6 jours de silence en stage de yoga à Chiang Mai, Thaïlande

Bringing meditation to life in a heart-centered way. In this six-day silent retreat, you seek to discover the capacity to remain fully engaged in life while staying firmly centered in inner silence. The retreat will include a combination of activities, from Hatha yoga and meditation to workshop-like interactive exercises. In your lectures, you will touch on the Tantric view of meditation, and you will learn how to bring meditation to life, meditating on the essence of emotions, desires, and inner experiences. You will have days in which you will speak and days spent in silence.

Your approach will combine the traditional methods of concentration (the eight-fold stages of Patanjali - focusing mainly on) with methods taken from the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra. From the moment you learn to speak, you rarely stop. Unless done consciously, you never take a break from words, and over time, your perception of reality becomes deeply conditioned by them. It is difficult to even imagine that reality exists beyond language that you can experience thoughts, emotions, and the world around you without automatically labeling them with words. This is why choosing silence is so powerful.

In this retreat, silence - combined with yoga, meditation, and insightful lectures - will guide you toward a direct experience of reality beyond words. You will reconnect with something deeper: inner peace, happiness, and joy, always present but often obscured by the constant chatter of the mind. You will enter silence on the first evening and remain in silence until the last day. Each day will be enriched with Hatha yoga, meditation, and lectures, as well as interactive exercises to deepen your practice.

While the schedule is immersive, there will also be time for rest - three-hour breaks around midday to reflect, read from the library, or simply enjoy the garden, pool, and sauna. While this retreat may remind some of Vipassana due to the silence, it is fundamentally different. You enter silence on the first evening and break it on the last morning, dedicating much of your time to meditation. However, unlike Vipassana, you also practice yoga, keeping the body energized, awake, and vibrant.

Though you remain in silence, you consciously cultivate a deep heart connection with one another, fostering a warm and supportive spiritual group rather than isolation. Here, silence is not just an absence of words but a space where sweetness, connection, and inner depth flourish - embracing stillness while keeping the heart open. Mahasiddha Yoga offers free transportation from a designated spot in the city on the first and last days of the retreat.

Is this the same as Vipassana?

There are similarities but also differences. It is similar from the perspective of the fact that you go in silence in the first evening and come out of silence on the morning of the last day, and you respect silence, devoting a lot of time to meditation. It is different because you do yoga, keeping the body fresh, awake, and with a lot of energy. Even if you will be in silence, you aim to be deliberately heart-connected to the others, and not isolated, creating a warm and sweet spiritual group. Also unlike Vipassana, you are allowed to silently embrace and keep the sweetness in the heart as a support of your meditative practice.

A typical day

Each day will include yoga practice, meditations, lectures, and exercises. A usual day would look like this:

• 08:00 - 09:00 Hatha yoga
• 09:00 - 09:30 Meditation
• 09:30 - 10:45 Breakfast
• 10:45 - 12:00 Lecture or teachings
• 12:00 - 13:00 Meditation
• 13:00 - 16:00 Lunch break
• 16:00 - 16:30 Meditation
• 16:30 - 17:30 Lecture or teachings
• 17:45 - 18:30 Short Hatha yoga and meditation
• 18:30 - 20:15 Dinner break
• 20:15 - Meditation or interactive exercises

Disclaimer for people with mental health issues

Kindly note that people who suffer from mental health issues or are currently on antidepressants or other psychiatric medications are strongly recommended not to join this program. Those who do, however, decide to join, do so on their own responsibility.