Silent Retreat – PachaMama, Costa Rica

This silent retreat at PachaMama Eco Village & Retreat Center in Nicoya, Guanacaste, Costa Rica, is a silent meditation retreat for people who want to set everything else down for a few days and attend to what matters most. It is framed as a call to focus solely on the most earnest questions of the heart and to spend some days in silence in a beautiful, natural setting. It suits anyone drawn to that kind of quiet, whether the question is a long-standing one or has only just surfaced.

What to Expect

The invitation is simple: silence, and the questions you carry. Rather than filling the days with teachings or activity, the retreat gives you room to stay with what is true for you, without conversation to carry you away from it. The retreat runs for several days and is held in silence throughout, in a natural setting that does a good deal of the work by being quiet itself.

PachaMama also hosts other silence-based gatherings, and they differ from this one. Vipassana is a separate program, built around sitting silently and watching, just being with what is. Silence Music Prayer combines silence with music, prayer and voice. This retreat is the one offered simply as time in silence with the heart's own questions.

The silent retreat has been scheduled more than once in the season, including a December retreat and a later one in the new year, so there is usually more than one chance to attend.

The Setting

PachaMama Eco Village & Retreat Center sits in the Nicoya region of Guanacaste, in Costa Rica's tropical forest country. The center holds a wide range of gatherings through the year, among them meditation retreats, yoga workshops, body cleanse programs, emotional healing workshops, Red Road ceremonies and musical journeys, so it is a place where people come specifically to do inner work and where silence is understood.

The center closes its doors during Costa Rica's rainy season, in September and October, so retreats run in the other months of the year.

Before You Go

Come ready to be quiet. The retreat is for those who wish to spend several days in silence and give their full attention to the questions of the heart. Since silence is the center of the practice, it helps to arrive with a willingness to leave conversation, and the usual reflex to fill a pause, behind for the duration.