2023-2025 were those kind of years that strips things back.

I am not going to explain all of it here. But I will say this: by the middle of it, I had been running on adrenaline for so long that I had forgotten what it felt like not to.

One weekday morning I sat on my local beach at 7am. Nobody was there. Just me, the water, and eventually a man in an orange council vest picking up rubbish along the shoreline. He stopped near me and started talking. He asked how the weather had been the week before.

I said it had been fine. Why?

He said he didn’t know. He had been away. Vipassana silent meditation retreat in the Blue Mountains. Ten days. Run entirely by volunteers, donation only, existing for one purpose: to help with human suffering.

I remember those words landing strangely. To help with human suffering. Not wellness. Not optimisation. Suffering.

He walked on. I never saw him again.

I went home and searched for it. Dhamma Bhumi Vipassana Centre, Blue Mountains NSW. I found it immediately. Fully booked, months in advance. But there was a waiting list. I put my name down and didn’t think much more about it.

Three months later, an email arrived. Someone had cancelled. A spot had opened. January 2026.

I went.

What I Was Walking Into

Wake at 4am. Meditate for more than ten hours each day. No phone, no writing, no reading, no creating. No eye contact with other participants. No talking. Food twice a day. Limited time outside. A wooden cubicle with a linen curtain for a wall, eight of us in the room, each separated by that thin partition of fabric and the understanding that we were all there for the same reason.

I didn’t mind the room. I didn’t mind the silence. What I wasn’t prepared for was what happened on day two.

I sat down for breakfast in the dining hall. Strangers had cooked the food. Strangers had set the table. Strangers were quietly moving around me, making sure I had what I needed, asking nothing in return, not even eye contact. And sitting in that room, being fed and sheltered by people who had never met me and owed me nothing, I felt something I hadn’t felt in over a year.

Safe.

I cried into my breakfast. Properly cried. Surrounded by people who weren’t trying to comfort me. Who were sitting in their own silence, minding their own stillness. They couldn’t touch me or talk to me. So I just cried there quietly…

Then My Body Gave Up

A few hours later I was sick.

Fever. I spent roughly six of the ten days in bed or in the meditation hall covered with blankets. I thought I should leave. They told me to stay. Volunteers brought ginger tea, some tablets. They checked on me and asked for nothing.

I understand now what was happening. My nervous system had finally registered that it was safe enough to stop holding everything together. My body had been waiting for permission to release what it had been carrying. And the moment that permission arrived, it took it.

This is what chronic stress does. It doesn’t just live in the mind. It lives in the tissue. In the held breath. In the shoulders that never fully drop. In the jaw that clenches in sleep. The body keeps an account, even when the mind has moved on.

The Practice

The Vipassana meditation technique is this: scan your body. When you feel pain, and you will feel pain because sitting still for that many hours creates genuine physical pain, do not move. Do not react. Observe the sensation. Stay with it. Let it be there without adding anything to it. This too shall pass.

It sounds simple. It is not simple.

On one of the last days I felt a sharp pain in my hand. I did what I had been taught. I turned my attention toward it, not away from it. I observed it as sensation, not as mine, not as a problem, just as a thing that was happening.

And then something unexpected occurred.

A picture of a memory appeared. Not gradually. Suddenly. A scene from my teenage years, something I had not thought about in more than twenty years. It arrived in full detail, like a film starting in the middle. I watched it. I did not relive it. I did not feel it as present. I just observed it, the way I had been observing the pain in my hand.

There was a girl in that memory. I felt something for her, not grief, not anger, but a kind of quiet compassion. She had been carrying guilt and shame that was never hers to carry. She was just a child.

When the pain in my hand dissolved, the memory dissolved with it. Both gone. Together.

I had been storing that in my body for over twenty years.

After that there were many more sharp pains in different parts of my body. I observed each one. No more memories showed up. I am glad they didn’t. I trust the pain was still releasing something, just without pulling me back into the story of it. And that is often what keeps us stuck. We replay. We retell. We feed the mind the very thing we are trying to let go of. The body does not need the story. It just needs the stillness to release it.

What I Think Was Happening

I am not a psychologist. But I watch what happens when people stop performing and start simply being somewhere, on a trail, in a forest, in silence.

The body stores what the mind cannot process at the time. This is not a fringe idea. It is increasingly well-supported in trauma research. The experience of danger or shame or overwhelm gets encoded not just as memory but as physical holding: tension, posture, pain, the patterns we carry in how we move and breathe.

The way through is not to relive it. Not to dig it up and examine it under a clinical light. But to observe it until it passes. To give the body the safety and the stillness it needs to release what it has been keeping.

The forest does something similar, though more gently. When the trail narrows and the signal drops and the trees close in and the only sounds are birds and your own breath, something in the body starts to remember that it is not in danger. The parasympathetic nervous system begins to do what it was built to do. The holding begins, slowly, to ease.

Why I Am Sharing This

I don’t share personal things lightly. My Instagram post about the retreat was the most engagement I have had on anything I have posted in months, not because of the numbers, but because of the comments. People recognised something in it. People are carrying things.

I am building a practice around the belief that nature is one of the most accessible, most ancient, most physiologically real routes back to the self. Not as a metaphor. Not as a nice day out. As medicine.

If you are holding something, and I think most of us are in ways we may not even fully recognise, I want you to know that the body can release it. Slowly, safely, in its own time. With enough stillness. With enough space.

The forest offers that space. So does silence. So does, apparently, a wooden cubicle with a linen curtain for a wall and a stranger who brings ginger tea in the night.

Sabina Laniova is an ecotherapist and nature guide based in Sydney NSW. She runs 1:1 ecotherapy sessions and nature walks across NSW national parks. Learn more at sabinalaniova.com.au

If you are interested in Vipassana meditation, the retreat is at Dhamma Bhumi Vipassana Centre, Blue Mountains NSW. It is run by volunteers, costs nothing upfront, and operates on donation. There is usually a waiting list.