Sufism

Solitude with God in retreat (khalwa) burns away distraction

Far from casual alone-time, khalwa in this tradition is a structured, supervised period of restricted food, sleep, and conversation, meant to remove the ordinary noise that keeps attention scattered outward.

Khalwa, formal retreat, appears across Sufi training manuals, including instructions to novices associated with Najm al-Din Kubra's order, as a structured, time-bounded practice undertaken under a shaykh's supervision rather than casual solitude a person arranges for themselves. Typical elements described in this literature include a private, minimally furnished space, restricted food and sleep, reduced or eliminated conversation, and a sustained focus on dhikr, all aimed at removing the ordinary stream of sensory input and social interaction that keeps attention distributed outward across a hundred small concerns. The rationale given is that much of what feels like spiritual stuckness is actually just noise, habitual chatter, appetite, and distraction, crowding out any chance to notice subtler inward states, so khalwa works by subtraction, deliberately creating conditions under which what is ordinarily obscured has room to surface. Because prolonged sensory and social deprivation can also produce disturbing or destabilizing experiences, the manuals consistently insist on supervision by an experienced guide rather than unsupervised self-directed retreat.