Health & Wellness

The Unexpected Lesson Sami Clarke Learned After Seven Days of Silence

July 17, 2026

Most of us say we want more peace and quiet. Few of us actually mean seven straight days without talking, scrolling, listening to music, reading, or even writing down a thought.

When Sami Clarke decided to book her first solo silent retreat, she didn’t check into a traditional meditation center. Instead, she designed the experience herself. She booked a wellness hotel on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, pre-planned every meal so she wouldn’t have to speak, wore a necklace that read “I am on a silent retreat,” and followed the Open Gate Sangha at-home retreat program. Sami wanted to remove every distraction and see what surfaced.

She spent seven days meditating for roughly seven hours a day, walking in silence, eating alone, and resisting every urge to reach for her phone. By the end, she described it as “one of the hardest things that I’ve ever done.” But somewhere between the discomfort and the stillness, she walked away with a realization that she didn’t want to escape her life at all.

The Unexpected Lesson Sami Clarke Learned After Seven Days of Silence

She removed every distraction—even the ones that felt productive

The rule Clarke struggled with most was giving up her journal. As someone who regularly writes down thoughts as they come to her, she worried she’d lose the breakthroughs she was hoping to find during the retreat. Instead, she was encouraged to let it exist without trying to capture or make sense of it.

“I had to build trust that whatever download came through, I will remember if it’s worthy of remembering,” she says. “You have to surrender and let go that I can’t journal this. So I have to trust that if it’s really worthwhile, it will be remembered.”

And that was one of the biggest exercises of the week for her. Rather than treating every thought like something that needed to be solved or documented, she learned to sit with it. If an insight mattered, she trusted it would find its way back. If it didn’t, she let it go.

Day four was when the silence stopped feeling peaceful

Without conversations, music, or even the option to distract herself, Clarke quickly realized just how loud her own mind could become. “You really notice the distractions and the numbings that we can have on our everyday basis…When you have all of that stripped away, you are truly by yourself,” she recalls.

The first few days felt manageable, but that changed on day four. “They say going past the three-day point, because the three days, you’re kind of like, ‘I can do this.’ After the three days, you are thinking about how the hell you can get out of there,” she admits. “By day three, you’re like, I think I can do this. After day four, I’m like, again, I don’t know if I can do this.”

View this post on Instagram
A post shared by TRANSFORM (@transform)

Clarke describes the experience as one of the hardest things she’s done, admitting she even questioned why she’d signed up in the first place. “I definitely had thoughts of, ‘What the f**k am I doing right now? This is really scary, really crazy.’ It felt like I was in prison for sure.”

Looking back, she says she’d recommend doing a silent retreat with other people rather than in complete isolation. Even without speaking, simply seeing others move through the same challenge would have been a reminder that she wasn’t alone.

Not every meditation came with a breakthrough

Spending seven hours a day meditating might sound like a fast track to constant epiphanies. “I felt like every time I showed up, I wanted to have this huge epiphany, but a lot of the time it wasn’t that,” Clarke says. “It was just me showing up that was the act of what needed to be done.”

Some sessions brought clarity. Others brought nothing at all. Sometimes, she simply fell asleep. “And it’s the fact that you have to surrender to really allowing each meditation to be what it needs to be, rather than what our plan is,” she says. “You get more comfortable with allowing what needs to happen in the meditations instead of trying to control it.”

View this post on Instagram
A post shared by TRANSFORM (@transform)

One of the biggest lessons came after listening to the nightly Q&A recordings included in the retreat. As she listened to other participants wrestle with big life decisions, she noticed that many of them already knew the answer before they even asked the question. “They just needed to trust themselves and let the noise that would come after trusting themselves go away. The answers were already within them,” she notes.

She came home more grateful for ordinary life

At the end of it all, Clarke says she realized she didn’t want a different life—she wanted to be more present in the one she already had. “I think what surprised me is honestly how much I actually really love my life,” she shares. “I think we can get caught up so much in our lives of feeling like we could always be better and do more and be more.” Instead, the retreat left her with “more surrender and trust in the life that I’m in, rather than searching for what’s next or how I can do better.”

View this post on Instagram
A post shared by TRANSFORM (@transform)

After seven days without speaking, the simplest parts of everyday life felt entirely new. Her first word when the retreat ended was “hello,” spoken quietly to herself. On the flight home, she listened to music for the first time all week and found herself crying “tears of joy.”

“I was so grateful for life. Joy to be able to have music, joy to be able to speak, joy to go back to the life that I have,” she says. The experience didn’t make her want to retreat from the world. If anything, it reminded her how much she enjoys being part of it.

If you want to hear the full conversation about Sami Clarke’s experience at a silent retreat, listen to Transform wherever you get your podcasts.