I know accompaniment as the essential practice of education: the ability to be present alongside others.
To accompany is to seek to better understand—and therefore to better be with—another for its own sake, without the goal of easy resolution or self-congratulatory helpfulness.
Retreats honor the practice of walking alongside another on the unfolding paths of life, of serving as a witness and companion as individuals transform their curiosity into wisdom.
Accompaniment lets go of prescriptive demands—what must be accomplished, what must be learned, what must be valued—and loosely holds tendrils of the imagination—what might be experienced aslant, what might be known differently, what values might bloom anew.
A firm grip, trying too hard to clasp meaning, closes down possibilities of expression and expansion. But an open hand offers space for new relations to form.
Retreat leaders—spiritual directors, organizers, fellow participants, and facilitators—can orient towards the fraught work of being present amidst the cacophony of life. We can embrace accompaniment as a practice of love that does not seek to teach by taming but wander in wondering, together.
Wandering together lies at the heart of accompaniment as a practice of sacred sharing.
An accompanier offers invitations.
We invite people to sit with their multifaceted selves.
We enter into dialogue that strives for mutual presence as its own end.
We respect the body, mind, and spirit as intermingled sources of inspiration.
An invitation that cannot be refused is merely a demand, blocky and bereft of care. Thus, we accept refusal as a necessary condition of these invitations.
An accompanier wishes to see the particularities of another instead of flattening them into tropes of reliability.
I think of bell hooks writing on how we know better together when people are “seen in their particularity…and interacted with according to their needs.”
An accompanier crafts artful questions instead of investing in beautifully packaged answers. They clear away expectations so new alignments of intent and impact can take root.
An accompanier walks in vulnerability and ambiguity instead of righteousness and certainty. They sidestep the pyrrhic victory of immediate reframes in favor of the steady work of slow transformation.
The limit of accompaniment is the limit of attention: how much time and energy, curiosity and capacity one has to attune themselves to another.
D. H. Lawrence writes, “my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.” Accompaniers feel not only for the clearing of the known self but also for the dark forest surrounding it.
We do not need to prune each other’s forests. We do not need better shears, sharper blades, and brawnier action.
We need more people willing to dawdle in the shadowed deeps and distant vales of our imaginings.
We need those who delight in our contradictions, tarry with our uncertainties, and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with us as fears quake, doubts torrent, and insecurities strike.
The Art of Accompaniment
If I witness a retreat participant berating themselves, I might wish to correct their thinking by replacing their sensemaking with my own. I might gift them my understanding.
This may be an act of kindness, but it also projects my worldview over another’s reality. This replaces perspectives instead of engaging perspectives.
You may have experienced such acts of kindness in the form of dismissive optimism, where someone—in trying to uplift, improve, and support you—sprinted away from the thorny complexity of your situation and towards a rosier response. When you’ve just broken up with someone you imagined a loving life with, you don’t really want to hear about other fish in the sea.
When someone gets lost on the trails of life, it’s not someone else’s map they need but others to walk alongside them as a path materializes out of the haze.
The authority of conviction, proscribed resolutions, and blanket affirmations corrode accompaniment.
On the other hand, remaining open to multiple paths forward, to being changed by encounters with others, and trusting in relationship buoy accompaniment.
Recently, a college student shared feeling as though she had no present.
Time-starved, she rushed from class to networking event to co-curriculars to social outings.
Imaginatively-drained, she envisioned a high-intensity professional life that only accelerated her responsibilities.
Relationally-unsteady, she did not feel she could express these thoughts to friends without appearing melodramatic.
Instead of softly chastising and offering readymade solutions, I choose accompaniment.
I listened as she shared more stories.
We laughed at the counterproductive ridiculousness of sprinting through studying.
We cried as she named moments of panic and isolation.
We pondered how the culture of her university influenced her sense of worth, equating busyness and goodness.
After meandering in conversation, I asked how she might reclaim her present. We continued experimenting with different practices for the remainder of the semester.
Accompaniment acknowledges the need to slowly unspool the tangled webs we weave about ourselves without severing strands that quiver with love, meaning, and connection.
Too often, in the hopes of turbocharging learning and expediting joy, facilitators prioritize actionable insights without taking the time necessary to more fully commune with the individual in front of them.
Time matters. Opportunities for follow-up and debriefing matter. Retreat facilitator communities—where designers of retreat experiences can accompany one another— matter.
Instead of colonizing others with the most profound of our intentions and insights, we can accompany others with the most sincere of our empathy and curiosity.
We need more accompaniers.
Retreats offer a place and time to practice this commitment to one another.
If you enjoyed this piece, you might want to check out how sacred places invite us into retreat or how accompaniment and transformation often go hand-in-hand.
