about this event and how amazing it would be, I thought to myself, “I don’t dance by myself, let alone in front of a group of 40-year-old moms (the primary demographic of Kripalu).” But I knew the purpose of Kripalu and the retreat was to get outside my comfort zone, both by being exposed to other faith practices and by trying whatever this “dance yoga” was. As I entered the room for dance yoga, a vivacious older woman was swirling around without a care in the world.

Once she asked everyone to be seated, she read a quote by Gabrielle Roth, an American dancer and musician. 

“In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: ‘When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence?’” 

As this quote was being read, I was overcome with emotion and even began to tear up a little. I hadn’t danced since I was five years old in a ballet class, and I also haven’t felt truly connected to the spiritual side of my religion in a very long time. As the class proceeded, I danced like I was five again, along with the 30 other middle-aged women in the room. I even participated in a group dance where I had to make eye contact with random strangers while doing some crazy moves. Even though I was being watched, I didn’t feel watched. I guess I just felt like a child again. 

What the lake and yoga dance have in common is that they allowed us to unleash our inner children while being in a very serious place for a serious purpose. But I think it’s the child in all of us that allowed us to obtain the serious goals our counsel intended to achieve by going on the retreat. We strived for interfaith literacy, and we became literate in the other faiths of the council members by being curious and asking every and any question no matter how specific or silly it sounded—something a child freely does all the time. This was deeply refreshing; I constantly have the responsibility to be an adult in every domain of my life, drawing me away from the childlike curiosity and wonder that was so transformative for me during this retreat. And don’t get me wrong, adults are curious too, but in my opinion, they tend to let that curiosity sit inside of them rather than allow it to spill forth and guide them. In asking these questions, leaning into my childlike wonder, and by being curious, I realized that my faith has much in common with the faiths of my peers.

So now, going back to the question Rabbi David posed at the beginning of our retreat, I can firmly say that I was retreating “from” responsibility and retreating back “to” my childhood.

Zara Skolnik is in the class of 2026 and can be reached at zskolnik@wesleyan.edu.