Misbehaviour on Retreat: Rule-Breaking and the Labours of the Self

Abstract

Current scholarship tends to frame retreat-going, and the practices carried out therein, as emblematic of late-modern forms of self-work, understanding retreats as part of broader personal life projects of self-mastery and self-knowledge. For this article, I draw on empirical data to suggest that, although work on the self is typically the central concern for retreat-goers, they also question or outright reject the discipline of the retreat space by breaking its ‘rules’. Borrowing insights developed in the context of organisation studies, I describe two kinds of such ‘misbehaviour’ on retreat. First, I explore how retreat-goers misbehave in regards to the rules around intimacy, since sexual and erotic desire is usually discouraged but nonetheless features in retreat-goers’ experiences. Then, I explore examples of collective misbehaviour and suggest that retreat-goers often work together to ensure the retreat’s success by collaboratively breaking the rules through practices like gossip. This article contributes an understanding of how wellbeing practices might be usefully made sense of as social accomplishments, situated within the greater swathe of everyday life. But I also map out one way in which the concept of ‘misbehaviour’ might be applied to activities outside of the workplace.

Introduction

Current scholarship tends to frame retreat-going, and the practices carried out therein, as emblematic of late-modern forms of self-work, understanding retreats as part of broader personal life projects of self-mastery and self-knowledge. Tourism studies see retreat-going through the lens of alienation in Western society, seeing people as dupes of the contemporary need to establish an authentic self. Sociologists have therefore often connected retreat-going with Foucauldian notions of self-discipline, as producing docile subjects and well-governed individuals. I seek to nuance our understanding of retreat spaces in this respect.

For this article, I draw on empirical data to suggest that, although work on the self is typically the central concern for retreat-goers, they also question or outright reject the discipline of the retreat space by breaking its ‘rules’. Borrowing insights developed in the context of organisation studies (OS), I describe two kinds of ‘misbehaviour’ on retreat. First, I explore how negotiations around intimacy can be a source of difficulty for retreat-goers, since sexual and erotic desire is usually discouraged but nonetheless features in retreat-goers’ experiences. To manage these feelings, retreat-goers break the rules, for example, by withdrawing from mandatory activities. Then, I explore instances of collective misbehaviour and suggest that retreat-goers work together to ensure the retreat’s success, sometimes collaboratively breaking the rules to do so.

The article makes two related contributions to the existing literatures. It softens the general perspective on retreats as spaces of pure self-discipline by pointing to ways in which discipline is not easily or consistently maintained. It contributes to our understanding of misbehaviour, which to date has been mostly studied in the workplace. I suggest that the concept can also help make sense of voluntaristic spaces (where people elect to attend and so to abide by the rules) like retreats. But I also suggest the concept is better approached with an understanding of social interaction and rule-following drawn from interactionist and pragmatist analyses, since my data suggest misbehaviour is not simply about individuals doing what they wish in the face of management rule. Rather, I argue that misbehaviour should be thought as an interactional strategy deployed to navigate complex social arrangements.

Literature review

Self-discipline and consumer culture

While existing sociological scholarship on retreat-going is relatively limited (Hodgson, 2022; Pagis, 2010, 2015, 2019), it is often useful to include retreats alongside a number of cognate social practices, like wellbeing tourism, yoga holidays, and ‘alternative’ or spiritual gatherings (Cohen et al., 2017; Irvine, 1999; Kelly, 2012; Norman and Pokorny, 2017; Smith and Diekmann, 2017; Tavory and Goodman, 2009). This is because scholars tend to orient their analyses towards features common to these practices and to retreat-going. These include a focus on rhetorics and practices of self-work and self-development; the mix of emphasis on collective and individualistic elements (like group discussions and solo meditation); the connection with consumption practices and leisure; and the typical aims of personal change and transformation. Most of this literature is critical of ‘self-help’ cultures, viewing them as alienating or disempowering despite their stated promises to the contrary. Rindfleish (2005) explores how New Age self-help texts constantly incite their readers to improve themselves, with a major caveat – because the texts themselves are never fully satisfactory in terms of the remedies they advise, upon consumption, readers are further incited to purchase more self-help texts. Hence, the self becomes the lure for continuing consumption. People who engage in these kinds of activities are thus conceptualised as dupes of late-modern forms of consumption.

These accounts often draw Foucaultian notions of a disciplinary society, capillary power, and biopolitics (Foucault, 1975, 1978). In the main, they seek to understand retreats and cognate practices as a cultural manifestation of the turn, in late-modern society, towards self-discipline as the primary mode of population control. Mickie McGee (2012) considers self-help as a major strategy through which advanced capitalist societies foster conformity in their citizens. She reads the ‘products of self-help culture (life coaching, workshops, retreats, and more recently webinars, chat rooms, and bulletin boards) [as] among the means by which advanced capitalist societies govern their subjects’ (McGee, 2012: 686) in part because these products direct action exclusively inwards, onto the self, rather than outwards, towards social problems. Similarly, in his now famous critique of ‘McMindfulness’, Ronald Purser frames the mindfulness encouraged via the corporate wellbeing programmes of Google, Goldman Sachs, and General Foods, among others, as shaping employees into ‘docile’ subjects that bear full responsibility for their own wellbeing (Purser, 2019; Purser and Loy, 2013).

Such accounts align with other critiques made about wellbeing (Davies, 2015), therapy, and psychological approaches to health and happiness (Nehring and Kerrigan, 2019; Rose, 1990, 1998), which see such products as merely mitigating the effects of, and at worse actively contributing to, the ongoing harms of Western late capitalism. Sharma (2014) unpicks the rhetoric surrounding lunchtime yoga classes, which, while promising to offer ‘time-out’ from sedentary office life, actually serve to ‘recalibrate’ the bodies of middle-class office workers and render them more productive while ameliorating the sense of alienation and despondency generated by unfulfilling but well-paid jobs. The orientation of this existing scholarship is largely pessimistic. But the uniformity of these accounts raises a question of whether retreats are always straightforward training centres for better disciplined and compliant subjects, or ‘docile bodies’. If that is the case, what do we make of the fact people also appear to derive some benefits from such experiences that are often non-cognitive, hard to put into words, or that involve other people rather than just the self (Hodgson, 2022; Pagis, 2010, 2015, 2019)?

As Ackroyd and Thompson (2003) write in another context, the assumption in such scholarship is that consumers of self-help culture, including those who attend retreats, are merely passive subjects of discipline; whether the dupes of self-steeped rhetoric that erroneously promises fulfilment or complacent bodies who will their own subjection. What has been less widely considered is the ways in which retreat-goers also exhibit degrees of agency. After all, Foucault emphatically linked the workings of power to the generation of resistance or ‘counter-conduct’, the small individual acts of non-compliance that emerge by default as the subject is sculpted, disciplined, and positioned – or the ‘struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others’ (Foucault, 2007: 201). There are nascent studies that explore this point in the context of practices like mindfulness and self-care. Godrej (2022) examines the capacity for meditation and ‘rehabilitative forms of self-discipline’ to both encourage prisoners to accept (misplaced) responsibility for structural injustices and, at the same time, teach attentiveness to social inequality. And Illouz (2003) has pointed out that self-help culture can generate life-style possibilities that are not necessarily normative. But these points are, on the whole, minor notes of ambivalence in an otherwise critical field. The forms of resistance of those carrying out self-work has been consistently underemphasised, and real ‘counter-conduct’ has not been explored in retreats or like spaces in any serious way so far. In line with recent efforts to consider power relationships as social accomplishments (Giustini, 2022), there is thus an empirical and conceptual question at stake here: is there evidence of misbehaviour and resistance-like practices in these spaces, and if so, how best should we conceptualise this given the nature of retreat-going as a highly voluntaristic set of practices?

Non-compliance, resistance, and misbehaviour

The small amount of ethnographic work on retreats tends to agree that retreats are highly disciplined spaces – as in Michal Pagis’ studies of the intense physical and cognitive discipline demanded of participants during Vipassana retreats (Pagis, 2015, 2019). So far no study explicitly addresses ‘bad behaviour’ in retreat-going contexts per se, and, in part, this article aims to close the gap by drawing on work carried out in OS. The concept of ‘misbehaviour’ developed by Ackroyd and Thompson (2003) offers a useful way to conceptualise rule-breaking. Misbehaviour describes the way workers would maintain an overall stance of compliance with workplace regulations, management directives, and supervisors’ orders but also engage in collective and individual efforts to find ways to non-comply, that is, to not do what they were asked to carry out, often in hidden or secretive ways. This might have involved dawdling, gossiping, jokes, playing games, ‘soldiering’, or going as slowly as possible, as well as a more serious or even dangerous behaviour like sexual misconduct, fighting, and sabotage. Scholars in OS tend to overlook misbehaviour, particularly forms like joking, because it is often hard to understand in terms of organised, collective action, like strike efforts. Ackroyd and Thompson maintain that misbehaviour should be seen as the result of what they call ‘self-organisation’. This describes the tendency for groups to emerge within the workplace that have their own interests and identities, ones which can depart from those of management (Ackroyd and Thompson, 2003: 55). Driving the emergence of self-organisation is ‘the pursuit of autonomy’, although this is less about the liberation of workers from management control and more about a desire to do things their own way – to literally organise themselves, rather than be organised. Skilled workers can often work in highly self-organised ways that align with management interests, what is understood to be ‘responsible self-organization’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 2003: 59).

Ackroyd and Thompson develop misbehaviour as an alternative to the more individualised, Foucaultian concept of ‘resistance’, which they find relatively unhelpful for understanding non-compliance in the workplace. Bottero (2019) points out that scholarly work in OS, at least the work against which Ackroyd and Thompson were writing, often lent heavily on Foucaultian accounts of power, and were ‘so focused on explaining how workers are controlled (as docile and useful bodies through the “government of the soul”) that they simply fail to see how workers resist such constrains and exercise agency’ (p. 159). At the time, many OS scholars had conceded the failure of collective bargaining and promoted more individualistic or identity-based efforts to resist power. This same tendency towards analyses of individualistic attitudes to power characterises much of the critical literature on retreat-going, self-care, and self-work, which, as I have suggested, is very interested in how such practices dominate their practitioners but less interested in how practitioners can and do respond to such efforts. Misbehaviour makes ambiguity more visible, as Bottero (2022) notes, since ‘commitment to work may actively provoke dissent’ from workers who find management to be ineffective or inefficient (11). Misbehaviour also helps articulate how workers may be proud of their own craftsmanship but resent management interference in how they go about achieving their results. When it surveys workplace non-compliance as a dualistic battle between workers and management, OS overlooks complexities of action, intention, or motivation – how worker’s commitments, whether to themselves, their work, management, or the organisation, may be multiple, ambivalent, and ambiguous. I suggest the same can be said of critical perspectives on self-work, given the comparable examples of misbehaviour I find in my data.

Methods

The data I draw upon in developing my argument were collected during a one-year project exploring how people went on retreats, the sorts of practices they engaged in on retreat, and what was important to them during their time there. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 21 retreat-goers and six retreat owners who had also been on retreats themselves (17 women and 10 men). Here, I focus only on the accounts of the retreat-goers. All but two participants were White – one woman was British African-Caribbean, and one woman was British Asian. Participants ranged in age from their mid-20s to early 70s, although roughly half the participants were in their 40s and 50s, and just under a third in their thirties.

All participants had been on retreats before, which served as the primary criterion for inclusion. I left the definition of retreat up to participants to explore commonalities across a range of retreat and retreat-going practices, to discern what we might find of similarity in these shifting and heterogeneous spaces. This led to a diverse sample, both in terms of the retreats attended and of frequency. Retreat types mentioned included mindfulness (5), energy healing (4), Buddhism (4), wellbeing (2), Ignatian meditation (2), secular meditation (2), Christian (2), nature (1), shamanism (1), transcendental meditation (1), Vipassana (1), Ayahuasca (1), and yoga (1). The frequency of retreat-going also varied within my sample. Five participants only attended a retreat once. Just over half of the remaining participants (12) went on several retreats but engaged with one specific type of retreat in particular (Clarissa habitually went on a Vipassana retreat once a year). The remaining participants (10) engaged in a variety of different types of retreats and discussed two or more different retreat experiences in their interviews.

Most retreats were highly organised events and consisted of at least one day’s worth of carefully timetabled activities. Typically, a retreat manager, or sometimes a team of two or more managers, would oversee the group through all the activities, although sometimes a specialist was involved to deliver particular activities, like a Tai Chi teacher or an art therapist. Such activities might include group meditation for around an hour; group discussion about a particular theme or topic; a seminar or lecture; physical activity like yoga, tai chi, or swimming; an hour-long contemplation of an object of interest (like a relic or a countryside vista); ‘sharing circles’ wherein feelings and thoughts were allowed to be freely expressed by the retreat-goers. In some cases, the passing of time was measured by a bell, which signalled the group to move from one activity to the next. Some activities were taken in silence. Other times, the whole retreat was silent, with discussion permitted only for emergency matters like a medical incident. Meals were almost always taken together. Food was typically vegetarian; on one retreat, it was forbidden to bring meat onto the retreat grounds. Mobile phone usage was typically limited, with phones being collected by the retreat leader at the beginning of the retreat and returned at the end. Retreat-goers were typically discouraged from travelling with a romantic or sexual partner, and since the focus of most retreats was spiritual development, sex and physical intimacy between retreat-goers (in some cases, also sexual urges and thoughts) were considered inappropriate.

Advertisements were placed in online fora and on social media. Once an initial round of recruitment had taken place this way, I then recruited via snowball sampling. I did not ask questions about class or occupation, and these themes did not come up in the interview. That said, the sample seemed to reflect the argument in the literature regarding the target market of holistic tourists, and I judge that participants mostly belonged to the middle-class. The data do resemble what we might find in the broader population of retreat-goers although generalisability is not possible here. At the same time, this narrow sample in terms of ethnicity, age, and class limits the interpretation of the data and poses further questions regarding how I can extend my analysis, which I will return to in the conclusion.

The interviews lasted, on average, around an hour in length. The interview questions were open-ended but focused on three general areas: what participants did to prepare for a retreat; what participants did while on a retreat; and what participants did after the retreat. In some cases, participants provided detailed descriptions of their practices and experiences in these areas, but others told stories about how retreats were situated in their lives more broadly. Most of the semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants face-to-face in a location of their choice, usually a public café, and were mostly conducted in the Northwest of England (several interviews were conducted in London, and one in Southeast England). Eight interviews were conducted via Skype. All the interviews were transcribed professionally and checked for accuracy by the primary researcher, who also coded the interviews using a qualitative analysis software program (NVivo 12).

The coding process was conducted via thematic analysis first, and then a more targeted pass through the data was conducted, to find examples of both commonality and difference within the key areas identified by the initial sweep. On the first pass, I noticed the importance of rules and discipline to retreat-going practices. Another area that soon became apparent was reports of rule-breaking. After further reflection, and an additional pass of the data, I noted the tendency to discuss problems with following the rules and non-compliance, whether their own non-compliance or that of others.

Bad connections, misbehaviour, and intimacy

Intimacy on retreat was usually discussed in terms of a sense of brotherhood or connectedness that results from the disclosure of information, emotions, and personal insights to the wider group. This follows the general priority of ‘disclosing’ intimacy as the apex of intimacy in contemporary Western social life (Jamieson, 1998, 1999) but could also be seen as a discursive variant of ‘communitas’, a ritualised sense of connectedness and common humanity (Turner, 1974). Developing a sense of connection and intimacy with others was an expected part of retreat participation, constituting a principle according to which the retreat was organised. As Olivia says, ‘you really notice when someone’s not there, and then it’s been commented on, as they’re not joining in with the community and adding to the community feel’. But there were limits to intimacy, since sex and erotic experiences were generally prohibited. Indeed, contrary to the popular view of New Age spiritual groups as ‘adrift in a sea of permissiveness’ (Aidala, 1985: 291) – as bastions of free love – a highly proscriptive approach to sexuality was in fact often common among alternative communities, informed by a equation, derived from both Eastern and Western religions, of spirituality with purity and sexuality with pollution.

Robert attended transcendental meditation retreats, which were, among other things, informed by a general requirement to abstain from sexual activity: ‘one of the rules was like, no sex, no masturbation, no nothing, you know [. . .] you don’t lose your sexual energy, you retain your sexual energy’. This echoes ideas in Eastern mysticism that link celibacy and the retention of semen with self-mastery (in Ayurveda, ‘the promotion of an ideal of embodied power’, see Alter, 2013: 179). For Robert, prohibitions on sexuality led to the following struggle:

Somebody arrived late – it was a young woman, probably about thirty. I looked at her, she was really attractive and I can remember saying to myself, ‘Oh fuck me, I’m in trouble’. It was like somebody like her was the last person I wanted, somebody that I was actually going to fancy. [. . .] I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Drove me nuts and I remember going and talking to the [retreat leader] and saying, ‘Look I know this is bonkers but I’ve got the screaming hots for this lass and I don’t know what to do’. And he was saying ‘Who has got the screaming hots for this lass? Who are you? What is going on here?’ And I tried and I tried and nothing would shake it off.

Robert’s troublesome, inappropriate desires are prohibited, but they are also the overwhelming feature of his retreat experience and something that he felt ought to have been resolved through talk or meditation. He wanted help to abide by the rules and overcome this intense, embodied experience. But neither the talking meditation practice nor discussion with a retreat leader sufficiently dispersed his attraction. At the end of the retreat, the woman asked him to help her fix her car; ‘afterwards, I gave her a hug, and this is the weird thing, the moment I touched her, it just all disappeared – I found out she was actually just sort of flesh and blood and just a human being and not some fantasy that was twirling in my heart’. His distress is relieved through a brief but powerful experience of intimacy – the production of a ‘potent’ connection (Hodgson, 2022; Mason, 2018) – which also holds significant value for his own understanding of self. He told me ‘I have never fallen in love in that way ever again since, and that was like a massive lesson that was taught to me’. But the embrace – which might be taken on the surface as a customary communication of thanks – is also the longed-for expression of his erotic desire and a breach in the strict rules against indulging in ‘sexual energy’ even if it is brief and occurs right at the end of the retreat process. It is a sort of misbehaviour that leads to self-knowledge. In that sense, his comments show how insights into the self can emerge outside of the stringent norms of the retreat, through their transgression. Misbehaving in his feelings, thoughts, and – at the end – his use of physical intimacy was ultimately central to the retreat’s success, at least for Robert.

Intimacy threw up other problems for retreat-goers. Some participants were quite able to abide by the rules on sexual intimacy but ended up breaking different sets of rules around participation. Lorelei explained that another retreat-goer was ‘far too flirty for his own good, made constant sexual innuendos and jokes, a highly inappropriate guy’. His bad behaviour stemmed from the fact that ‘men are not necessarily used to having their sexuality censored and, on these retreats, it is actually imperative that you’re not indulging in sexual energy because it’s a distraction’. He acted in gendered, patronising (but, I sensed, familiar, for Lorelei) ways towards her – when she shared personal experiences in the group, he would not respond by ‘just accepting what I said, instead he offered a lot of advice and that’s not really appropriate’. Lorelei put her finger on a tension between two sets of competing directives. On the one hand is the need for men to reign in their ‘sexual energy’; on the other hand is the encouragement for all participants to make themselves vulnerable and open in the spirit of authenticity, which was usually seen as key to spiritual and emotional growth. For Lorelei, since the group failed to manage the interloper’s misbehaviour (and the retreat space itself failed to spot a familiar gendered dynamic at work here), her feelings of disquiet grew to the point where she would avoid sitting near the troublesome retreat-goer and stopped disclosing her experiences in sharing circles where he was present. Lorelei began to withdraw from the retreat process itself wherever he was involved, ‘I wouldn’t want him to be like near me, he was loud and crude’. Withdrawal and non-participation became a non-confrontational (but also non-compliant) strategy to manage his presence. In another similar case, a retreat-goer’s own taboo sexual desires caused her a problem (like in Robert’s anecdote), but she solved this by misbehaving through withdrawal (like Lorelei did). On one meditation retreat, Olivia decided to spend a portion of the time removed from the group activities, carrying out meditation alone in the grounds outside rather than with others, and taking long walks on the nearby beach during sharing circles. Olivia did not explain her decision to abscond until later in her interview, when she told me that: ‘I did fancy someone. But I was on retreat, and I was trying to pull myself away from him’. Like Lorelei, non-compliance with the directive on group participation was generated by an effort to follow the retreat’s rules on intimacy – misbehaving in one sense to play by the rules in another. But her ‘misbehaviour’, and the resulting time she spent away from the rhythms and activities of the group, dialled up background ambivalence about the retreat and led her to openly question the rules of the retreat in a more general way. She began to doubt the prohibition on ‘sexual energy’ itself, asking herself, ‘well, why can’t I fancy someone? What’s wrong with those feelings?’ After a number of equivocations on the issue in the research interview, Olivia eventually told me that she felt this particular retreat format was not ‘for’ her and instead planned to attend a women’s retreat, with a focus on sexual healing, a few weeks later.

Predominant sociological perspectives on retreats and cognate practices hold them to be sites of self-discipline, but as my data suggest, this is not a good description of the complicated dynamics involved in how participants navigate what is expected of them in such spaces. For a retreat to ‘work’ at bringing about self-realisation, it requires of participants ‘authentic’ self-expression alongside constrained or sensitive attentiveness to the collective; intimacy, proximity, and vulnerability alongside a non-sexual or non-erotic disposition to others; and the pursuit of self-knowledge alongside active rejection of sexual desires and erotic experiences. My data suggest participants became sensitised to the fact it was not possible to carry out self-work by following all the rules to the letter. They approached rules ‘actively’ rather than passively, as able to follow some and as choosing to breach others, to navigate the complex dynamics in those groups while also endeavouring to still achieve their self-work aims. In highlighting this flexible approach to rule-following, misbehaviour on retreat might start to support pragmatist arguments that see social rules as apprehended and acted upon within the context of everyday social interaction, used, discarded, manipulated, or even invented, in order to carry out a range of mundane, practical social accomplishments like establishing how action should be understood, accounting for one’s behaviour, restoring a sense of orderliness to interaction, and so on (Bottero, 2019: 179–180; Garfinkel, 1967; Hilbert, 2009). After all, the non-compliant, erotically charged bodily contact Robert made with his fellow retreat-goer helps him re-frame his disturbing and disruptive desires (which might have simply ruined his retreat experience) into a ‘massive lesson’ for him, perhaps the reason he was supposed to attend the retreat in the first place, and so to generate an account of his own successful self-realisation and, moreover, of the retreat’s efficacy.

In Bottero’s (2022) analysis, ‘grudging’ acts are tasks we would rather not do but nonetheless perform because our commitments to particular activities like work or family are embedded in the weft of social life – whether that means we feel obliged to others or hold some unpleasant tasks as necessary for the accomplishment of other projects. We act in grudging ways to resolve a practical problem when faced with, on the one hand, one’s own wants, self-interests, desires, appetites, and so on, versus our commitment to agreements made with others, whether bonds, projects, programmes, rules, bonds, and so on; grudgingness involves the half-hearted sacrificing or suspension of self-interestedness for collective ends. I suggest a flavour of grudgingness appears in the examples of misbehaviour related to me in retreat-goers’ accounts, inasmuch as their ambivalences alert us to the fact my participants actively managed the rules but felt conflicted about doing so. Lorelei, Olivia, and Robert reluctantly ditch some rules – some commitments – in order to meet other ones. This suggests that retreat-going, and the self-work conducted therein, is not simply about turning disciplinary efforts ‘inwards’, onto the self. Retreat-going is also about ‘practically and morally [weighing] up engagements in relation to other commitments, obligations and constraints’ (Bottero, 2022: 7). Rather than just being about the one-way workings of power, retreat-going is better understood as involving a relatively fraught process of working out the right thing to do within relationships from a lot of conflicting options. What appears in my data as ‘misbehaviour’ can be helpfully conceptualised as participants’ efforts to resolve practical dilemmas of relationships. It stands as evidence of the ‘practical [moral] reasoning’ that takes place in retreat-going (i.e. efforts to work out the right course of action from within the relationships that shape a specific social practice, see MacIntyre, 1999; Sayer, 2011: 1).

Unserious others and collective acts of misbehaviour

One might ask a reasonable question about how seriously the rules were taken. Is this truly ‘misbehaviour’, as Ackroyd and Thompson understand it, if that concept was developed to explain rule-breaking in highly constrained situations like the workplace? After all, going on retreat is voluntary – no one is making you do it. But to that I would say that taking rules seriously was a key part of how retreats were supposed to work. Lorelei told me how she loved ‘the discipline of an hourly bell telling us where to go’ as it allowed her to focus wholly on herself. Retreats gave permission to take self-work (i.e. self-realisation, emotional exploration, inner healing) as seriously as one might take securing a livelihood, given the same weight, even produced in the same way – through disciplined and directed labour, collective agreements, and so on. In that sense, retreat-going starts to look like a form of serious leisure (Stebbins, 2004, 2017), with the self as the object about which participants develop expertise, or perhaps a kind of collective playtime, the playfulness of which is disguised under (or enabled by) a veil of seriousness, as there is resonance with Riezler’s (1941) comments on play as a suspension of everyday life: ‘we disregard the context of ordinary life, the meaning of things, their demands, our obligations, and put in their place meanings, demands, and obligations of our own making. In playing we enjoy being our own masters’ (p. 511). The point here being that people went on retreat to take the project of the self seriously, and a part of that work would be taking seriously the rules purported to facilitate this as well – at least in theory.

In practice, my data suggest that other people (the connections made with them and obligations made to them) threw up problems for retreat-goers that occasioned moderating how seriously rules were followed, close to the examples discussed in the first part of this article. Simon travelled to a remote retreat located in a national park. He made friends with two German women, attending the same retreat, with whom he happened to share a taxi ride. The three initially found it difficult to take on some of the retreat’s more stringent rules around silence and talk. He told me that ‘there was period of silence at the start’, but instead of obediently keeping this, he said: ‘we all took it as a bit of a joke’. Simon told me, ‘We were doing sign language, passing notes to each other, or going somewhere and having a chat on the hillside’. This misbehaviour, presented to me as relatively harmless and playful fun, akin to group bonding, ran on throughout the retreat. Simon and his friends would dip out, break the retreat’s silence, and express solidarity with each other rather than focus on the serious labour of the self. Simon’s anecdote shows his capacity for a playful approach to the rules or sense that taking things seriously was not guaranteed – arguably, the risks of taking the retreat too seriously also hang over Simon’s head, given the prominence of his newly-made friends within his anecdote. As Ackroyd and Thompson say, ‘people at work are not inert or passive. They actively engage with their work, developing identification with workmates and the activities they undertake’ (p. 74). Just as in the workplace, friendships and connections may become more important to participants than the stated aim of their shared efforts; new sets of norms and concerns, clandestinely negotiated beyond the view of management, can threaten to overshadow their commitment to the managers’ goals. In that sense, workers and retreat-goers both must grapple with contrasting normative frames, working out when and where to take them seriously, and when and where to relax the attention they pay to them.

Olivia went on a range of meditation, outdoors, and shamanic retreats. Some of these involved periods of silence carried out before and after ‘sharing circles’, where participants disclosed their emotional experiences and, sometimes, vulnerabilities. On one retreat, she felt the management team had failed in ‘holding’ the space well enough for authentic sharing to take place. She told me:

We finished meditating on the first night and I was just one of the last ones to go, and I saw the leaders, a guy and a woman, hug each other. But they were hugging each other in a way that I knew that they were a couple. There was no kissing. But it just completely threw me off guard, and I thought, ‘They’re not supposed to be here’. And I detested the fact that they were there. Because it was upsetting the dynamic and they weren’t honouring the space. They weren’t honouring the way that things were supposed to be.

When Olivia discussed the retreat managers’ behaviour with others during their breaks, after the day’s activities, or when working together and out of earshot, further details came to light. Like the fact ‘the woman [retreat manager] was less able to say what she felt, in front of the husband’ and that they all shared a sense of ‘being judged, as if it was them versus us’. Eventually, open conflict erupted between the retreat-goers and the leaders. As a somewhat starling end to her anecdote, Olivia told me how this newly formed ‘resistance’ was able to challenge the managers directly. Then, when the managers reacted poorly to the group’s feedback, the group went above the managers’ heads and called in the managing organisation (a parent company) to ensure the retreat went ahead but with new managers installed. In effect Olivia helped stage a coup d’état.

Wanda told me a similar story, this time nestled in a biographical account of how her retreat-going practices changed over time. She attended a range of retreats, from silent meditation retreats to events centred on a theme. As her retreat ‘career’ developed (Potter, 2019), she became gradually more interested in retreats managed by a national organisation with a specific psychological focus and attended these on a regular, yearly, basis. Over time, she gravitated towards a specific retreat mentor, Lorna, who took an idiosyncratic approach to self-development that captured Wanda’s attention. Despite operating under the brand of a parent company which provided psychological services, Lorna designed her mentorship around reflection on spiritual and mystic issues (like using Tarot cards) alongside psychological ones. This integrative or holistic approach appealed to Wanda and gave her a broader sense of the possibilities for self-work than the retreat programme might have otherwise offered. On one retreat, however, Lorna was removed from mentorship duties. When the organisation offered her a replacement mentor, Wanda rebelled:

I said actually this doesn’t work for me. So I just won’t have mentorship. And that didn’t go down very well, and then sudden manoeuvring went on behind the scenes and the next minute I was told I was back with Lorna. I don’t think they liked it. I got the feeling I was being difficult. But I didn’t like it. On the second or third session with the replacement I said to them, ‘this doesn’t really work for me. So I’m not going to continue with being mentored. I’m just going to stay here and do some breath-work [meditation] on my own’.

In this quote, Wanda describes how she downs tools and went on strike, so to speak. Hers is a rebellion that seems pitched against the retreat organisation but nonetheless demonstrates her continuing efforts to work on herself. Later, Wanda talked with another retreat-goer about the issue, and, by piecing together titbits of gossip, between them they worked out that certain members of the retreat management team felt threatened by Lorna’s popularity and her unconventional approach to retreat mentorship. The two conspirators decided not to return to this particular programme: ‘It tainted all the experiences I had, you know, I felt like I’d had really profound meaningful experiences and it felt really deep and amazing, and [Lorna] had been so talented and amazing that you just thought – what? How short-sighted’.

Both participants’ misbehaviour begins as thoughts and opinions that are critical about the retreat management and in intense feelings that run against the affective disposition expected of the retreat space (hatred, for Olivia). But this activity gains a collective charge when gossip and badmouthing enter the picture. For Olivia, gossiping spreads information about the leaders’ transgressions throughout the cohort. Gossiping helps Wanda cement her illicit loyalty to Lorna, establishes ties with another retreat-goer, affirms a hostile and critical disposition towards the retreat managers, and provides her justification to leave this particular retreat programme. Critical approaches might struggle to make sense of this sort of misbehaviour, where the sense of just who is being governed, and who is in control, is unclear. We could read these examples as instances of the way gossip contributes to overall group regulation, close to how Noon and Delbridge (1993: 32–33) see gossip as playing some role in the maintenance of an organisation’s values, norms, and structure. Or we could attend more sympathetically to the participants’ sense of betrayal and see gossip as a ‘weapon-of-the-weak’ – an informal collective practice for challenging unjust power relationships (Boehm, 2012; Scott, 1989). In reality, gossip in these cases is neither straightforwardly about resisting power, nor an obvious disciplinary practice, but in some ways both of these things.

From one perspective, both Olivia and Wanda liaise with others to restore seriousness to self-work, whether their own project or the collective endeavour. They do this by breaking the rules themselves: they gossip, refuse to ‘work’, reject the commands, question management authority, and so on. But it is also possible to differentiate between misbehaviour that challenges the rules of the retreat, on the one hand, and misbehaviour that repairs those norms on the other. Wanda’s strike action might be viewed as belonging to the first category, as a liberatory rejection of rule-following. In contrast, Olivia’s rebellion repairs the norms that had been previously upset by hypocritical managers. In that sense, misbehaviour on retreat appears patterned like workplace misbehaviour, which can either run against management interests (in practices like dangerous workplace ‘hazing’) or in their favour (when workers cut corners to improve their own productivity). However, on closer look, we find ambiguity. For one, Olivia’s reparative work both restores discipline and also involves or requires a devaluation of the disciplinary norms in the process. Conversely, Wanda’s liberation from the rigours of retreat-going appears to tighten her commitment to ‘disciplinary’ self-work. In practice, then, rules and norms that seem broken or resisted from one angle are reinforced when seen from another; acts that repair the rules also highlight their provisional qualities. This conceptual slipperiness suggests that an approach that focuses on how subversive (or not) such practices are – or how misbehaviour might be captured by terms like ‘compliance’ or ‘resistance’ – might miss something important about the way rules and norms are approached on retreat. Namely that participants use rules (and misbehave) to solve practical problems of the social arrangements in which they find themselves in.

For Ackroyd and Thompson (2003), misbehaviour is ultimately motivated by a need or drive for autonomy in workplaces – that is, out of a need to pursue one’s commitments in one’s own way (‘self-organisation’). But I found misbehaviour on retreat was often about negotiating relationships with others. Misbehaviour for retreat-goers was a response to others’ impingement on, involvement in, and indeed their requirement for the accomplishment of the project of the self (a project I and others have argued is fundamentally collaborative, see also the works of Hodgson, 2022; Pagis, 2010). Participants misbehaved to establish new connections (and so to make up new rules and obligations) whether through gossip, talk, or passing notes. When they reluctantly ‘weighed up’ the rules, selecting some to follow and others to discard, their misbehaviour resolved tensions in the agreements already in place. And they misbehaved to correct others’ failures to keep to their obligations, going ‘on strike’ or coming together with others to plot a coup. This flexible approach is evidence of ‘reflexive, methodical, occasioned use’ of rule-following to carry out practical accomplishments (Chua, 1974: 242). It also corroborates arguments which hold that what is serious or not-serious within interaction, including what is serious or not-serious about the rules governing conduct, gets worked out strategically as interaction unfolds (Schenkein, 1978: 301).

Conclusions

Scholars of retreats and cognate practices tend to focus their critiques around the sense these activities are sites of control, spaces wherein a self is taught to further their own discipline and where ‘docile’ bodies are produced. This critical approach is now increasingly challenged, sometimes through efforts to draw out the other things that take place on retreat, like the making of connections and relationships (see Hodgson, 2022). But it is also possible to nuance critical arguments more directly, since it was not the case, in my data, that rule-following was reported as automatic or habitual, nor that the examples of rule-breaking I found could straightforwardly be understood as ‘resistance’ to authority. Describing the different sorts of rule-breaking on retreat as ‘misbehaviour’ focuses our attention on retreats as unfolding social arrangements. This article therefore contributes an understanding of how wellbeing practices might be usefully made sense of as accomplishments situated within the greater swathe of everyday life (Cieslik, 2021; Thin, 2018).

The article also makes a contribution to the scholarship around misbehaviour. Misbehaviour may not simply be about deciding to prioritise the projects of the self over management concerns or the development and realisation of self-interests. Misbehaviour can also be about efforts to ‘practically and morally weigh up engagements in relation to other commitments, obligations and constraints’ (Bottero, 2022: 7) and to collaboratively accomplish particular projects. Misbehaviour manifested as a flexible approach to the seriousness of social rules. Participants used misbehaviour – dialling up or down the seriousness of a situation’s directives – to manage a range of commitments and obligations: to the retreat; the project of the self; those relationships they made on retreat; the projects and activities of their broader life. But they also used misbehaviour to manage others’ commitments, including others’ varying engagements with the retreat as a project in itself. In other words, misbehaviour is one strategy for the practical accomplishment of retreat-going, with individual dimensions (to do with the resolving of tensions or problems in the rules) and collective ones (to do with the resolving of problems with other people). This opens up questions of the role misbehaviour might play in the accomplishment of other social practices outside of workplace settings.