Five Days of Silence Changed How I'm Building Bergbait

In early June I paid actual money to not talk to anyone for five days.

No phones. No chit-chat. No "so where are you from?" Just me, a converted castle an hour north of Lyon, and a room full of strangers I wasn't allowed to speak to. My day job is a cross between partnerships, sales and customer success. My whole thing is talking to people and there I was, practicing mauna (silence) for the better part of a week.

It turned out to be one of the more useful things I've done for myself all year. Not because of anything mystical. But because when you take words away, you finally see what's actually happening between people. And once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it, and now it's changing how I interact in the world itself and how I plan to manage trips with Bergbait.

But let me back up.

Why would anyone do this to themselves?

Fifteen years ago, on my very first backpacking trip, a girl in a hostel told me two things: walk the Camino de Santiago, and try Vipassana (a more hardcore version of what I did). It took me five years to get around to the Camino, and I loved it so much I figured she'd earned my trust on the second one too.

Then I looked up Vipassana. Ten days. Sitting in meditation from dawn to dusk. Intriguing for the right kind of person, but for me? Maybe not the best fit.

Fast forward a few years. A friend mentioned Hridaya (say it with me: ri-DIE-yah), and it sounded like Vipassana took a chill pill. Five days instead of ten. Comfortable instead of a waking death. Still affordable. And without the massive queue to get in, because apparently silence is trendy and these types of retreats normally tend to have a waitlist.

Hridaya itself has a few locations around the world. I picked the one in France for two reasons: I figured I'd get some French somehow soaked magically into the language part of my brain, and it was driving distance. What was the reality? It was beautiful, peaceful, and the kind of place where I thought to myself, maybe I can actually do this.

Here's the part I wasn't prepared for (and as I heard later, neither were a lot of others): a silent retreat isn't simply "no talking." The phones go away, no one's performance, and every social queue you normally use to smooth over the weirdness of existing near other humans is gone. It's akin to being transformed into an inanimate object. You're there. You exist. But no one would notice if you just disappeared. And you have to pretend the other objects don't exist either. I'll tell you now: avoiding eye contact or getting rid of the niceties like "thanks", is damn near impossible.

Five days, in all their brutal glory

Day 0. Arrival day, everything still normal. Phones out, people chatting and getting to know each other over dinner. Which, IMO, is a genuinely strange design choice when you think about it: hey, quick, bond with these people you're about to spend five days aggressively ignoring.

Day 1. Silence begins. I was late to the very first session because I'd trusted a morning bell to wake me, while wearing earplugs, because I, a nearly-40-year-old woman, had decided a four-person dorm was a fantastic idea. TLDR: it was not. And here's the part nobody warns you about: the first day of a silent retreat is the loudest day of your life. Every door, every footstep, every single human being clearing their throat, all of it turned up to a thousand because there's nothing else to listen to. I'm noise-sensitive at the best of times. Day 1 nearly broke me.

Day 2. Settling in. The food was all mush, which as a plant-based person I take personally, because mushy is exactly the stereotype we're trying to shake. It reminded me of an influencer who claimed all vegan food is mushy, and now I'm convinced the only "vegan" food she ever tried was at this exact retreat.

Day 3. Halfway. Long stretches of sitting there thinking, why on god's earth did I sign up for this. It was boring. It was uncomfortable. And I was exhausted, which made no sense, because I was doing nothing. I had no idea doing nothing could be this tiring. The strange part: I kept waiting for time to crawl the way it did when I was a kid in my room, reading or playing Pokemon Gameboy. Instead, the days were evaporating strangely fast.

Day 4. Is it over yet? I am seriously done with the mush.

Day 5. Genuinely magical, and not just because I could go back to reality. The one story that girl in the hostel never told me was what happens once you're allowed to speak again. I won't share anyone's specifics, but I'll share the shape of it.

We chanted for a bit too long, honestly, but I could see how it was affecting people (in a beautiful way), so I kept going with it. When the chanting stopped, we gathered around the front of the room, and anyone who wanted to could go up and say whatever they needed to say. Some people talked about why they'd come. Others talked about what the five days had been for them. Trauma, hope, change, the lack of change.

Sitting there listening to other people's stories, I was struck by how connected we all were, even though we'd never spoken. I haven't felt the pain of losing a partner or a child, and I haven't lived through some of what was shared in that room, but it didn't matter. The human condition is such a shared one. It was truly magical.

I learned that we are more than animals

Here's the thing that hit hardest.

I've spent 15 years living in places where I don't fully speak the language, so I already knew you can get surprisingly far on eye contact, a smile, a shrug or a nod at the right moment. But I always thought of that as the backup system. The thing you use when words fail.

The retreat flipped it. Take words away entirely and you realize the wordless stuff isn't the backup. It's the main channel. You know who's anxious, who's at peace, who wants the last piece of bread, who needs the window seat, all without a sound. We're animals reading each other constantly, and speech is just the cherry on top.

Which is exactly what a phone kills, by the way. Not conversation. A phone at a table kills what lies beneath conversation. The face goes down, the signal goes dark, and the body language says one thing loud and clear: I'm not really here. That's why I want to take away the tech as much as possible on trips. No phones when eating. No cameras out to record every god damn thing. Let's live in the moment.

The lesson that embarrassed me

Somewhere around day 2, with no conversations to occupy it, my brain started fantasizing about the other guests.

Why is this woman being such a horrible bitch? She barges in loudly every single time. The other one always races to lunch first. And that dude never cleans up. I genuinely wanted to kill some of the girls in my room for being such assholes. Note: I had never met them, yet I had typecast them as villains with fully developed backstories (although I hadn't exchanged a word with any of them).

Then came the sharing circle, and it turns out basically everyone had spent five days writing a similar novel about everyone else. Hating someone they'd never met, or convinced something was happening that wasn't. The "loud" woman thought she was tiptoeing. The lunch-racer had a blood sugar thing. Every villain in my head was just a person, trying their best, with no idea they'd been cast in my drama.

That really hit hard. The story in your head about a stranger is almost always fiction, and it's rarely a generous genre. We're so caught up in what people think of us, even people we've never met, which is insane when you say it out loud.

What this means for Bergbait trips

I did a lot of thinking up there about the community I'm building, and about a day last ski season that had been quietly bugging me. I'd joined a group for a day on the mountain, strangers mostly, and it turned into a phone party. Lunch with twelve people, eight of which were pointed at their screens. And before I get too smug: on day 0 of this very retreat, when I could have been mixing, where was I? On my phone. Guilty as charged.

That's the exact thing I want Bergbait trips to be the antidote to.

Tech-light, not tech-free

I work online so I know how hard it can be to fully log off. I also have a boyfriend who I don't always get to spend time with in person so we do spend a lot of time on our phones talking to each other. I'm not a monster and you will not be in a hostage situation if you join one of my trips.

The thing is, I've seen what happens when phones run the room and social time get shaped around something happening in a far away place. That's why each trip will have a dedicated tech room, a place to go when you genuinely need to be online, so the rest of the space doesn't have to carry that energy. And one hard rule, the only one I really care about: no phones at the table. Ever. Meals are where a group of strangers turns into a family that actually each other, and that doesn't happen if you're TikTokin.

Disposable cameras, buddies, and safari days

This is the part I'm most excited about.

At the start of the trip, everyone gets a disposable camera. Twenty-seven shots each, no delete button, no reviewing, no retakes. You choose your moments and then you go back to living in them. Half the fun is that nobody, including you, knows what you got until later. And please, no dick pics.

On the mountain we will run a buddy system. Keep your phone in your pocket for emergencies, obviously, I'm not sending you into the Alps on vibes alone. But the working plan is each other and a paper map. You get to work your brain and work with your buddy.

The first day or two will act more like a safari: we'll head out as groups and learn the mountain together before anyone jets off solo. Groups split into beginner, intermediate and advanced, so nobody's terrified, nobody's bored, and everyone gets the lay of the land at their own speed.

You'll go home with an actual album that's Instaworthy

After the trip, everyone gets a digital album of the whole thing, all those disposable-camera shots developed and gathered. And if you want to go old school, you can add-on a printed album shipped right to your door. A physical book of the trip that you were actually present for, not just 400 near-identical photos and videos on your phone.

The mountains are the bait

That's the whole game, really. You come for the skiing, the peaks, the food. What gets you hooked is the other stuff: the faces around the table, the wrong turn you and your buddy laughed about for an hour, the feeling of being fully somewhere for once.

Five days of silence taught me that the best parts of being with people don't need words, and they definitely don't need screens. They just need everyone to actually show up.

So that's what we're building. Come get hooked.