Episode 7 — The Week That Refused to Be Quiet
I had a plan for this week.
A quiet one.
After the fullness of England — the funeral, the family, five days of London living itself awake — I told myself this would be the week of settling. Slowing. Preparing for the silence retreat I leave for on Wednesday. Ten days of Vipassana. No phone, no speaking, no René, no Netflix, no noise. Just breath and whatever waits underneath it.
The week had other ideas.
I think many of us know this particular tension — the one between what we tell ourselves we need and what actually shows up when we stop moving. I thought I needed stillness. What I discovered is that stillness, when it arrives uninvited, can feel uncomfortably close to emptiness.
And emptiness, for someone like me, is not automatically peaceful.
Monday arrived heavy. After the high of England — all that love and laughter and adventure — I crashed back into my flat, which was messier than I’d left it, and felt the particular fatigue that follows a week of being fully alive. I slept. I wandered. I went down a rabbit hole creating an AI clothing stylist, which wasn’t my plan for the day, and then judged myself quietly for it.
Then seven episodes of Netflix with a bowl of salted peanuts.
Then more quiet self-judgement.
The kind that doesn’t announce itself loudly — it just hums underneath everything, making the evening feel slightly wrong.
And looking back now, I can see it clearly:
I had just lived one of the most emotionally significant weeks of my year.
My body was exhausted. My nervous system was full. Of course I cocooned. Of course I reached for comfort.
The cruelest thing I did that Monday was not the Netflix or the peanuts — it was the part of me that kept score.
By Tuesday I had straightened up enough internally to see it more clearly.
I had volunteer work. I prepared an Ideal Scene letter. My son Dion came by in the evening with his girlfriend, and I gave him the Dungeons & Dragons set — the player’s handbook René and I had hunted down in that little card shop in London next to the Travelodge.
The shopkeeper had lit up because someone was genuinely interested in what he loved. And then Dion lit up when he opened it.
That moment — watching my son hold something I’d found for him across the water — was the kind of ordinary that matters entirely.
The week kept quietly filling itself in.
A long call with my accountability partner in Atlanta. A call with my mum. An NLP webinar. Catching up. Cooking. Ideal Scene work. Transcribing the England audios. Publishing Episode 6.
And not only publishing it.
I completed the entire cycle in one go:
the website,
Facebook,
Instagram,
WhatsApp,
Telegram,
the email.
That was not “doing nothing.”
That was momentum.
And then something else happened.
I saw that Episode 6 had reached nearly fifty views on the website already — a record for me — and I saw that my father had read it and put a heart on the Facebook version.
That mattered quietly.
Because something real had moved from lived experience into words, and those words had reached people.
Maybe this is how I show up for now.
Maybe this is not “less than” because it is not yet a big launch, a retreat, a funnel or a polished business strategy.
Maybe this is the bridge.
Still, underneath all of it, there was a tension humming in me:
If I am not actively moving toward my dream, am I wasting time?
That voice still lives in me.
And then there is another voice saying:
“Shamna, you are about to disappear into silence for ten days. Let yourself breathe before you try becoming the next version of yourself.”
That was the real tug-of-war of this week.
Pleasure on one side.
Pressure on the other.
Trusting the Divine on one side.
Wanting to control the future on the other.
Resting on one side.
Feeling guilty for resting on the other.
And meanwhile life kept refusing to become empty.
Ascension Day arrived, and René and I went to the kermis in Zoetermeer.
It wasn’t extraordinary in the grand sense.
It was simply fun.
We walked around with childlike eyes. Ate an oliebol. Played the slot machines. Looked at lights and colours and people and movement and all the little absurd joys of ordinary life.
And I realised again:
pleasure is not a distraction from my life.
Pleasure is part of how I return to life.
Friday René took me on what unexpectedly felt like a real date.
Yes, we eat out often. Yes, we spend a lot of time together. But this felt different somehow. Deliberate. Romantic. Soft.
We sat across from each other at Moodz in Delft before his DJ set, sharing beautiful food and different conversations, and I caught myself thinking:
this is what I am about to go ten days without.
Not just him.
This particular quality of being met. Of being known by someone sitting right across from you.
And then Saturday came.
Old-timer cars rolling through the Dorpsstraat all day long. MGs. Triumphs. Corvettes. Porsches. The whole street transformed into a living museum of nostalgia and beauty.
And there it was.
A sky-blue Porsche model.
Sally.
My Sally.
I bought it immediately and spent the rest of the day singing in Dutch:
“Ik heb een Sally, ik heb een Sally.”
Like a little girl. Like a woman dream-building in plain sight.
And honestly?
Dream-building does not always look like vision boards and strategy plans.
Sometimes it looks like a tiny blue Porsche on your desk and you feeling ridiculous with joy about it.
Sunday René and I sat side by side working quietly.
Me doing Global Information Network member retention calls with headphones in. Him building branding ideas for a new DJ concept: The Rewind Club.
That particular kind of companionship — two people creating beside each other while fully allowing the other to be themselves — is something I realised I will miss deeply during Vipassana.
Because underneath this whole week, humming quietly behind every experience, was the awareness:
Wednesday I disappear into silence.
No phone.
No eye contact.
No talking.
No scrolling.
No Netflix.
No René.
No distractions.
Just breath.
And whatever surfaces when there is nowhere else left to look.
I had imagined I would spend this week in spiritual preparation.
Packing mindfully.
Washing clothes slowly.
Entering some serene pre-retreat cocoon.
Instead, life kept asking me to participate.
And maybe that was exactly right.
Maybe the preparation was never meant to look like withdrawal.
Maybe it looked like this:
a son receiving a gift,
a date in Delft,
a fairground,
old cars,
a tiny blue Porsche,
working beside the man I love,
publishing a blog I was proud of,
living fully right up until the edge of silence.
I won’t pretend I am not nervous.
The three-hour drive to Belgium is already on my nervous system. My ankle still hurts sometimes. I’ve worried about being cold. About packing correctly. About whether I would find my Priestess cloak.
And today I realised something simple:
a blanket will do.
The most important thing is not to arrive perfectly prepared.
The most important thing is to surrender.
The final line I wrote in my Ideal Scene letter this week was:
“These two weeks I release addictions and embrace the silence of Vipassana.”
Addictions to noise.
To scrolling.
To productivity as identity.
To emotional eating.
To needing reassurance.
To the quiet self-judgement that disguises itself as discipline.
And yet, alongside that surrender, I also booked something else.
The morning I leave the retreat, before returning home, I booked myself a massage at Elaisa Wellness.
Warmth.
Water.
Care.
Softness waiting for me on the other side.
And perhaps that is the deepest shift of all.
Maybe I do not have to conquer myself.
Maybe I may lovingly prepare to meet myself.
So this is me signing off for now.
Not perfectly prepared.
Not fully detached.
Not without fear.
Not without tenderness.
But willing.
At the edge of silence.
At the edge of surrender.
At the edge of whatever version of me waits on the other side.
And for now, that is enough.
And if something in this reflection felt familiar — the self-judgement, the emotional tug-of-war, the pressure to keep performing even when your nervous system is asking for softness — my free 5 Human Clouds guide may help you gently recognise the patterns underneath it all.
Sometimes awareness alone changes everything.
