I’m sitting at a rustic wood table in a candlelit farmhouse, staring down a plate of piping hot vegetarian lasagna. I have my hands around a burnt-orange colored ceramic mug full of hot, spicy tea, trying to warm myself up from the outside in after walking across a field under the starry, 29˚F night skies. I take one bite of the lasagna and it tastes like a dream—the cheese melts even further in my mouth, the root vegetables both somehow crisp and buttery soft at the same time, and the crunch of the almonds adding a dash of excitement with every bite. It feels nourishing and comforting. So I continue this meditation for another 20 minutes, savoring each bite and each sip of tea and letting it make me feel warm and whole again. Oh, and there are 17 other people in the room all following a similarly meditative process, and I wouldn’t dare look them in the eye, let alone speak to them—even the woman sitting directly across from me at the table.
No, I haven’t gone insane. I’m about 23 hours into a three-day silent yoga and meditation retreat. Two nights ago, I went into silence with the rest of my retreat cohorts, and I won’t be coming out of it until Wednesday afternoon. To some, this might be anxiety-producing. To me, a sensitive introvert who has had one of the loudest, nonstop years of her life yet, it is pure therapy.
The mental process of going into silence is not an easy one, to be sure. Everybody has a completely different experience, and having done this same retreat at two very different points in my life (only a year apart, but man, what a year—more on that later), I witnessed it very differently each time. I think a lot of one’s experience going into silence can be chalked up to the depth of and intensity of the emotions they felt in the months prior. For me, I refer to my first retreat as the “novelty retreat.”
At first, it was fine—I entered silence after an hour of guided meditation in a dimly lit room, wrapped up in blankets, and I was basically asleep anyway. All I had to do was get myself to a bathroom, brush my teeth, wash up for bed, and hit the sack like I would any other night. But then, as soon as my head hit the pillow, the noise started.
When the retreat leader asked everyone in the opening ceremony why they were there, my answer was, “I have had a very noisy and tense year, and I need my brain to unravel.” Although I had never experienced anything like this before, I knew in that moment that my brain had turned into a messy, jumbled ball of knotted-up yarn, and that three days in silence—away from all screens and with no contact to the outside world—was the key that would finally let it unfurl and unknot itself. There was so much energy and information that my brain had not been able to process because I had been keeping myself so busy, rushing from one activity to the next, dealing with shifting relationships, traveling to four different countries, moving into a new apartment immediately after returning from two of them, giving 110% of my remaining energy to a workload that was orders of magnitude more complicated and stressful than it needed to be. And yet in my gut, I knew that if I just took away all stimuli for a few days, and was brave enough to witness myself processing all of the emotions and thoughts that were stuck in the depths of my brain, I could release that jumble of energy.
So, that first night, when my head hit the pillow, the unraveling commenced. A lot of it manifested in fear—fear that I was going to have a mental breakdown, that I would be bored, that I would freeze to death overnight, that wild animals would attack me in my glamping-style tent overnight (I’m talking like, tigers. In Northern California. That one might have been a teensy bit irrational, but still valid). The show-stopping Broadway musical numbers I had listened and sung along to during my 3-hour drive up north were pounding incessantly in my head like the entire orchestra was lodged between my eyes and my brain. I was terrified, my head and heart were buzzing, and I barely slept a wink, but there was still a little voice of intuition inside of me whispering, “stick with it.”
As I awoke at 6:30 a.m. to the Marimba alarm on my iPhone set to the lowest volume—I was concerned that anything louder would be seen as obnoxious by my tent neighbors, and didn’t want to risk them not liking me since I couldn’t make up for it through charming conversation—I didn’t want to do any of it. I wanted to stay curled up in my sleeping bag with the space heater on and sleep until the retreat was over. It was a long, 10-minute walk through the frosty valley down to the first meditation session of the day, and I felt safer in my cozy little cot than how I imagined feeling in a room full of what I assumed were morning people who were excited and ready to go for an energizing half-hour of meditation (thinking back on it now, I realize that’s not how meditation works).
But I didn’t want to be “that girl” on the retreat who didn’t participate fully, so I forced myself to get up, threw on some extra layers and my Ugg boots, and unzipped my tent. The second I stepped outside and looked to my right, however, I witnessed a sunrise that can only be described as “out of a fairytale.” The sky was awash with striations of cotton-candy pink, golden yellow, and lavender, and the tule fog draped over the hills, trickling through the trees. “Oh,” I said to myself (silently, of course). “So this is why people wake up early.”
As I made my way through meditation and my first-ever, slightly awkward silent breakfast, something started to shift. It might have been that I was getting more comfortable, or I was inspired by the natural beauty and community of people surrounding me in silence, or that my brain had just made its way through processing the fear from the previous night, but I did something that I had rarely done in my day-to-day life up until that moment: I gave myself permission to feel anxious, feel happy, and simply listen to what my needs were moment-to-moment. I took a morning nap, I did yoga, and I took an afternoon nap. I took a hot shower with coconut- and mint-scented shampoo and I scribbled my thoughts across dozens of pages in my journal. I also spent a decent amount of time sitting on a bench and staring out in front of me, watching my thoughts as if I were watching a film in a theater. And by the time I made it to my silent-in-a-room-of-18-people vegetarian lasagna meditation dinner, I had reached a point where all my brain paid attention to was every morsel of food and how nourished each warm bite made me feel. I no longer had that extra noise buzzing around my head and reverberating throughout my body, nor did I feel the obligation to even make eye contact with the people at the table with me so as not to “make things awkward.” I could just exist.
And as the retreat continued, I only got deeper into it: I spent an hour drinking tea and staring out a window while playing a concert of my favorite band in my head. I listened to the birds and the breeze whistling through the trees and felt like I was in the presence of such beauty that I could cry. And one time I caught a glimpse of myself in a bathroom mirror, smiled, and thought, “Wow. I am so happy to just be me.”
I said before that I’ve done this twice. This first year, my “novelty retreat,” I hit the state of purity and inner stillness within the first 24 hours of my stay. In the year leading up to my second retreat, I experienced a depth of emotions that I had not yet felt in my almost 30 years of living. A loved one was diagnosed with and underwent treatment for cancer, and while the prognosis turned out to be positive, the anticipatory grief and despair I felt was more intense and all-consuming than anything I’d ever felt. My family and friends were in harm’s way as wildfires and power outages ravaged my home state for weeks. My life that year imprinted a new set of emotions on me, which I believe took me longer to process as I went into silence again than the previous year’s higher level, stress-focused feelings.
I knew going into my second retreat that it wouldn’t necessarily be better or worse, but that it would be different. I took a spectator position and watched myself reflect on a tumultuous year (and decade) and knead through these new emotions, but I didn’t see the positive results right away. I found myself regretting signing up for another retreat on New Year’s Eve instead of being at home with loved ones. I hated that I couldn’t be in contact with them whenever I chose. But two days in, I had a moment that shifted my perception.
I sat resting in a bubbling hot tub, irritated by the woman sunning herself next to me and loudly crunching on potato chips, and exhausted from obsessing all morning over at what point that day I should wash my hair. Right in the middle of my negative and annoyed thought spiral, a fellow retreater showed up, hopped in the clothing-optional jacuzzi completely nude, and politely whispered to the chip cruncher that the sound was distracting and could she please eat elsewhere, to which she happily obliged. I had spent all day worrying about what people would think if my hair was greasy or whether I would freeze if I showered at night, and she was, at least from my perspective, effortlessly able to strike that sought-after balance of not giving a f*ck what others thought and remaining graciously kind. I still admire her for that, and am grateful to her for forcing me to examine how busy my brain had been, to remember to allow myself to be present, and to eventually have another mirror moment later that evening, looking at myself and feeling completely centered and happy, not weighed down by the thoughts buzzing around me.
Now, I need to call out that being able to participate in two massage-filled, glamping-style, three-nourishing-meals-a-day yoga and meditation retreats is an extreme privilege. I had the money, resources, and time off from work to do it, and I am forever grateful that I had these opportunities to be surrounded by all of these luxuries and this community of souls that helped me arrive in this state. I also had not recently been through any serious trauma, and while I do struggle with anxiety and feel my emotions incredibly deeply, I do not have any major mental health issues to battle. But I’m not writing this to brag about my amazing vacation, or that I live a rather privileged life. I’m writing it because I want to offer a look into the vulnerable experience of allowing oneself to witness and work through bottled up thoughts and emotions, and to pose a question: How can we all pull bits and pieces of the experiences I’ve illustrated here and apply them to our daily lives?
With the state of the world we’re in today, it is by no measure an easy task to find moments of silence, or at least moments of silence when we can be completely at peace with our thoughts. Especially in 2020, we are constantly oscillating between feelings of grief, anxiety, boredom, elation, depression, creativity, loneliness, contentment, and connection—usually all within the first six hours of the day (at least, that has been my experience). Often, it feels crushing and paralyzing to feel those negative emotions, but at the same time, irresponsible and guilt-inducing to feel the positive ones. But, just the same as I needed to let my brain unravel and pause the worries of what others thought of me back at my retreats, we all need to give ourselves permission to let our bodies work through each of these emotions fully, processing them and experiencing them mindfully, so that we don’t suppress them to later have them explode in a breakdown.
When we allow ourselves to feel everything, sit back, and notice what we’re going through, we eventually arrive in a place of stillness, similar to my meditative lasagna dinner or my moments in the mirror. It is in that stillness that we are able to feel the most connected to ourselves, to our naturally beautiful surroundings, and to each other. In today’s hectic world, supercharged with blaring news headlines and polarized communities, they can be difficult to come by. But they are possible to seek out—taking a few bites of food and sips of hot coffee in the morning without looking at any screens or engaging with others; carving out a 15-minute break in the afternoon to simply sit and look out the window; creating distance between nighttime activities and bed by turning off all stimuli—including reading a book—and doodling or writing haikus in your journal.
The more we break our days down into meditative and still fragments of time like this, the more we work the muscle of arriving in a state of feeling calm, content, and whole. It becomes easier to identify when those more off-kilter thoughts and emotions come up, and we start to notice that perhaps feeling like our tightly wound brains are in constant need of unraveling isn’t the natural human state of being after all.