Why retreat isn’t stepping away from the work—it’s part of how we sustain it
Lucretia Carter Berry, PhD • September 22, 2026
A rabid raccoon tried to break into my house!
My dogs heard it first—a strange noise near the tree line—and bolted out the door before I could stop them. I looked up and saw the raccoon coming down the trunk, making sounds I’d never heard an animal make. Rabies was my first thought.
It kept coming toward the dogs.
One dog made it back inside. The other planted herself on the edge of the deck and stared while the raccoon kept coming toward the house.
I grabbed a chair off the deck and threw it down the steps. That bought enough time for my dog to get through the door. I closed it, and the raccoon went door to window, window to door, trying to get in anyway!
I didn’t fight it. I didn’t stand there trying to prove I could handle a rabid raccoon.
I retreated.
I got everyone to safety and let a closed door do what a thrown chair couldn’t. And in the days since, I’ve kept thinking about that.
When something is coming at you hard enough to send your whole body into panic, maybe the answer isn’t to get stronger. Maybe the answer is to get somewhere safe.
To retreat.
To rest.
To recover.
To restore.
Maybe that’s part of what retreat is for.
Not quitting. Not giving up. Not abandoning the work.
But stepping back long enough to remember that you are a person, not just a vessel for the work.
Sometimes retreat means getting out of the way of what’s coming at you. Sometimes it means getting quiet enough to hear what your body has been trying to tell you. Sometimes it means creating enough space to process what you’ve experienced before you take on something else.
Retreat isn’t always about going somewhere. Sometimes it’s simply about making room.
Two days later, I was at Exhale, a self-care breakfast for people doing social justice and equity work across Charlotte, sponsored by GFiber. Dr. Kenya Henderson facilitated a conversation with Juliana Lozano, Dr. Nicole McKinney, Kamal Shaw, and YWCA’s Pamela Senegal about what it costs to do this work and what it takes to stay in it.
One thing that stayed with me was the conversation about listening to your body, paying attention to what happens in your body when your days are filled with other people’s pain, stories, needs, and struggles. I appreciated that. And I appreciated GFiber and the YWCA for creating the space — for gathering us, feeding us, and giving us a chance to simply be together. It was good to meet other people doing this work here in Charlotte.
The breakfast was a reminder that retreat isn’t something we should have to wait for. It’s something we can build into the way we work.
That idea isn’t new to me. In fact, it’s built into What LIES Between Us. When I designed this course, I already knew what would happen when people started talking honestly about race. Things would come up. Guilt. Shame. Grief. Anger. Questions people had never had a safe place to ask. And I knew I couldn’t be the place where everyone put all of that. So I built retreat into the learning.
Not retreat as escape, but as rhythm.
We pause.
We reflect.
We reconsider.
We sit with what we’ve heard and what we thought we knew.
We make room for something new to take shape.
I designed prompts to help people process what is coming up for them rather than simply moving on to the next piece of information. There is good reason for that. Sometimes we need to slow down long enough to name what we’re feeling, make sense of what we’re experiencing, and decide what we want to carry forward.
That’s part of what the journaling component does in What LIES Between Us. It gives people somewhere to put what is coming up—to slow it down, name it, look at it, and begin working through it—without handing it to me or to someone else in the room.
But the deeper intention is the rhythm itself.
Learn.
Pause.
Reflect.
Reconsider.
Renew.
Then return.
I’ve tried to build that rhythm into Brownicity more broadly, too.
We take the month of July off, as much as we can. We slow down significantly in December, when the world around us is already beginning to exhale.
Because learning—and especially learning that asks us to examine things we may have inherited, absorbed, or never questioned—needs room. We can’t keep adding information without giving ourselves time to make meaning of it. We can’t keep asking ourselves to engage difficult things without creating space to breathe. And we can’t sustain meaningful work by treating rest as something we earn after we’ve exhausted ourself.
Most of us have been taught to think about self-care as a repair job.
Push through. Get it done. Then rest.
But what if rest isn’t supposed to be the thing that comes after? What if retreat is part of the blueprint?
The pause before the overwhelm.
The boundary before the burnout.
The space to process before everything becomes too much.
The retreat before the raccoon is already at the door.
I don’t think the answer to sustaining demanding work is to become tougher and tougher. I think we have to become more intentional about how we carry the work—and how we make room to exhale along the way.
And maybe this is the question worth asking:
Where might you need a little more retreat in your life—not to walk away from the work, but to make room to reflect, reconsider, recover, and renew?
Lucretia Carter Berry, PhD, is a distinguished author, educator, and speaker, as well as the visionary founder of Brownicity, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering education designed to inspire a culture of true belonging and justice for all. Lucretia was also a valued contributor to incourage.me, where she shared her insights and wisdom on topics of faith, resilience, and personal growth. Through her books, Teaching for Justice and Belonging – A Journey for Educators and Parents (2022), Hues of You – An Activity Book for Learning About the Skin You Are In (2022), and What LIES Between Us – Fostering First Steps Toward Racial Healing (2016), her impactful TED Talk, and her commitment to building just communities, Lucretia encourages meaningful engagement that transcends boundaries, fostering personal development, resilience, and the transformative capacity within each of us.
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