Tatler friend Rachel Sim shares the profound transformation that a 10-day silent retreat has had on her personal and professional life
I felt like it would be nice to detach from social media and be able to unwind. I think that’s quite a rare thing to be able to do in a Singaporean context. It almost requires the environment to force me to put technology aside, put all my distractions aside, and just make time for myself.
I went not knowing what to expect. I was told to go with a very open mind. We were told not to practise any other forms of meditation while we were there. We would wake up at 4.30 am and finished at 9 pm—it sounds like a lot, but when I was doing it, it didn’t feel like that much. Every session is broken down into an hour, and there’s a break. You have two meals a day: breakfast and lunch.
I won’t say it was easy—it was actually quite difficult. I wanted to give up on day two, day six and day eight ... it helped having friends there with me, even though we couldn’t have physical contact, verbal contact, or eye contact! It helped having people around me, knowing that we’re going through the same thing. And I felt like the most important thing was that at the end of it, I came up with a mental clarity that I’ve never had before.
Imagine your head is like phone storage space: you’ve got 80 per cent of the apps running in the background and 20 per cent running in the present moment. I think I developed the ability to shut down the apps running in the background and turn them on at will. That was when I realised our minds are actually very cluttered spaces, where we allow our minds to lead us, and that’s how we very often spiral down into making a mountain out of a molehill, and thoughts can cause us more grief and unnecessary emotion.
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I feel like coming out of this experience gave me both mental clarity and emotional clarity as well. You realise—or you’re more aware of—the triggers that set you off on an emotional level. The biggest example is coming home to my son. In the past, I just didn’t have the mental capacity to parent when I got home. I was so tired at the end of the day and I had no energy because I felt like I used up all my mental capacity throughout the day. By going on the retreat, coming back, and freeing up that 80 per cent of my mental capacity, I feel like it’s given me a new bandwidth to spend time with my son and my husband.
And because I’m so much more aware of my emotions, if I’m upset at my son I’m also mindful of whether this is me being upset at him or him triggering me because there’s an underlying cause. It helped me to parent in a more conscious way, so that even when I raise my voice or I’m firm with him, my emotions are actually very stable. So it’s not attachment of emotion to a lot of people, and I think I took that into the workplace as well. Being able to be firm with my team has become easier, even though I feel that I’ve softened as a person, because it allows me to know where my emotion originated from, and to shut that emotion down, or stop it becomes a hindrance to the task at hand.
Contrary to a lot of other meditation practices I’ve come across, where old emotions come up and then you relive memories and all of that, the silent retreat’s style of meditation was very different for me. I think everybody has a very different experience: some people might have a movie playing in their head, some people might relive their emotions. But for me, everything just manifested as, unfortunately, pain. So I went through these insane few days where I was just in constant pain, and yet my mind was quieter and the sharpest it has ever been. The strange thing about these sensations is that the more aware you are of them, and the more you watch them, the more they don’t matter.
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