No phones. No TV. No books. No booze. And definitely no talking. A very chatty ELEANOR MILLS reveals… How seven days of silence banished the insecurities I hid beneath a busy life

• Eleanor Mills spent a week at a silent yoga and meditation retreat in France 
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The gong chimes. The silent retreat begins. Earlier today I handed over my mobile phone to the teacher for safe-keeping. That deep bong means I’m in, we’re off — no speaking or interaction with the outside world for a week.

Around me, my 28 fellow retreatants (a mixture of ages, 26 women, two men) look a bit scared. 

Truth is, I feel pretty trepidatious myself, not to mention knackered. It is 8.30pm and my head is spinning from travelling to France by plane, train and automobile. 

My stomach growls — the watery soup for supper wasn’t exactly the truffles, foie gras and wine most would expect of the Dordogne region.

But it’s not that kind of holiday. I’m here to spend a week at the Moulin de Chaves — a Buddhist meditation centre by a river. I’ve signed up for six hours of yoga a day, plus two hours of meditation.

Eleanor Mills spent seven days in silence at the Moulin de Chaves, a Buddhist meditation centre in the Dordogne region of France (stock image)

I’m also expected to contribute an hour’s ‘karma yoga’ (chores such as cleaning or peeling vegetables; I am on supper clear-up) and I am looking forward to swimming in the (cold) river in the couple of free hours I have in the afternoon.

Right now, I am sitting on a yoga mat inside a huge wooden meditation hall, all flying buttresses and glass windows. Outside, shadowy trees wave in the wind. 

It is eerily quiet. In London where I live, there is always the sound of a car or person. Here, deep in La France, tout est tranquille.

I close my eyes. Try to focus inside. Around me the rustling and fidgeting of people resting their bottoms on black beanbag meditation cushions finally dies down. 

The ‘invitation’ (it is always a request, not a command) is to be still, to land, to ground after our journey.

To follow the breath: I think of parts of a mantra from the late Vietnamese Buddhist monk and poet, Thich Nhat Hanh: ‘Breathing in, I know I am alive. Breathing out, I smile to life.’

I spin that around my head for a while. This session is 30 minutes long. I try not to wiggle on my beanbag. My lower back is already aching. I try to ‘turn towards, sit beside, soften around’ the ache ‘with love’ as the teacher instructs us.

It sort of works. Around me the silence is suddenly deafening. Inside my head feels a bit like a TV on fuzzy static. I take deep breaths, reminding myself that I’m going to be spending a lot of time just with me, like this, over the next seven days.

Each day on the retreat Eleanor (pictured) did six hours of yoga, plus two hours of mediation. She was also expected to contribute an hour’s ‘karma yoga’ (chores such as cleaning or peeling vegetables)

While trying to be calm and serene, my mind is racing and a stupid quote from a book I used to read to my children is repeating over and over in my head: ‘Can’t go over it, can’t go under it, got to go through it . . .’

I pull my attention back to my mantra. I last a few seconds and my mind is off on another tangent. I pull it back again.

When I told my family and friends I was going to spend a week in silence — no phone, no computer, no emails, no texts, no TV, no books, no podcasts, no booze, no meat or dairy, no chatting — they were surprised to say the least.

I’m famous for being loquacious; I’m a professional communicator. My siblings were so aghast at the very notion of ‘quiet Eleanor’ that they took bets on how long I would last.

To be honest, I wasn’t that sure I could do it myself, and when I first arrived, I was petrified. In fact, I sobbed with fear.

But it turns out I like silent Eleanor. She’s mellow and thoughtful. She has time to notice the sunlight through the trees and the way the reeds at the bottom of the river sway backwards and forwards with the eddying current.

Two days ago, I finally handed in an enormous, exhausting project, and I feel like a sponge which has been squeezed out. This week of silence is my present to myself. Not just a retreat, but a treat. The best kind of personal replenishment there is.

It’s not for everyone — my mum thinks I’m nuts. ‘Why don’t you just go and collapse on a sunlounger with a book like a normal person?’ she asked. 

Well, because life is hectic. I am a writer, run my own business, have a busy team, and I’m a mum and wife. I’m a news and adrenaline junkie, having spent three decades working as a top-flight editor on British national newspapers.

The retreat included a digital detox, with Eleanor handing her phone over to the teacher at the beginning of the week

Usually my brain is a constant whirr of to-do lists. I clock up around four hours a day on my mobile phone; more on my laptop and in meetings.

This week of silence is yin to that yang, the antithesis of my normal. This is a digital detox, too, a chance to be unplugged from everything. Here, I sleep not with my husband of 27 years, but in a monastic single bed; there is no TV or radio.

To drift off I look out of my window at the stars, which are so bright I can see constellations and the Milky Way. 

It takes me a while to get to sleep and I wake up in the small hours sweating, unsure where I am, freaked out by strange dreams (Donald Trump saying he’ll tweet about my platform noon.org.uk for midlife women . . . hmmm).

When my borrowed alarm clock trills at 7am for pre-breakfast meditation, I am groggy and cross.

I stagger to the hall and my cushion, a hoodie thrown over my PJs. I eat a breakfast of watery porridge and stewed apple. Then there’s a three-hour morning yoga session. 

Each day we work on a different set of energetic pathways, moving from grounding to exploring fear, anger, heart, connectedness and spirit.

Wringing out the muscles leads to unexpected emotional epiphanies. I have a dodgy right knee — I snapped my cruciate ligament skiing 20 years ago, which means I can’t fold it back underneath me as the session requires — and the sense of being incapable, unworthy, not good enough is intense.

I know it isn’t my fault, but that sensation amplifies in the silence and, before I know it, I am tumbling down a wormhole of ‘lack’. 

Every day there was a three-hour session of Iyengar yoga in the morning, followed by three hours of yin yoga (intense stretching poses) and different kinds of meditation in the afternoon (stock image)

It is like a depth charge blowing up all my insecurities. I start to weep snottily into my yoga bolster. It has stirred up something very deep.

‘In this moment you are safe in your body,’ intones my teacher Ayala Gill. ‘It is safe to be you. All is welcome here.’ 

Around me others are also weeping, digging into their own insecurities, their own sore, dark places, the ones that usually we would rather ignore. The bits that we hide away, that we numb out with busyness or glasses of wine.

But here, held by the teacher, surrounded by calm and peace, it feels safe to explore the things I usually avoid.

It is powerful to move towards the pain, to use it as a portal to find my own release and healing. I have done years of therapy — this is deeper.

After the weeping I feel lighter, like I have looked deep into me and come to terms with it. 

I am 52 and it has taken me until now to shake off the programming of my childhood — be good, succeed, achieve! For the first time in my life, I feel that it is OK just to be me. As I am.

Not thinner, or more successful, or different. No more being a square peg in a round hole; no more being what others want or expect me to be. Just me. Silent Eleanor. Phew!

Every day we do a three-hour session of Iyengar yoga in the morning, followed by three hours of yin yoga (intense stretching poses) and different kinds of meditation in the afternoon. 

Pictured attending a charity event in London, Eleanor, as a writer, businesswoman, mum and wife, leads a very busy life at home

In one session we explore where we ‘hold anger’. I stretch my legs out wide, looking up into the bamboo trees (we do this session on an outside deck beside a pond full of carp, surrounded by statues of the Buddha).

As I hold the stretch (it is a kind of mild agony), I feel energy building inside me. 

My head is aching (probably caffeine withdrawal), but suddenly the energy of the anger seems to split open the bit of my skull where the headache is, and I see a key relationship through a different lens. I had felt the fault was all mine and been mired in guilt.

Finally, I get through the sadness to the anger beneath and, wow, it is liberating. 

When the teacher suggests we take half an hour to meditate in nature, I find myself dancing like a child in the middle of a field, blowing dandelions with delight. I feel free.

The next morning, we are doing tree poses. I am very wobbly on the knee that is damaged. But the teacher suggests that we raise our arms and join our hands.

Suddenly, I’m upright and proud, standing tall and strong, lifted by the women next to me. We are like a forest of people, supporting each other, stronger and more resilient together. We grin wildly, exchanging ecstatic smiles.

The strangest thing about a silent retreat is how much communication happens without words. When I am sad, several others come and wordlessly hug me. A shared sense of the ridiculous is apparent in eyes caught in smiles.

Small gestures in the lunch queue, the delivery of half a ripe peach into my breakfast bowl from a woman with a secret stash, a glance of understanding over a poem. 

Despite the silence, Eleanor found communality, friendship and support on the retreat

There is communality here, new friendship and support. I don’t feel alone; I am part of a collective. Just a wordless one.

Silence does lead to some misunderstandings. During clear-up one night, I am frustrated that one of the team isn’t pulling her weight (wrongly, as it turns out).

I roll my eyes. She sees. I can tell she is upset, but there is no way to communicate the misunderstanding. At the end of the retreat, when the silence is broken, the first thing I do is give her a hug and say I am sorry.

She hugs me back gratefully, telling me that the fleeting eye-roll plunged her into a long dissection of her relationship with her disapproving mother. 

It turns out to have been a key moment in a huge internal shift for her. In silence our actions are magnified.

With so little stimulation, it is easy to brood on what was meant by a gesture. A key teaching is that ‘the way we do anything is the way we do everything’. I resolve not to be so quick to judge in the future.

Ultimately, though, it is all grist to the mill. We are all here exploring our internal landscapes; the silence allows for unbroken reflection, for unearthing and processing deep wounds.

By exploring all of our darkest corners we expose them to the light of our presence, of our loving acceptance. As the outside world becomes more distant, I feel my mind is like a snow globe settling. 

In that first meditation the inside of my head was full of static. By day five, when I close my eyes, I see a calm purple light. My mind stops jumping and instead is focused. Still.

On the penultimate morning my 7.30am meditation feels very deep. As if I — Eleanor — am no longer even there. 

It is still and calm and beautiful. I emerge into the daylight blinking at the iridescence of the dappled leaves in the sun. I cross a small bridge over the stream and stand by the river watching the light shimmering.

The poplars and willows go fuzzy, the inside of my head is like an impressionist painting, and suddenly that fades, too, and it all goes white. 

The silence provided Eleanor and the other participants with an opportunity for unbroken reflection 

I am flooded with golden light; it is so beautiful I weep with joy, there on the bank of the river in my yoga pants.

Over the week I become ‘ungloved’, as the poet Mark Nepo puts it. The hubbub and busy-ness of daily life; endlessly trimming and not articulating what we really feel. 

All of this can become like a callous over our capacity to truly feel. Like emotional gloves over our hands; a barrier. A numbness. 

Stripping everything back like this, it is as though we unpeel the layers. Take off the gloves; become more sensitive to our true selves, more open to the beauty of the world and our direct loving response to it. More truly and essentially ourselves.

Yes, it can be uncomfortable and sad — but by removing the numbness we allow ourselves to feel everything. The good and the bad — and, most of all, the wonder. Try it!

• Eleanor Mills is the founder of noon.org.uk — home of the Queenager.

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