Our Silent Yoga Meditation Retreat coming up soon (22/3 – 24/3/24) was inspired by events happening in the world at large. With the deteriorating mental health of so many people, caving under the deluge of bad news and doomsday forecasts, there is a real need for all of us to build up our inner reserves, our sense of self and to be able to tune into and act upon our own inner wisdom, regardless of the mass rhetoric. Silence and a meditation practice will help you grow your inner resilience.

My interest was piqued when I read an article on the mental health of reality TV stars. How many of these reality TV stars slip into major depression when the show is over. Now there were multiple reasons, the biggest and most ugly was the trolling on social media. But the phenomenon I found fascinating was how these young people had loved the relentless attention from the public and had felt validated, seen and very important for the first time in their lives. But as soon as the media attention was turned off, there was nothing for them to draw from. They had become addicted to external validation, and there was no inside sense of self they could retreat to and be themselves again, after the show had finished. They were untethered in the world, totally vulnerable to external opinion – and this is a frightening, lonely place to be. You are open and unguarded to the judgement, cruelty, and criticism of others, with no reserves of your own to draw from and resist. It seemed like the majority of these contestants had never taken the time to find out who they really were, go inside and map out their real selves and their beliefs. If they had had built these inner reserves, becoming a no-one again would not have been so devastating.
Then, I had a conversation with a friend who is a Grade 1 teacher. She mentioned how she’s watched the attention span of 6 year-olds degenerate over the years, until now in a class of, say 15, she might be lucky to have 3 or 4 students who can actually focus on a task for 10 minutes. Everyone else’s attention is fragmented after 2 or 3 minutes. The pupils who could focus had parents who encouraged self-play, solitude, nature and periods of silence and the other pupils entertained themselves through distraction: mobile phones, TV and computer games.  
The philosopher, Max Picard stated that: Silence, is the only phenomenon today that is ‘useless.’ It does not fit into the world of profit and utility, it simply is. It seems to have no other purpose; it cannot be exploited. Silence makes things whole again, by taking them back from the world of dissipation into the world of wholeness.
Margot Wagner
Yoga Under the Bodhi Tree
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