Meeting Fear, Uncertainty and a Week of Silence

What Fear Taught Me About Not Knowing

I’ve just come back from a five-night silent retreat at Gaia House with the Leila Sarti.

I try to do one every year and have been doing this for about fifteen years now. I’ve come heavily pregnant. I’ve come before children. I always come exhausted from work and sometimes full of enthusiasm for practice.

This time the retreat showed me something about fear.

At one point I felt a strong wave of it, a tightness in my chest and the sense that something bad was about to happen. For a short while, maybe an hour, it felt like I might be losing the plot a little.

But alongside that there was also the quiet recognition that fifteen years of practice was holding me.

One thing that helped was an image that arose during meditation.

I imagined myself sitting under a Bodhi tree, not as the historical Buddha, but embodying the qualities associated with the Buddha: steadiness, compassion, patience and care.

In Buddhist psychology the voice of fear and attack is sometimes described as Mara, not a literal demon, but the forces in the mind that try to pull us away from clarity.

Mara showed up for me as fearful thinking and bodily dread trying to convince me that something terrible was happening or about to happen.

Usually when fear arises I can be quite punishing with myself. The inner critic gets busy.

This time I tried something different.

Instead of fighting or even fuelling Mara, I imagined inviting him to sit down.

The fear didn’t disappear. But something softened in the way I related to it.

I didn’t suppress the fear. I didn’t analyse it to death. I related to it.

People often say to me when they hear about silent retreats, “I could never do that.”

And to be honest, sometimes I don’t want to do it either.

Retreat can be boring. Restless. I missed my family. I missed my phone. At times I wanted to come home.

But alongside that there are moments of real rest, stillness and clarity.

You begin to see the habits of your mind more clearly, the emotional patterns in the body, the stories the mind creates, and how quickly those stories can amplify what is already difficult.

It’s a bit like muddy water.

In everyday life I’m constantly shaking the sediment without realising it, conversations replaying in my head, arguments I wish I’d had years ago, stories about people from my past.

I noticed that happening on retreat too.

I caught myself having imaginary conversations with people from my childhood, trying to tell them what was wrong or what should have been different.

I’ve been doing that for years, usually in the shower.

But this time I saw it clearly and almost laughed.

“Oh, there you are again.”

It didn’t feel great, but the seeing changed something.

The most challenging part of the retreat wasn’t the thinking though.

It was the fear in the body.

Thinking can sometimes be worked with through reflection or imagery. But fear lives somewhere deeper.

It’s visceral.

You can’t think your way out of it.

You have to meet it directly.

For someone like me who loves understanding and intellectual digging, that’s not always easy.

Being with difficult sensations, fear, anger, dread, requires a different kind of attention: gently learning to treat fear as a bodily phenomenon to be known rather than obeyed.

So the image of the Buddha helped steady the mind while the body did what bodies do when fear moves through them.

What became clear in that moment was something surprisingly simple.

Something bad might happen.

But in that moment there is no way of being certain.

And if I don’t know, then that is the truth of the moment.

But fear wants certainty.

My mind tries to collapse uncertainty into certainty because certainty feels safer, even if the certainty is catastrophic. It tries to drag the future into the present and treat it as fact.

But certainty only ever arrives when something actually happens.

Until then, it is just a story, a phenomenon of the mind.

So if something difficult does come, I will meet it when it arrives.

But right now, the honest ground beneath my feet is simply this:

I don’t know.

And in that not knowing, there is a quiet kind of letting go, of predictions, of stories about the future, and of explanations for why the fear is happening.

Why this matters beyond retreat

This insight isn’t just about meditation.

Throughout my career, and now through The Aftershock Project, I speak with people whose nervous systems have spent years in environments where danger really was possible.

When your body has learned to treat alarm as truth, fear can feel incredibly convincing.

But one of the things contemplative practice slowly teaches is this:

A powerful feeling in the body does not always mean a threat is present.

Sometimes it simply means the nervous system is doing what nervous systems do.

And sometimes the most honest response is not certainty, but allowing ourselves not to know.

To become curious about the space of not knowing.

And right now, in this moment, that is enough.