I Disappeared for Two Months. No Phone. No people. No noise.

People assumed it was a breakdown or a spiritual crisis.. or they simply looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.

It was none of those things. I just wanted to see what was actually going on inside my own mind, and I suspected the only way to do that properly was to remove everything else first.

So I did.

Sixty days. No phone. No internet. No conversations. A small room in a retreat centre with staff nearby, someone bringing meals. Books only about meditation. And silence, more silence than I'd ever experienced in my life.

I'm a hypnotherapist and I work with the subconscious mind every day. But this was different. This was a way to go much deeper within myself.

I Built Up to This Over Ten Years

I want to be honest: I didn't just decide one morning to disappear. This was the result of a decade of group retreats, shorter solo attempts, and very gradual progression.

I also want to say plainly, this kind of practice is not for everyone. Solitary time without distraction can surface difficult things. If you have unresolved trauma, significant mental health challenges, or any psychotic disorder, extended solitary retreat is not appropriate. Please speak with a professional before attempting anything like this.

For those who are psychologically grounded and genuinely curious: the experience is unlike anything else I've done.

What I Didn't Expect

I didn't expect to never get bored.

I'm someone who have previously changed jobs out of restlessness and boredom. I need novelty, creativity, excitement. Yet inside the silence, with nothing (no phone, no internet, no conversations) I was never bored. Not once.

The mind, when you actually look at it, is endlessly fascinating. There is always something more to find: a habit running in the background, a belief you didn't know you held, a thought arising before the thought you thought was first. The territory never exhausts itself.

I also didn't expect how tiring it would be. The first month was extraordinary, I didn't open a single book, found everything I needed inside the practice. The second month was harder because the mind gets tired. It wants its old escape routes back. That fatigue was real and humbling.

Retreats are not a straight line of blissful insight.

And yet (and this is the part I find hardest to explain) even the hard days had a quality to them that ordinary life rarely offers. There was nothing to hide behind because there were no distractions to reach for. Just the difficulty itself, and the awareness of it. That kind of honesty with oneself can be uncomfortable sometimes; it exposes our weaknesses and the patterns we've avoided. But eventually, that sense of acceptance becomes deeply clarifying.

The One Thing That Changed Everything

I came back knowing, not as an idea, but as something lived, that thoughts are not who I am.

They arise, and they pass away. The awareness watching them is something different. And that difference, once you've really seen it, doesn't go away.

Most of what shapes our emotions, our choices, our sense of what's possible, runs beneath the surface of ordinary awareness. The retreat let me see it directly.

That's the same territory hypnotherapy works with: not the conscious, reasoning mind, but the layer underneath it where the real patterns live. Two months of watching my own mind made me a better hypnotherapist. It also made me more certain that this work matters.

If any part of this resonates, like the curiosity about what's running beneath the surface or the sense that there's more going on inside than everyday life reveals, that's worth paying attention to. You don't need sixty days. You just need to start looking, 20 minutes a day.

Curious about how hypnotherapy can help you reprogramme your subconscious and improve your sleep? Explore my hypnotherapy sessions or book a free consultation to take the first step.