Thank you for writing about this it's fascinating - and i'm so glad you had such a fruitful time. It's great that the emphasis on prayer and the silence and community helped you with concentration and wandering "monkey-mind" thoughts. Hoping you can successful bring what you've found from it back into everyday life.

I'm a little surprised you can do piano practice on a silent retreat!
I've randomly just been reading about the examen (this book was in a recent kindle sale and although it's pretty simple i found it surprisingly powerful) and am exploring how it could be part of my own idiosyncratic spiritual practice.
I did quite a bit of exploring Ignation style Spiritual Imagination back in what feels like another life time when i was a church youth worker. It's a method that seems to fit well into the Reformed tradition i grew up in. (And i have a soft spot for St Ignatius because i was born on his feast day!) But Lectio Divina is newer to me - i first heard about it on the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast - so now i'm wondering how the it version of it varies from traditional Jesuit practice? Do you have any resources on it you would recommend?

[I'm also trying to think what the equivalent of a retreat into silence for a busy and highly sociable person would be for someone like me who spends a lot of their time alone and is often forced to be un-busy by the boring living-with-chronic illness stuff? i don't think a noisy-retreat would quite work! But maybe a focusing-on-a-particular-activity one would?]