I Spent Two Months Completely Alone With My Mind. Here’s What I Found.

I am not a nun. I’m a hypnotherapist who works online, and last years, I disappeared from the world for two months.

“I’m going on retreat” sounds manageable. “I’m going to sit alone in a cabin for sixty-plus days, not speak to anyone, not look at my phone, not watch anything, not read anything except meditation books”, that gets a different reaction. Usually something like a puzzled expression.

This is the story of what actually happened.

Why I Did It

The motivation was something closer to curiosity than devotion. A stubborn, almost scientific desire to know: what is actually going on inside my own mind?

We talk endlessly about mindset, about changing our beliefs, about manifesting a different reality. But how does any of that actually work? What does it look like, in real time, from the inside?

I wanted to see it directly. Not read about it, but see it myself, the way you’d look at something under a microscope rather than in a textbook.

This Isn’t for Everyone And I Mean That Seriously

Before anything else, I want to say this plainly: a solitary retreat requires genuine psychological stability.

Solitary confinement is used as punishment in prisons. That context matters. Choosing voluntary solitude is entirely different, but it requires readiness. If you have unresolved trauma that could surface in silence, recent loss, significant anxiety, or any psychotic disorder, extended solitary practice is not appropriate. It can genuinely be dangerous.

I also want to be clear that what I’m describing is the result of ten years of preparation. I started with group retreats, twenty or thirty people in silence together, a teacher available, a structure that held you. Over those years I moved gradually toward shorter solo retreats: five days, eight days, nine days. I only attempted two months when my shorter retreats had become genuinely stable and deep.

Building up slowly is not caution for its own sake. It is how this works.

The Setup

I went to a retreat centre with support staff in the background. My family had a landline they could use in a genuine emergency. I turned my phone off completely. Not silent, just off. Someone handled meals and I brought meditation books only.

That last detail about meals matters more than it sounds. Not having to plan, shop, or decide what to cook removed a surprising amount of mental friction. Every small decision is still a decision and removing them gave the practice more room and stability.

What the Days Actually Looked Like

The first thing I established was my sleep schedule. I’d heard insistence that serious practitioners wake at 4:00 AM. This didn’t work for me and I’ve never done it in this retreat. I need seven to eight hours, and when I honoured that, my practice was stable and alive.

Sleep, I discovered, is foundational to everything the mind does. This is something I now explore with clients through sleep hypnosis: the quality of your nights shapes your inner life far more than most people realise.

I wake naturally at 6:30 AM and built my day from there. Sessions were twenty minutes each, seven or eight per day, but really putting the effort in for that time. It sounds modest on paper, but I assure it is not modest in practice if you really aim at quality rather than quantity.

Between sessions: meals, tea, personal care. A two-hour walk after lunch, which was non-negotiable. Qi Gong, stretching, exercising. The body needs movement when the mind is doing that much work on a still position.

The First Month vs. The Second

The first month surprised me with how well it went because I didn’t open a single book. Every question I encountered, I found the answer inside the practice itself. There was something quietly astonishing about that.

People asked if I got bored. Honestly: no, not even once. I say this as someone who gets bored easily in ordinary life. I’ve changed careers multiple times because I need novelty, creativity, constant mind stimulation (in a wholesome way, not just mindless scrolling). Yet in silence, with no entertainment whatsoever, the mind was endlessly interesting. There is always something new: a subtler pattern, a deeper habit, a thought arising before the thought you thought was the first thought, and constant investigation.

The second month was harder. The mind tires out. Staying present, staying aware, is actual work, the same way holding a yoga pose is work. Eventually the muscles fatigue and the mind wants its old patterns of distraction back. I opened my books. I looked for guidance. That was humbling, and necessary. I was still there, and still showing up in my meditations, but I recognised the challenges and the tiredness.

Retreats don’t unfold in a straight line of blissful insight.

What I Actually Discovered

I don’t want to dress this up. What happened was subtle and lasting rather than dramatic.

I saw in a way that stopped being conceptual and became lived that thoughts are not who I am. They arise, they pass, and the awareness watching them is something different from the thoughts themselves. I saw how the mind creates reality: beliefs shaping perception, perception shaping experience, almost all of it happening outside ordinary awareness.

Coming back, I knew something about my mind I hadn’t known before.

Why This Connects to My Work

I’m a hypnotherapist, and both meditation and hypnotherapy work with the same territory: the subconscious, the patterns beneath the patterns, the habits of mind that shape how we feel and what we believe we’re capable of.

Those two months deepened my understanding of that territory enormously. When I work with someone around sleep, anxiety, or the stories keeping them stuck, I draw on what I witnessed in that silence.

If you’re curious about working with your subconscious mind in a more guided way, Lucid Mind Hypnotherapy offers online sessions worldwide. And a free consultation.