Relentless Healing

Not long ago, in a blanketing mental haze, I found myself winding my way up the sheer cliffside of Quarna di Sopra enroute to a six-day silent retreat at the Mandali Centre. I could tell you all of the reasons I needed to go, or I could just say that I needed to go, because I know that you will understand. 

I had researched the reviews for my local nail salon more than I had researched the Mandali Centre. Within a ten-second Google, I learned it had 4.8 stars and a mention on Conde Nast. It was a self-pronounced blend of yoga, vegetarian food, and silence on the top of a mountain in a tiny town in Northern Italy. It was the silence part that sold me.

I spent all day speaking, professionally and personally. In fact, my life was all noise. Algorithms, emails, WhatsApp, Netflix, unknown numbers, my accountant. In 2025, I qualified for the top 1% listeners of Spotify in the world. This meant I lived virtually all my days to an artificially-curated soundtrack. I was suffering from the classic maladies of the distraction-attention era, and I was sick of it. 

The retreat was fully booked online. This seemed fair given that the session began in two days. I took a shot in the dark and emailed them anyway. They replied immediately that they had one room left next to the boiler. “Loud, inconveniente, discounted,” were the words they used. I wrote back: I’ll take it.

I was concerned. For myself, my erratic behaviour, and my bank account. But what can I say? There was some larger calling occurring.

As I wound my rental car sideways around the one-hundredth hairpin turn up the mountain, the thought occurred to me that I could easily go back and spend a week in Milan drinking in underground bars and stuffing my face with cacio e pepe. I could toss my dreams of self-transformation in the trash and book into Soho House, even. No one would ever know. And then the Spotify track changed in the car to Bruce Springsteen’s “New York City Serenade” and something about the way Bruce’s acoustic guitar was efforting in the intro, you know, the way he was showing up, snubbed this thought from my consciousness. Not just because it was weak, but because it was also physically impossible to turn my VW T-Roc around. 

I craned my neck around the next turn and found my spine. This was, I guess, the mountain I needed to climb. 

I arrived with a thin bead of sweat dripping down my back. “Is there another way down?” I asked the beautiful, greying Italian woman behind the desk. 

She just laughed. A small, tight laugh. A laugh that said welcome to Hotel California, and handed me my room key.

At the induction session, I sat on a little magenta cushion and tried to locate my third eye. I found only the beginnings of a migraine. The group was encouraged to exchange a few pleasantries. There was clearly a recent Ryanair sale because everyone was from Amsterdam.

I’m Meta, I’m 35, I’m in communications.

I’m Hamish, I’m 45, I have two children at home and my husband hates me.

I’m Nicole, I’m 56, I hate myself. 

It was embarrassing to realise we were all mirrors, and I related to every single person. Many people had been to the centre before, which comforted and concerned me equally. One woman had already been there for 10 days and was bolting on another week. She was smiling like a lunatic. I introduced myself by way of some sarcastic joke and slid firmly back behind my mask of practised coolness. 

The instructors walked us through the agenda of the week. Multiple meditation, yoga, and Qi Gong sessions a day with access to a spa. It was basically rehab with a dash of zen. The important bit was that we would be guided into silence later that evening. They said you don’t even have to make eye contact with people or smile. I liked this. Even better, if we wanted to enter silence early, we could simply pick up a pin that noted so at reception immediately after. I nodded solemnly, as if this would be a difficult decision before making a beeline to reception to pick up the “In Silence” pin and plaster it to my chest.

At dinner, a kind, well-meaning woman in her mid-fifties began speaking to me. “It’s like a fairytale here, isn’t it?” she said, looking wide-eyed at what was indeed an impressive view over the fog-coated Lake Orta. 

She said this directly to my forehead even though I was wearing my pin in the centre of my fleece. A pin so visible, it might as well have been hanging between my eyebrows.

“Yes,” I said begrudgingly and engaged in the kind of small talk one only suffers at baby showers because I simply didn’t want to be a dick.

By bedtime, which was 8.45, I was exhausted spiritually and otherwise. I looked at myself in the mirror, dark circles weighing my eyes. I remembered a conversation I witnessed between my boyfriend and a friend of a friend a week or so earlier. She had asked him what it was like to date a writer. 

He said, matter-of-factly, that he didn’t know, because I no longer wrote.

Give it a chance, Sam. 

I said this aloud. I’m not religious. But it sounded like a prayer.

The brand of the retreat was what I would call relentless healing. 

In addition to the regular yogi programming, you could tack on sound baths, reiki, breathwork, and lymphatic drainage. Just accomplishing one of these wellness efforts on an average day in London would be a Herculean feat. But all of them in the span of eight hours? Sign me up. Because the alternative of being in an activity was being alone in my head. 

The sound bath was a personal highlight. The ten of us lay down, supine, in the centre of a tent. The Italian man leading this exercise looked nervous. He said aloud that he’s never made sounds for an entirely silent retreat before. He was hoping for a laugh and received crickets. He went about setting up a garage band for one.

He told us to close our eyes and began banging various gongs and bells chaotically above our heads. I found it difficult to “relax” and keep my eyes closed with the chance of having an iron bell land on my forehead at any moment but I gave it a good ol’ college try. I heard someone weeping to my left and I felt like a spiritual failure. I told myself to shut up. In my head.

For the finale, he placed singing bowls on each of our bellies, and then went about thwacking them with a wooden stick, playing us like a human drum set. I thought that I was most definitely in the wrong career if it was possible to wander around tents in Italy doing this shit and calling it transcendence. But the thing was, no matter how deeply sarcastic and hopeless I had become, this place was beginning to beat the cynicism right out of me. I hated to admit it, but I was unwinding. My defenses, fortified like a walled garden, were dissolving.

“Breathe in, breathe out, relax.” The meditation instructor, a balding Scottish man in his fifties said at the top of each session. He looked like an extra from Trainspotting and floated through the centre with a perma-Buddha-esque smile. 

He reminded us that breath is one of those miraculous things that is both voluntary and involuntary. Sounds simple enough, right? 

Here’s a top-line of the things I thought about during an hour of silence: 

How trauma is accumulative. We acquire it like lint in a dryer.

The first time I saw my mother crying after a fight with my father. I was six and she was trying and failing to wash the same pan, over and over. 

How I had hurt people this way.

Whether my adidas track pants are getting longer or I was getting shorter

How nice it is to hear dogs bark in the distance. A church bell. A bird.

How many days does my father have left on earth?

I have forgiven rejection, but I’ve never forgotten it.

With (mostly) no phone and outside noise, you think a lot about yourself. Boredom sets in. Unfiltered, free fall boredom. Which reminded me that boredom is information.

I had read a letter from the editor of British GQ  before boarding the plane. He wrote, aptly: “Those of us able to withstand low stimulation are going to win big in the slop era. The bored are harder to manipulate. Harder to impress. Less susceptible to hype, hooks, scale, spectacle. They’re the ones who will start asking better questions: is this actually good?”

We went for walks in the surrounding commune. We were like mental patients tapping in and out of the gates, nodding as we passed one another. The commune felt stuck in time. Idyllic, sleepy, arcane. Nothing much beyond a pharmacy, a bar, a school. A farmer waved at me good-naturedly on my way back. He fed his goats. I nuzzled the necks of his two small horses. I breathed in, out, relaxed.

The walls were plastered in sunlight, dewy pastels, and vivid murals-some animals: a fox, a whale, an eagle. But mainly, they depicted women in various states of nudity. The one above the pharmacy portrays a woman fleeing the devil, his long, wanting fingers grasping for her ankle. It’s not hard to understand the story. What’s hard during these experiences is to not look at everything like a sign, or a warning. 

As my fellow retreaters and I orbited one another in and out of classes, at lunch time and dinner, it’s striking how true the “people are energy” adage became. 

Everyone’s face carries a different weight of surrender or sorrow. The younger women felt lighter, probably because the older women seemed less inclined to make everyone comfortable. There were a few people in particular I found myself drawn to. I knew, somewhere innately, that we’d be friends outside of this. One was simply beautiful, and we napped on opposite couches in the library together often. It was not romantic. It was gravitational. You are drawn to who you’re drawn to. 

One older woman struck me with her face twisted into what can only be described as deep despair. Like sadness tugged at her hips. I ended up alone with her one night in the saltwater jacuzzi, a full moon above our heads. The jets came on and blew my bikini top clean off. We burst into laughter. The sorrow that enveloped her dissolved in the stream. For a moment, we were just two women, of varying ages, naked.

I began to crave the bell for breakfast, lunch, and dinner like a hungry wolf, even though it was vegetarian. We lined up like school children, saliva gathering in our mouths. You begin to appreciate flavour. Freshness. Mayonnaise, when you have little else to fixate on. Time felt different. Silence could slow it down. A book could speed it up. And my book of choice was Helen Garner’s diaries, which I clutched to my chest like a cross at night, asking her for some cold comfort. Maybe a promise that I would find my voice again.

In yoga, I began to ache. My body surfaced old troubles in my shoulders. I had a cramp on my left trapezius, and then it migrated to the right overnight. I became impatient with movement, with the healing I promised myself. I wanted to push through. I wanted to be new. But there were knots inside me that I could not untie. 

“Wash your heart with your breath,” the yoga teacher said. It sounded nice, but my heart was filthy. Rusted. Difficult to scrub. At home, I could be my busted self without so much encouragement to be better. I could be dumb and distracted and numb.

But here, eventually, my own resistance became boring. On the fourth morning, something loosened. I wouldn’t call it transformation. Some subtle shift. I sat down, closed my eyes, and there it was: space.

I started having vivid dreams. 

In one, my friend, two years gone, waved at me, grinning ear to ear, as alive and well as the last time I saw him from the window of a cafe. In another, my mother cradled me in her arms, I cried but I’m not sure about what. I wrote these down. I mined them for meaning.

I began a relationship with the sunrise. Before 7.30, the fog would hang low across the mountains like a proud toupee. Sorbet shocks of pink, orange, and yellow would crack from the east. The lake lay dead still. A sleeping beast. And we would sit, three of four of us early-risers, quietly in the observatory, watching the show. Above the weather.

Surely this is the point of all of this, no? To be above the weather. To be sure that we are not our sadness.

The yogi tells me there is the spirit of the mother here. It’s in the air, the very DNA of the place. It’s in the statue of al cuore immacolato della gran madre di dio (Mother of God), in Ganesh’s outstretched palm, and the jellied bodies of the koi fish in the pond. I swim the saltwater pool religiously. I baptise myself. I make a routine. I wonder; is the mother within me? 

Could I learn to mother myself at last?

I think six days is just enough time to lose or find your mind. I had reached my ceiling for meditation, but not for silence. People think silence is hard. I think the opposite. I think saying true things is hard.

Saying sorry. Saying I love you. Saying I was wrong. Forgive me. See me. Be with me. I have needs. I have wants. I have sorrow. Skin. Light.

On our last morning, the sunrise was beautiful. The world puts on a show, and we miss it. It’s sacred really. This shit.

The yogi asks, gap-toothed.

What is stuck?

What is alive?

She receives no response. Then she says: Be well. And that is that. 

You can’t live among the clouds forever. You have to come back down. And I had to admit that who I was coming back down as was mostly the same person who slogged up there. Aside from one thing. 

I have this strange, new power. 

I am in the middle of Oxford Circus. It’s Tuesday. It’s raining. People are rushing by, yelling, making noise. I close my eyes and I am sitting cross-legged in a stone temple on the top of a mountain. The sun rises behind me over a flat blue lake and a bell tolls from a church in the distance, saying it’s time to breathe. And I do. I breathe.

My editor emailed me the other day. She said she knows I haven’t written anything for her in ages. She needed a piece on relationships for Valentine’s Day.

Could I please send her some pages?