Art Journals
From Solo Retreat
Post four of five, in section My Experiences
In February 2025, I went on a 5-night solo retreat in the Ardennes, Belgium. I stayed on the edge of a small town, with lots of epic woodland walks straight out the door.
There isn’t really any difference in my inner experience between being in ‘retreat mode’ and ‘normal mode,’ but when I am in nature, the more-than-human aspects of experience become a lot more nourishing, and there’s more resonance available in the depths of experience.
It’s also nice to give my consciousness some space to expand without it having to fit into social roles and expectations.
I created an art journal of some of the key moments of the retreat. The aim was just to capture the pure state of receptivity of being in the experience.
I didn’t take any psychedelics on the retreat (I do them a few times a year at most), but my baseline experience is very psychedelic, and this comes through in the images I created.
Underneath the rational mind’s reified ways of looking, life is a lot more shamanic, interdependent, embodied, and direct than most people can begin to imagine.
It’s a very modern phenomenon that contemplative practice is used as a complement to a mostly rationalist worldview. Being able to relate to experience in a rational way is a superpower, but getting stuck there and not being able to move beyond into the more ineffable and intuitive qualities of experience can easily become an incredibly narrow way of practicing.
Dharma is about deeply opening to the true reality of experience beyond your individual self-view, which tends to be much richer and more surprising than a typical modern mind can conceive of.
A lot of dharma practice is about being able to tune into your thread of joy and your care for the benefit of all beings and being willing to follow this wherever it takes you.
If you want to hear me describe more about the Universe being psychedelic, you can listen to this interview I did with Alex Olshonsky.
I arrived in the late afternoon and walked up into the woods at dusk. Being in the trees made my heart sing. I could feel the threads of energy both exploding outwards from my core and rushing inwards from the nature all around, in a kind of resonant loop.
One aspect of my experience is how it emerges from a place of the energy already knowing itself from the inside, which is what the eyes in the image represent.
On the second day, about halfway around the trail, I came across a river with a plunge pool. Stepping over the icicles on the edge of the river on the way to get in, I had a very quick dip.
The image depicts the feeling of the water and the cold washing away some of the solidity of the body and the sense of dissolving into the flow of the river before emerging fresh again.
I’ve found doing cold dips one of the best things for doing a complete reset of the body – it’s like turning the body off and on again – and lots of content can be released in that process.
This was also the second day, where I spent the day very merged with the landscape around me.
I was processing and releasing a lot of energy that felt like a stream of multidimensional stories and interdependent energies leaving my body and being left behind me as I hiked through the woods.
Listening to music. I regularly recommend practicing with music to help keep emotions moving in a healthy way. It’s also just a total vibe to feel the way a song can move through your entire being.
Walking on the third day. My experience was a lot more empty and spacious, more like being a vast sky and moving through a crisp landscape of details.
There was a lot of pine forest and mixed woodland on the trail I was walking.
I turned a long, slow corner walking up a steep hill, and I could feel that I’d entered the territory of oaks even before I had looked up and seen the trees. Oaks always hit me with a specific transmission of a kind of wholehearted ancientness that I really appreciate.
I also love the feeling of being small that you get in nature. It feels expansive and humbling at the same time.
Find the landscapes that your soul is designed to feel at home in.
There are certain corners of the world where my whole being comes to life. It’s like they and I are made of the same stuff, and everything pops to life in an aligned flow of resonant energy.
This was a particular section of pine forest that had just the right combination of mossy floor, dappled light, vibey trees, and ineffable alignment with the depths of my being.
Working with dark energy flows and eros.
My main practice path was shadow work, with inclusion, realness, and wholeness being three of my strongest practice values. I find it as rich and sacred to be with the dark energies that can emerge in your being as with connecting to light energies, in part because it’s the doorway to accessing a more creative relationship with life.
One aspect of this is that I get a lot of eros arising on solo retreats; some of it is sexual, and sometimes I find it beneficial to work with it and to allow it to come to life.
There’s a lot of good purification and transmutation that can happen at this level. It’s also interesting to develop the capacity to be able to watch the process of these more carnal aspects of yourself boot up in your system. Sexual energy is the same energy pathways that are involved in the way you access power and connection in your wider life, so having more mindfulness and clarity around them can be both empowering and create more possibility for connecting with an open heart. The purpose of practicing with this is to be able to hold energies related to sexuality in yourself in a more spacious and wholehearted way.
On the last two group retreats I’ve been on, there have been sessions on working with sexual energies in imaginal ways (this needs to be facilitated with a lot of care and include space for people to bring in challenging experiences). Making space for sexual energy to be present in a safe way is also really beneficial for helping people get more broadly into their bodies, their lower chakras, their aliveness, and their full expression.
If you’re at the start of your practice or have an addictive response to sexuality, power, or eros, it can be best to abstain from all sexual energy during practice time while you build basic skills of mindfulness and presence without distraction. It’s also super valuable to do periods of time without it at any stage of practice because it can open up the richness of other aspects of experience that are more subtle and can easily get steamrolled by stronger energies.
While on this retreat, I also had a dark and intense past life experience.
I went up to the woods at night to see the stars. I walked past an old chapel, up a long, steep path onto a plateau, and into a dark woodland.
In a clearing in the woods, I stopped to take a photo. To be able to capture anything in the dark, you have to hold the camera still for 3 seconds in the pitch black, and while I was doing this, I started to imagine how scary it would be if someone or something was there when the photo appeared.
My adrenaline started rushing. I walked a little deeper into the woods and held my nerve. My heart was racing at every little sound that I heard. After pausing for about 30 seconds and staying with the fear, I had the feeling that it would be good to run and let some of the fear energy complete itself on a nervous system level. I ran through the woods as if someone were chasing me until I reached the gate at the edge of the forest, where the lights from the town below started to become visible again.
After going through the gate, the path became steep, so I slowed down my pace. As I walked down the rocky path, a vivid waking dream (or past life memory) moved through me. The sensation of being a Viking woman, holding a knife, being chased by a big man through a woodland flooded my experience. I had a very clear choice – to surrender, to run, or to stop and fight. The memory was of stopping and screaming a war cry before everything faded out. My sense was that she had been killed.
This whole series of events felt like a shamanic release of an energy pattern in me where I was willing to fight for the things that I care about, even in the face of almost certain death. It felt like the energy pathway had been planted more than a lifetime ago and buried in the depths of my being. The energy had now served its purpose and, through this whole process, had been unearthed and was releasing back into open spaciousness.
The next day I walked into town to buy some food and happened to wander into the church on the way. The sun was coming through these beautiful, psychedelic, stained-glass windows, and I felt like I’d walked into one of my paintings.
I spent the afternoon walking through the woods in a very open state of emptiness.The subtle circle in the image is the lightest sense of being a receiver in the world, and the flow of colours are thoughts moving through the open space of the mind without catching on anything.
I’ve found from teaching (and listening to other teachers) that some people love being in this state. I think if your natural mind state tends towards being full and graspy (for example, Myers-Briggs thinkers, Enneagram mind types, people with controlling tendencies), the spaciousness in comparison feels really relaxing. But if you’re naturally quite open and nebulous already, this state feels kind of nothingy.
It’s not unpeaceful, but it’s not particularly peaceful either. It’s not unluminous (or all those other spiritual-sounding qualities), but it’s not those things either.
I find it useful to have as a backdrop to be able to drop into, but I don’t especially love hanging out here.
Feeling into the depths of nothingness
Listen quietly for the tiny opening;
A crack in the surface of being sure
That you already know what experience is
Run a finger of your heart-knowing
Over the contours of this opening
And allow it to take you somewhere
You have never been before
Lying down that evening, I had a series of mini cessations interspersed with symbolism, shadows, and energetic forms in my body, revealing and releasing.
I normally don’t remember what emerges in this state, as it happens in a totally different dimension from rational thought and the place of being able to form memories, but a vivid image of the underneath of an octopus stuck with me. It was scary enough and surprising enough to switch my rational mind on for a couple of seconds. It always amuses me that they have a beak hidden away in the middle of their tentacles – the last thing you’d expect to find there.
I’m also reading about Yoga Nidra and the different brain wave states that it takes you through, as this is an interesting way of systematising and understanding this process.
Cessation.
The 7,000 silk-thin threads of meaning and social models that hold reality together, however loosely, all unhook at once. The whole of reality turns just a couple of degrees to the right, and the infinite void that lies directly next to everything you hold onto as real appears before everything dissolves.
I have spent lots of time having reality utterly eaten by cessation on a much more regular basis than was manageable.
These days I enjoy it when it arises, and I’ve found that having a cessation after a lot has moved through the system on an embodied and energetic level is when it is most satisfying and meaningful. It allows the whole system to update to a new way of being in an incredibly subtle way.
The last day I was walking on a pretty boring route that was taking me through lots of villages. I noticed a cut-through in the woods and ended up in one of my favourite places of the whole trip.
A vibey, moody valley, it started as a dank and rich pine forest with a stream flowing through it and then opened out into a slightly wider valley floor. The stream was like nothing I’d seen before – it seemed to have burst its banks at some point, had ended up staying that way, and was flowing through islands and tufts of grass.
Just before it flowed into a small, icy lake, four tall, dead trees stood across the stream. I imagine they had died from being flooded.
They reminded me of large statues that guard the entrance to new lands in fictional stories like Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, but the entirely natural version. Shelf fungi were growing on them, and there was something about the feeling of nature both guarding and reclaiming itself. I felt a strong affiliation with them, as if I were one of the trees.
I sometimes describe my journey of awakening as me unknowingly setting out on an epic walk with only the Divine intelligence of the Universe for company. Once I’d made it through the hell realms, I enjoyed the companionship and the process of walking together so much that I forgot where we had intended to go and just carried on walking.
I’ve managed to capture some more structured insights of what I discovered along the way, and I’m currently putting this together into a book, ‘Being Buddha Nature,’ which includes my framework for awakening, illustrations, poetry, and an approach to practice.
