The 7 Most Life-Changing Lessons From My Mental Health Retreat

How I finally exchanged my inner critic for a sleep schedule and real self-love.

I spent two weeks at a mental health retreat in Chiang Mai, Thailand this August, and while I’m in the middle of a much longer and more personal post about it, I wanted to take some time to simplify some of the biggest things I learned there, just in case they can help other people as much as they’re helping me.

New Paradigm is a unique mental health retreat. There were only three of us there, and it’s all led by one therapist, the singular Dirk Lambert, who — prior to becoming a therapist — was a military sergeant, an IT company founder, and a twice-ordained Buddhist monk.

We did everything from EMDR to workshops on the Law of Attraction, and while I’d heard about most of what we'd been taught, it helped me immensely to be forced to put it all into practice in a supportive and structured environment. None of these tactics work, after all, unless you actually implement them, and structure is vital for any kind of success.

But reading can be a great place to start, and there were a few truly novel ideas that Dirk presented that I know I’ll be carrying with me for the rest of my life. I hope they can help someone else, too. Here they are.

1. A sleep schedule is critical and non-negotiable

Before our first therapy session, I presented Dirk with a long document about my life and the problems I’ve been facing. I’d created it at the behest of another therapist, but I thought it might help save time in our sessions — after all, we only had 10. After reading it, he had one takeaway: It sounded to him, he said, like my biggest problem was fatigue and exhaustion.

At first I was surprised to hear this. I knew I was tired all the time, but I figured that was a byproduct of my depression, and it seemed to pale in comparison to other issues. But actually, Dirk helped me realize that the fatigue was likely causing a lot of the issues I was having, from my forgetfulness to my low-self-esteem.

A really life-changing moment happened, though, when I started talking about how I saw myself as a lazy vat of unfulfilled potential, and Dirk said, I really don’t see you as lazy. I just think you’ve been really tired.

That kind of honestly blew my mind, because I’d been calling myself lazy in my head for so long without even thinking about the fact that when I have energy and when I’m feeling good about myself I’m actually kind of an amazingly creative powerhouse. It’s the fatigue, I realized, not some fundamental lack of willpower, that often keeps me from fully engaging with life.

I’d long known that the best way to combat insomnia is to go to bed and wake up at the same time. But for some reason, I’d never actually been able to apply this. I loved staying up late and was often up late anyway because I couldn’t sleep, and I figured that sleeping in occasionally was at least a way to catch up on some Zzzs. Over the past few years my schedule had become absolutely haywire, and I often went to bed around three and rolled out of bed at eleven or later.

Well, after New Paradigm, all that is in the past. Dirk told me that without a sleep schedule, everything else goes out the window. At one point, he told all of us that if we were taking great care of our sleep and nutrition and were still having mental health issues, he’d let us come back to New Paradigm for free.

He also told me that if I had a bad insomnia night, I should still wake up at the same time the next day — and I should just try not to worry about it too much.

Every day at New Paradigm, we woke up at 5:20 in the morning, and while at first I was exhausted — especially because we weren’t allowed any coffee!! — by the end I was falling asleep at 8:30 or earlier, and was feeling so much less tired than I had in such a long time, without coffee. Now, I’ve frequently found myself waking up at 6 even without an alarm.

It hasn’t been easy to maintain a sleep schedule while traveling, but I’m still getting up earlier than ever, and I feel so much better and much less tired than I did before.

Dirk also taught us two key tips for easing insomnia and winding down before bed: diaphragmatic breathing and progressive relaxation. Diaphragmatic breathing is essentially breathing in for four counts and out for four counts, and should be done for at least five minutes. Progressive relaxation is tightening parts of your body for fifteen seconds and letting them relax for 30 seconds, and was apparently developed for soldiers to help them fall asleep anywhere.

So, since New Paradigm, I’ve committed to turning off technology an hour before bed, doing these exercises every night, and never deviating from my chosen wakeup time by more than an hour or two no more than one or two days a week. Though I don’t want to jinx anything, so far it’s been working wonders.

I also initially felt so much resistance to actually committing to a sleep schedule, which made me realize just how much my inner teenager has been using staying up late as a way to rebel against the expectations of the world. I was a classic revenge bedtime procrastinator before New Paradigm, but now, for the first time, I’m actually enjoying my early mornings — a miracle if you ever saw me in the morning before I did this program. (Apologies to all the roommates who I’ve ever glowered at before I had my coffee in the past. It wasn’t you, it was me!)

Also, Dirk told us that it’s extremely important to try and think something positive in the first few moments after waking up. Every morning when he wakes up, he imagines himself shaking off any negative feelings, and then he fills his mind with positive affirmations, like the word GREAT!

I’ve personally been trying this and it makes a huge difference. I’ve also started putting my phone far away from me so when my alarm goes off, I have to get out of bed — and I’ve been absolutely forbidding myself from crawling back under the covers.

Right after you get up, he said, you should also do some form of physical activity, be it a walk or a short yoga class or something. Every morning we went for a 30-minute power walk and while it was so hard at first, I grew to love the ritual.

Nutrition also goes hand-in-hand with sleep as one of the most important parts of life, he often told us. This was a great reminder to not skip meals as I’d often been doing back home before the program — a bad habit that undoubtedly did not help my fatigue. He advised us to always eat nutritious meals at the same hour of the day.

All these things are kind of obvious, but implementing them is a whole other beast. Yet they’re the foundations for all mental health recovery, he told us over and over.

I’m learning to just accept that I’m not like other people: I can’t just expect to fall asleep whenever. I can’t just have a ton of sugar and watch TV right before bed. I can’t just allow myself sleep in all day on the weekends. I truly need the structure and discipline of a sleep schedule in order to be a functional human. And that’s okay. Because the sacrifices I might make for my sleep schedule are worth it in order to have energy. I spent so much time feeling like an exhausted zombie over the past few years, and I never want to go back to those days.

This is probably the top thing I learned at New Paradigm and if you take one thing away from this article, let it be this: Have a sleep schedule.

Key Takeaways:

• Have a consistent sleep schedule no matter what

• Wake up early even if you have trouble falling asleep the night before

• Think something positive right when you wake up

• Do some form of movement immediately after getting up

• Stick to a schedule for meals

2. Self-love is the key to everything, and affirmations are the way to get there

I know self-love is critical. I’d known it for many years. But my time at New Paradigm really showed me just how absolutely non-negotiable it is for recovery from mental illness.

I read two of the books that Dirk recommended at New Paradigm: Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life and Susan Jeffers’s Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, both of which are basically gung-ho diatribes on the importance of affirmations and positive thinking, and by the end of the retreat I was sold.

You should not criticize yourself, ever, Louise Hay wrote at one point.

Before this year, I spent so much of my life being so incredibly mean to myself. Feeling guilty for what I had. Feeling guilty for what I hadn’t done. Feeling so much shame. I was my own worst enemy. I never would have tolerated anyone else saying a fraction of what I used to say to myself every single day.

And yet I was trying to use self-hatred as a way to motivate myself to change my life, which was never going to work. If we try to heal from a place of lack, then we’ll always wind up back where we started. But if we try to heal from a place of fullness and actual self-love, that’s when healing actually happens.

So I’ve started doing daily affirmations, saying I love and accept you as you are to myself at least a few times every day while looking in the mirror. I have some written down on a piece of paper and am also saying them before bed. Saying I love you to yourself can feel weird at first, but now I can’t believe I ever went so long without telling myself that. It felt odd in the beginning, but now I really do feel it.

I can honestly say that I actually do love myself, and it feels amazing.

Hay also suggests that you try saying I approve of myself in your head a few hundred times each day for a month, and I’ve also been trying to say that to myself whenever I feel my mind wandering into dangerous, self-critical territory, which still does happen at least a few times a day, likely because I spent so many years ingrained in this pattern.

Imagine if you could replace your inner monkey mind’s prattling with I approve of myself; how would your entire worldview shift? I already feel mine changing.

I’d also been working on combatting my inner critic for a while, and last year, the reframe I took away from a CBT course I took last year was: If self-criticism worked as a way of motivating you to change, it would have worked by now!

To make affirmations work for real, I also do think you have to start strong and kind of go all-out and deal with the discomfort that’s going to come with this practice. I said affirmations to myself and read about the importance of them for two hours a day every day for 14 days, and I think it takes at least that long to get a new habit ingrained into your mind.

Self-love is so hard for so many reasons, though, especially when you’re feeling emotional, so be gentle with yourself during this process. Dirk also suggested that when the self-critical voice or monkey mind does come up, it’s better to gently guide it away like you would an errant child rather than attacking it, and I think this is also extremely important.

I’d suggest reading Louise Hay or Susan Jeffers’s book and trying out the exercises they suggest daily for at least two weeks in order to get a head start on this.

Takeaways:

• Never criticize yourself!!!

• Invest some serious time and energy into repeating positive affirmations while looking at yourself in the mirror

• Say I approve of myself as many times as you can each day and see what happens

3. When it comes to handling emotions, practice radical compassion and embrace the cactus

One of the first things Dirk shared with us was a masterclass led by Tara Brach called Radical Compassion, which I’d highly, highly recommend to everyone. In it, she talks about the extraordinary importance of self-compassion, and she teaches a mindfulness technique called RAIN meant to help process emotions in a healthy way.

RAIN stands for:

R - Recognize (what are you feeling?)

A - Allow (can you allow and make space for the feeling?)

I - Investigate (where does this feeling come from? What is it trying to say? What patterns are contributing to it?)

N - Nurture (what do you need? What is the feeling asking for?)

One of the main reasons I’d come to New Paradigm was because of my experience at my 10-day silent Vipassana meditation course, which made me aware of a lot of emotional pain I was carrying around. Now that I knew it was there, I seemed to be having trouble getting rid of it. I honestly believe I’d mostly lived in a state of chronic disconnection from my true self before Vipassana, but afterwards, I now seemed to be almost too in touch with my reactive inner world. It was like I had peered underneath a floorboard and seen a horde of teeming insects and rot and fungi swarming around, and now I couldn’t unsee it.

When I told Dirk about this newfound pain I’d identified, I expected to spend the whole session unpacking it, but he seemed unconcerned and took about five minutes to give me a key takeaway. (I often do better with therapists who don’t give me too much self-pity and instead help me take myself just a little bit less seriously).

Embrace the cactus, he said. When the discomfort comes — as it’s really just discomfort, not pain — you just have to embrace it. Just greet it with love. (Now I really want a little cactus tattoo as a reminder of this all-important tactic).

The key is to not reject the negative emotions, but also don’t let them overstay their welcome. This is something I’m most definitely still trying to understand as feeling emotions in a health way turns out to not come super naturally to me, but I think the cactus idea and RAIN are two of the most helpful tactics for handling emotions that I’ve ever come across. I hope they help you too.

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4. Emotional binding and is critical, for both gratitude and manifestation

Takeaways:

• When practicing gratitude, actually feel the gratitude

• When practicing manifestation, make sure you believe and feel that what you want is already yours

I know gratitude is important, and I’d been doing a gratitude practice for nearly a year before New Paradigm, but it really didn’t seem to be helping me at all. I think that’s because (in addition to working at a job that was completely wrong for me), I wasn’t emotionally binding to the gratitude. I was just writing down gratitudes while still feeling shitty.

But, as I learned in Tamara Levitt’s lovely gratitude masterclass, when you’re writing down gratitudes, make sure you take a minute to actually feel grateful for what you’re writing. It’s as simple as that.

She also suggests taking time to write or say ten gratitudes each day (I’ve been writing them then saying them aloud while actually feeling grateful). And she also advises to make them specific in order to avoid repeating the same gratitudes over and over. Now I’m actually excited to practice gratitude each evening, as it actually makes me feel grateful. Who would’ve thought!

This tactic, called emotional binding is also a critical piece of manifestation, which Dirk also taught us about in a separate class. A master at manifestation himself, he often awed us with wild tales of how a wish of his was answered by a mysterious wealthy client who appeared at the right time or by some other miraculous stroke of fate.

The emotional binding step is key. For example, if you’re manifesting a new relationship or trying to get over an ex, he said, you have to actually allow yourself to feel like you already have an extraordinary new relationship.

What would it feel like? Real love and security? The imagined void completely filled? Feel it. Find it in yourself. This might even help you realize that you have always held the key to the love you’ve been seeking all along.

The universe responds to vibrations and gives us more of the energy we’re putting out. So if we’re always wishing for and desperately wanting a new relationship, instead of acting like a person who’s in an amazing relationship would act and feeling like they would feel, we’re probably not going to get it; instead we’re always going to be stuck in a place of lack.

I tried it with Ink Roads, this very blog, and I realized that if I already had a thriving and successful business here on Substack I wouldn’t be hesitating to launch any offerings and I certainly wouldn’t be waiting for new subscribers to magically appear before doing so.

So I went ahead and launched a ritual and creativity challenge for this autumn equinox/Mabon — and a bunch of people signed up immediately! That’s the law of attraction in action, baby.

(That ritual is in progress right now and you can learn more and sign up for that here):

5. We all need a higher power — but don’t overthink it

Dirk was very clear about the importance of a higher power, which he said can look like anything, but no matter what, this is key for any kind of healing, particularly when healing from mental illness.

I consider myself a very spiritual person and most certainly believe in energy and magic, but my Vipassana retreats brought up a lot of issues with spirituality, namely with the concept of a benevolent god. How could that god allow all this suffering?

Don’t overthink it, he told me.

I want to believe, I said.

Don’t want, he said. Just believe.

And so, I believe. Because it’s better to believe. Because I have so much evidence in my life that there have always been angels looking out for me. Because I’ve learned so much even from my greatest struggles.

Because people have always believed. Because the world itself is a miracle.

I’ve been trying to pray a bit every night and I really enjoy the ritual. I also read a really brilliant explanation of god that answered a lot of the questions I had. Surprisingly, I found it not in a dense philosophical text but in in Susan Jeffers’s hyper-positive book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.

She basically says that the universe is an energetic force that responds to what we put out. So if we believe there’s a loving benevolent force guiding and protecting us, that’s what will show up in our life! And if we believe that everything is random and out of control and awful, that’s also what will show up in our life!

Pretty simple and pretty damn powerful stuff. Might as well give it a shot.

6. Don’t dwell excessively on negativity (in therapy, in the news, or in life), as what we focus our attention on always grows

This is connected to that last point, and was also something I already knew, but it really was driven home to me in new ways at New Paradigm.

One of the main and more controversial things Dirk often talked about was how talk therapy can be extremely damaging, as it can often lead to people ruminating and focusing on negativity — and since what we pay attention to grows, this can just keep people stuck (and paying for more therapy).

While I’d never want to discourage someone from going to therapy, I actually do agree with this. I’ve been in therapy on-and-off for ten years and was in therapy twice a week for the past two years, and I honestly don’t think it helped me very much, unfortunately.

Therapy has been most helpful when I’ve been dealing with an acute issue or crisis, and I believe everyone should try therapy at some point. But personally, as the years rolled on and I attended sessions week after week with therapists who did little but mirror what I was saying, I often found myself talking about the same exact things over and over again in sessions while making no actual changes. In some cases, the advice they did provide went against my instincts and just turned out to be wrong.

Oddly enough, I also have found journaling to be completely unhelpful for the same reasons. I believe that because I was also just using it as a way to ruminate and relive the same issues over and over again. I really may have just been driving them home in my psyche and in my life.

So for now, I’m going to stop using journaling and therapy as ways to dump my issues out over and over. I’m going to continue to create art and journal and talk about my problems, of course, but I’m not going to force myself to do these things when I don’t feel like I really need to.

During therapy, we actually spent very little time talking about my problems and focused more on solutions. The only time we really dove into big issues or traumas was during EMDR, which was very helpful, and even that required only two sessions; Dirk complained that many therapists force their clients to do at least 10, though that might be overkill and unnecessary for reasons mentioned above. After our two sessions, Dirk had me use the EMDR machine to repeat positive affirmations.

He also was against the idea of group therapy and even had a rule that we weren’t allowed to share our personal stories with the other people at the retreat. I immediately balk at the idea that we shouldn’t talk about what’s really going on, as I really hate toxic and false positivity and am all about diving into the darkness in order to heal.

I also was in group therapy over the past year and found it helpful, though that was mostly because it was with a bunch of girls who were basically in the exact same life situation I was in, and hearing their stories made me look at my own in a much more understanding and sympathetic way. That can sometimes be helfpul, but being in a group with a bunch of people trauma-dumping about traumas you have no connection to can also be damaging, he said often, and I felt more and more glad I hadn’t chosen to do the other mental health program I’d been looking at — a program at a rehab center that involved two hours of group therapy a day.

While I still think group therapy and talk therapy can be helpful, I slowly began to understand Dirk’s approach. He actually did talk about his own struggles and experiences with mental illness quite a bit with us and was super blunt about how fucked up the world and the mind can be, which I appreciated, but all this was always delivered in the context of healing and growing.

We can and should share our struggles, but in a way that’s productive — either in a way that makes people feel less alone, or in a way that’s paired with lessons or at least some kind of optimistic outlook.

In my own life and relationships, I’ve also seen how simply sitting and marinating in negativity over and over without it going anywhere at all is generally really unhelpful and not healing at all.

So it’s kind of mind-blowing that talk therapy has become so all-powerful when so often it involves exactly this, but Dirk often said that this was just the medical industrial complex at work, keeping people sick so they’d keep paying.

I’m often drawn to people who have suffered a lot, and I’m also drawn to the dark side of life and art as many people with mental illness are. Of course, this is because I resonate with it.

I’m not going to stop looking into darkness and dark goddesses and the evils of history, and I’m not going to stop talking about my own struggles, either. But I do want to do it in a way that feels generative and transformative rather than stagnant.

He did say that on the other hand, it can sometimes be very helpful to be around people who are struggling a lot as a way of gaining perspective and doing something useful for the world instead of ruminating on your own struggles. When his depression gets bad, he said, he goes to hospitals just to help out and to be around the very sick. Going to volunteer or working with people who are struggling can be a healing and helpful way to get out of your own head and your own self-pity.

He also encouraged us not to look at the news too much and to protect ourselves from overexposure to world disasters, but said that he still goes to refugee camps and does what he can when he can to help out when he can. If you can’t personally help, he advised, then don’t engage.

This might make some readers balk, but I actually really agree with this. By all means, go to protests. Read the news in limited segments. Volunteer at food banks. Donate. Engage with world events or crises if you have the time and ability to be an active participant in making them better and addressing them somehow. Otherwise, you’re simply marinating in exhausting negativity.

Maybe some mentally stable people can engage with a 24-hour apocalyptic news cycle without it sending their lives into a tailspin, but for us, the highly sensitive ones who slip into bottomless pits very easily, it’s really not good — for us or anyone in our lives or for our ability to enact actual change — to overdo the exposure.

Which brings me to my final point:

7. Less is more — and though there will always be suffering, healing doesn’t need to be painful

We stuck to a pretty regimented schedule during the retreat, though it had nothing on Vipassana, and so felt rather liberating to me. We woke up at 5:20 and walked three kilometers each morning, did daily yoga and muay thai, had daily therapy, and did daily sessions in the sauna and ice bath. But the muay thai and yoga were both pretty gentle, with lots of breaks and relaxing stretches, and all of this fits into Dirk’s less is more philosophy.

A huge mistake I often make when trying to heal is trying to change my whole life and implement dozens of new habits at once, which always leads to burnout. But the key is always to start small, with manageable changes, and build from there so the habits are ingrained.

Essentially, healing is hard work and requires discipline, but it shouldn’t be painful or ultra unpleasant. I used to do a silent breathing meditation every day for five or ten minutes immediately after waking up, but I’d always feel exhausted and in pain during this time.

This probably led me to associate meditation with discomfort and certainly didn’t inspire me to do it any more than I already was. Instead, at New Paradigm, we did a variety of short, guided meditations each morning, which I enjoyed a lot more and which actually helped me relax as opposed to getting me more tensed up.

Vipassana was something I did because I truly wanted to change my life, and I thought a radical act like that would inspire the changes I wanted to see. I knew I needed to stop running and really take a hard look at myself in order to change, and maybe Vipassana actually did accomplish this, but only by guiding me to New Paradigm and to other forms of healing I’ve been inspired to pursue ever since then.

I’m actually super grateful for Vipassana because as difficult as it was, I do feel it led me directly to New Paradigm, and Dirk himself told me it was part the reason he let me into the program so last-minute (and honestly, for a hefty discount). That retreat forced me to become aware of my inner world, and awareness really is the key to not healing.

However, I really don’t think I needed to do Vipassana in order to realize that I actually had to invest some time into working on myself and make some serious life changes in order to live the life I truly want and deserve and now, actually, feel like I have.

Because the truth is, I am living my dream. I’d felt so guilty for feeling depressed while traveling all summer, but now that I’ve decided to stop criticizing myself and feeling ashamed, that weight has lifted — and while things definitely are not perfect, miraculously, I’m less depressed. I’m more grateful. I’m less tired. I’m more in tune with my emotions and sensitivity, which means I feel a lot, all the time, but I’m better equipped to deal with those feelings.

I am embracing the cactus. Just as I embrace the universe’s abundance and creativity and know I’m in flow with it.

I may have broken or sprained my toe the day before drafting this, which I was pissed about when I discovered it and probably will be pissed about again (I’m trying to remember that thinking positively does not mean rejecting my emotions, but rather recognizing and accepting and investigating and nurturing them…), but I knew that just means the universe has something special and different in store for me

Maybe it’s going to prevent me from getting an even worse injury I could have gotten had I kept up the intensity of the yoga I’ve been doing. Or maybe it just wants me to rest and sit and write and work on this blog even more.

(Reading this a few weeks later, it’s totally healed, and I’m very glad I didn’t worry about it more!)

This way of thinking doesn’t entirely jive with my ultra-rational thinking mind that still somehow clings to the deluded belief that negativity is somehow smarter than positivity, which it just straight up is not. And ultimately, I’d much rather see things this way than just feeling down and depressed about it for weeks.

We can either suffer while we’re in recovery or suffer much more out of it, Dirk said often. And I think that’s true. We’ll always suffer in this life. Shit will always go down.

But we have control over how we react, and with the help of our higher power and inner parental guidance and our hearts, we have control over how we schedule and structure our lives, and we can live in a way that makes all of it so much easier to bear. Is it easy? No, but I don’t think any of us came to earth for an easy experience.

Yet here we are. On this blue-green planet sailing through the stars, living out an incredibly temporary existence.

And here’s some final affirmations:

I am in love with all of it.

I love myself.

I love this life.

And I love you, reader.

*

Did anything in here resonate with you? Let me know in the comments. Sending lots of love your way. I hope you can give some of it back to yourself. You deserve it.