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I’ve been really excited to share this video with you for a while now . . .
The deepest work I ever do with people takes place during my In-Person Retreat, but trying to describe that experience in a few words has always been challenging because it encompasses SO MUCH. So I wanted to take you behind the scenes with this mini-documentary, which shows you what happens on each day of the event.
Get ready to put yourself in the shoes of some of the incredible women who attended our last Retreat, and hear the stories of how they’ve been able to find reserves of strength, resilience, and hope they didn’t even know they had.
It’s my wish that as you watch this video, it will be like a mini Retreat for you today—inspiring you to take on the rest of your week. (And be sure to leave me a comment once you watch!)
Transform Your Relationship With Life in 6 Magical Days.
Learn More About The Matthew Hussey Retreat . . .
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Jameson:
How do you go from giving dating advice to talking about the deepest questions in life?
Matthew:
I think we live more in one week here than people do in six months. Easily. Easily. And I see people come alive because of that. I see people who have lost a sense of community in their everyday lives, who see what community can be like here. I see people who struggle to be vulnerable in their lives, get vulnerable on a level that they haven’t been in a long time, reveal things about themselves to brand new friends that even the closest people in their lives don’t know. And of course it’s challenging. The funny thing about the Retreat, is it’s not escapism. We don’t get to escape anything on the Retreat. It’s the opposite; we have to deal with everything.
But we find a way to deal with even the most difficult things amongst play, and levity, and fun, and such a sense of romance. And such a love for life.
Leanne:
The whole week has blown my mind, Jameson. The content, the creativity, the immersiveness.
Marcella:
I don’t remember when was the last time that I cried like that, like waterfalls.
Kristen:
This week, the connections, the energy, the compassion.
Asia:
You have to go through it to know. I think you can’t explain, just be ready to learn a different way of being, a different way of seeing the world, and mostly a different way of seeing your inner world.
Jameson:
If you could go back in time to the beginning of the week, what would you tell yourself to expect this week?
Lila:
Gosh. To have your mind blown.
Matthew:
The day before the Retreat, I always spend just focusing on how to begin the process with people, because it’s going to be such a weighty five days in so many ways, and there’s no perfect way to start it. We’re all going to arrive at the same place at the end of it, but where’s the best place to start when you’re working on transforming someone’s life?
Anyone can get the front of house right, but what does it look in the details? What does it look on the things that people might not see, but you do it anyway? They may not even notice, most people won’t notice that detail, but you do it anyway. A, because you are proud of it and that’s your standard. And B, because the ones that do, it will knock them sideways to realize that we care that much. This is not one person who got us all here. This is everybody on the team who got us here, and it’s a lot of work just to get to this point where it’s a ton of work, starting today. It’s a ton of work just to be in a position to be able to do this program that we all love so much. So, thank you to all of you for getting this.
I suppose the expectation with anything like this, is that you’re going to go into a seminar room and you’re going to follow this self-development program that’s going to be just a series of modules that are designed to help you with your life. What people don’t anticipate until they get here, and what can’t even be explained fully until people get here, is that they are entering a world.
We could have a very logical event, where we sat here and we did goal setting, and we worked out all the things we want to achieve in our life, and I gave you a bunch of practical tools. But there are lots of people who can do that. Not all of them as well as me though. This is more than that. It’s your part of a story, and stories have emotion. And there’s a reason that we, as human beings, respond to story. We learn through story, we change through story. It’s not about just going somewhere and getting a bunch of logical information. You could have done that in a book.
You came here because it’s an immersive experience. This model is designed to work with your logical core and your emotional core, and bring them together. When they talk to each other, that’s when you can get yourself to do something. And this is one of the key things that I want us to start to get to today, is an acceptance. An acceptance of where we are right now, because it is one of the most powerful things we can all do. We’re all fantastic at having our functioning face to the rest of the world. And we also have our way, directly or unconsciously, of pretending that we are further along than we are.
And the thing about life, is it doesn’t actually care whether you’re pretending or not, it doesn’t score any points with life. If you say to life, “I’m going to pretend I’m fine.” Life says, “Okay, I’ll see you in five years. I’ll see you at the end of this relationship. I’ll see you in the health problem that comes about because you’re ignoring this. I’ll see you at the breaking point when all of this gets too much and you have a meltdown.” Life will just meet you further down the line. People may believe you, but life doesn’t care, and the only thing that matters to our suffering, is what’s the relationship we have with life?
Jameson:
How do you go from giving dating advice to talking about the deepest questions in life?
Matthew:
I don’t think that dating, or people’s love lives, is nearly as separate from everything else as people think.
Jameson:
And do you remember when you first came across Matthew?
Asia:
Yes, I remember really well. I had a boyfriend for 10 years, and then I got back on the market. And I felt like I didn’t know how to date.
Leanne:
Do you know what? It was probably about three years ago. I was in a pub and someone just mentioned Matthew. And I’ve read the book, How to Get The Guy.
Marcella:
A friend of mine referred me to one of his videos.
Dr Phil:
His advice reaches over 8 million followers weekly, and his YouTube videos have been viewed a few times, 300 million to be exact.
Marcella:
And then, I really liked the guy. It was just someone so down to earth, someone that I would feel so comfortable probably having a cup of coffee or tea.
Jen:
And I can tell you the video that spoke to me, I’m telling you, I watch it all the time. If there was some kind of count, because it puts me there. At the very end, he’s with Dr. Ruth.
Matthew:
I think that’s actually a very important point, is that it’s okay to be disappointed that someone didn’t turn out to be the person that you needed. But what you mustn’t do, is grieve as though they were the one.
Dr Ruth:
Right. A very good point.
Matthew:
It’s a big distinction.
Dr Ruth:
You are a good psychologist. I’ll give you a diploma of a psychologist.
Matthew:
I say good things sometimes.
Jen:
And so, even though this person, to me, always has been the one, when it finally came down to it, I was like, “I have to stop grieving him like he’s the one.”
Leanne:
The bit that really resonated for me, was not about the How to Get the Guy bit. To start off with, that was fun. And then, it was only after listening to the podcast that it became a much more apparent to me that it was just about loving life.
Matthew:
There are three relationships in life. There’s the relationship you have with a significant other, or just other people in general. There’s the relationship you have with yourself. And then, there’s the relationship you have with life itself. And ultimately, those are three relationships you’re always going to be in, in one form or another. How you approach and manage that relationship is key to everything, to your happiness. The Retreat is still about relationships, but it pivots away from just romantic relationships to what is your relationship with yourself? And what is your relationship with life and its challenges and its hardships? And what’s going on for you in your life right now?
There are magic seekers in life, and magic creators. And the magic seekers are never happy. You may have a goal that you want to find a relationship, but life can’t wait until that point. You may have a goal that you want to find a career that’s more fulfilling than the one you’re in right now, but life can’t wait until that point, and it doesn’t mean you should wait to bring soul to what you do now. Bring soul to what you do now even while you’re looking. And when you do that, surprising things might even happen where you are.
Monica:
Matthew talks about what goals are. And then, that it’s not a five-year goal or a three-year goal, it’s setting yourself small steps. And the whole process of goal setting is completely different from almost any other program that I’ve been through. What you get out of it is a sense of who you are in the process of finding who you’re going to be.
Marcella:
The energy from today was wow. Overpowering the room.
Matthew:
Gaining back the hours, gaining back the days, gaining back the weeks, gaining back the years, and resolving not to waste a single one in your precious, precious life.
Asia:
It’s caring, it’s kind. It’s full of love, it’s full of humanity, it’s full of compassion, and it just gets you into a positive, powerful state of being.
Jameson:
If you could come to the Retreat for the first time as an attendee, what do you think you’d be feeling right now?
Matthew:
I think urgency. I’d be feeling urgency. I would become intimate with the urgency in my life of doing the things that I needed to do, of being the way that I wanted to be.
Kelly-Anne:
I was desperate. Desperate for help. I was brutally assaulted by my ex-husband. He got prison time. I was receiving counseling, but it wasn’t enough. I thought maybe I could learn something from this Matthew guy.
Matthew:
What’s your name?
Kelly-Anne:
I’m Kelly-Anne.
Matthew:
Kelly-Anne. Of course, you’re Kelly-Anne. We’ve spoken before, have we not?
Kelly-Anne:
Yes, on the Virtual Retreat last year, September.
Matthew:
So, you were on the Virtual Retreat last year in September, and what happened?
Kelly-Anne:
I was suffering, was, with chronic depression, complex PTSD, and Acrophobia.
Matthew:
And that was preventing you from . . . You were barely going outside, right?
Kelly-Anne:
I wasn’t going outside.
Matthew:
Even that conversation we had on the Virtual Retreat, I seem to remember you were in bed.
Kelly-Anne:
I was.
Matthew:
Yes.
Kelly-Anne:
I was in my bedroom, in my safety zone.
Matthew:
Yeah.
Kelly-Anne:
After that Retreat, that was a life-changing event for me.
After I spoke to him, one-to-one, I don’t know . . . Well, I do know where it came from, but the courage within me just soared. And I put my shoes on, and I went outside for the first time in six months. I’ve got two grandchildren I haven’t seen in Australia. And I’m so desperate to get over there and give them a hug. And that was my first step. Matthew put me on that path.
And Matthew said, at the end of our lengthy one-to-one, that he would actually lose his shit if I came here today.
Lila:
I believe in toolboxes. That everybody have the saying, that everybody has their own toolbox. And depending on what’s in your toolbox depends on what you can build. And so, I’m just really excited about the additions to my toolbox that I’m going to walk away with from this experience.
Marcella:
For someone that has been trying to understand why it’s been so hard to point out certain things in my life for, I don’t know, let’s just say 30 years. To do that in four days? That has been super surprising for me.
Matthew:
Because here’s the thing, this is you. This is somebody else. You do something. Let’s say that’s action A. They have a reaction, let’s call that B. So you, action A, is a standard, a new standard you have. That standard gets tested, consciously or unconsciously, sometimes even by people that love us the most. I’m not just talking about toxic or narcissistic people. Sometimes the people that love us the most push back on new standards we have, because it threatens them. It forces them to grow or reevaluate something they think, it makes them feel bad about themselves.
So, they test it with B. How seriously we are taken in any change in human dynamics depends on C, our reaction to their reaction. Our reaction to their reaction. I have spent 15 years watching the terrible things that people endure in relationships, both romantic and otherwise, and the ways that they stay in them. Not just for way longer than they should, but many people never leave. They never readjust their standards, they never change the nature of the relationship or say goodbye to it. And even when they are given things they could do, because those things remain tactics, not standards, they cannot stick to them, because they are not underpinned by a deeper level of worth and self-love.
Jameson:
How are you feeling?
Leanne:
Just, I’m waiting for something to happen. But when I say nothing’s happened, that’s a load of shit, but I think I’m almost waiting for some tears of some sort, or for some realization to happen. I’m waiting for a light bulb moment and it’s not . . . it’s not there yet. A lot of my friends would probably say that . . . they’d probably describe me as one of the most driven people that they’ve ever met. And they probably would also say, alongside of that, “You’re really fucking hard on yourself.” And people tell me consistently, “You’re really hard on yourself, and you don’t give yourself a break.”
And I do often think that I’m not good enough and I don’t do enough work. I could hear people bawling their eyes out, literally bawling their eyes out. I felt pretty much nothing. And I almost felt a sense of guilt that I wasn’t feeling what maybe I should have been feeling from that.
Matthew:
Unconditional self-acceptance. Unconditional self-acceptance. I need you to know that this relationship with yourself has to be seen a very different way than most of us have been seeing it our whole lives. I heard the line, I think it was Jack Kornfield that said, “Your compassion towards people is incomplete if it does not extend to yourself.” And yet we go through life not looking after ourselves, just hating on ourselves.
The final exercise I want to take you through is going to emotionally connect us with this truth. Here’s the paradigm, here’s the model. Now we need to ingrain it, now we need to cement it.
Marcella:
I had no expectation going into day five. I was like, “Okay, what else can we do? I feel like we’ve done it all.” And then day five was like, “Well, you thought that he had done it all.”
Leanne:
I felt like that was the change that I was been waiting for all week. The whole week has blown my mind, Jameson. The content, the creativity, the immersiveness. I’m so interested in personal development and the psychology behind it anyway, that the content was blowing my mind, but because of the lack of emotion that I was feeling, I felt really frustrated at the beginning of the week. I used to call myself fat and ugly quite a lot. I used to have a very negative relationship with myself in that way. And I really felt that yesterday in the exercise of, “I can’t believe you told yourself that for so many years.”
I feel like a weight’s been lifted off my shoulders. I feel like I’ve got work to do, but I’ve identified the work that I need to do in the right places. God knows what’s going to happen in the next few months, honestly. I’m scared for myself, because I thought if I’ve achieved what I’ve achieved with just me not liking myself, if I’ve now got me and my little best friend in tow . . . Fuck. The world is, yeah, going to take it over, basically.
Asia:
It was overwhelming, even talking about it gets me all emotional. I don’t know how many times I almost cried, because I was so grateful that I was here. We’re dancing, Matthew’s talking, everybody’s . . . And I’m like, “Wow, this is so awesome.” I’m so grateful to myself that I gave this gift to myself.
Jameson:
What would you tell someone who was considering coming on a Retreat?
Kelly-Anne:
Come. I would say to anyone, if you’ve got the chance to empower your own life, then do it. And I just can’t thank you all enough. You’ve put me on the right track. Now I’m here to continue along that track.
Asia:
I’d say do it. Everybody needs to do this. Everybody needs to come.
Leanne:
Do it. Do it, 100%, it’s the best money I’ve ever spent.
Jameson:
What would you tell someone considering coming on the Retreat?
Monica:
Do it. No matter where you are.
Celeste:
I would say do it. No matter where you are in your life, there’s always something that you can pick up. And I talked to so many young ladies. I have so many new daughters and granddaughters.
Monica:
But she’s still mine. All right? It’s mine.
Celeste:
I would tell them don’t even think about it. Just go ahead and do it.
Monica:
And if you can get it together, whether they want to come or not. I didn’t ask her to come, she assumed she was coming, so we ended up working that out. But go with a family member. And if you can get your mom, do it, because it changes a whole lot of the dynamics, you get to learn who that person is in a whole different light, and love them even more.
Celeste:
That’s right, baby doll.
Monica:
That’s right.
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