Meditation Retreat in Nature: A Personal Story of Travel, Emotional Release and Reconnecting with Nature
My name is Siamak Nasihati, director of the Zero Markup Trips travel service platform, and I have spent nearly twenty-five years of my life designing tours and creating travel experiences — up to the day this article was published.
Over those years, I learned that travel is not simply movement from one place to another.
People do not travel only to see landscapes.
Many people travel because something inside them needs air.
Sometimes they need distance.
Sometimes silence.
Sometimes they need to remember parts of themselves that have slowly disappeared beneath routine, pressure, responsibility, and noise.
More than twenty years ago, one of my travelers — who was also an excellent psychologist — suggested an idea that at the time felt unusual:
What if a journey could become a safe space for emotional release?
That conversation became the beginning of one of the most unusual projects I ever designed.
At first, we gave it a direct and honest name:
Anger Release Tours.
The idea seemed logical.
Reality was different.
People did not embrace it.
Very quickly we discovered something interesting.
People are often uncomfortable with psychological language.
Not because they do not struggle.
But because they fear judgment.
Many worry that joining something with an explicit psychological label — especially anger release — means others will see them as a patient or a person with a problem.
Participation remained low.
The tours never reached the minimum number needed.
So we changed one thing:
Not the philosophy.
Only the language.
And we introduced the experience under a new title:
Meditation Retreat in Nature.
Everything changed.
Suddenly people became curious.
They embraced it.
The exact same human need existed — but now people felt safe approaching it.
For several years we ran those retreats successfully with the support of our meditation master until, sadly, after the accident that took his life, we lost his companionship and continuing in the same form was no longer possible.
But those experiences stayed with me.
And they changed how I think about travel.
Why I Believed Modern Urban Life Needed Something Different
My personal observation was simple.
Modern urban life is intense.
People live surrounded by concrete, traffic, deadlines, notifications, expectations, artificial light, constant comparison, and endless stimulation.
At the same time, many carry invisible burdens.
Professional disappointments.
Family tension.
Personal frustrations.
Grief.
Unfinished conversations.
Unexpressed emotions.
And yet most people continue functioning.
Society rewards self-control.
People learn to remain polite.
To remain productive.
To remain composed.
But remaining composed does not always mean remaining well.
Many emotions are never expressed.
They are postponed.
Stored.
Ignored.
And over time they accumulate.
I was not trying to create therapy.
I was not trying to treat anyone.
I simply wondered:
Could travel become an environment where people could reconnect with themselves in a healthier and more conscious way?
Designing a Meditation Retreat in Nature
To run these experiences, we rented a villa surrounded by untouched nature and far from the usual urban environment.
It did not feel luxurious.
If anything, it felt closer to an old countryside home.
The rooms were elevated roughly one floor above ground level, with a storage-like space beneath them. Two sets of stairs on either side led up to a long veranda and the entrance doors of the rooms.
Our mornings began before sunrise.
With the yoga master we would begin our meditation at sunrise.
After breakfast, participants got ready to begin walking in nature.
Not fast.
Not competitively.
We walked through foothills and forests.
Sometimes in conversation.
Sometimes in silence.
We practiced mindful attention to the beauties of nature.
Listening.
Observing.
Breathing. And smelling.
Feeling the caress of the breeze on our faces and arms.
Later in the evenings, we would walk to a nearby hill.
Under natural darkness and moonlight we practiced Shavasana.
No phones.
No performance.
Just stillness.
But one part of the retreat became far more memorable than anything else.
The Room That Nobody Talked About
One person stayed behind in the morning and one person in the evening — they did not join the group for the outdoor activities and remained alone at the accommodation.
Inside the room I had placed several simple objects.
Plates, side dishes, and ceramic pieces bought cheaply from pottery and ceramic workshops — the ones with manufacturing defects and little commercial value. I placed them on a table within easy reach, ready to be broken and thrown.
Paper and pens.
A punching bag.
Boxing gloves.
Head protection.
And in one corner, a large stone.
Before the group left for their walk in nature, I would quietly hand the key to the person whose turn it was.
I would tell them:
If you want, lock the door.
No one will remain in the accommodation.
No one will enter.
No one will ask.
No one will know.
Inside that room there were no mandatory instructions.
No expectations.
The dishes could be broken. Thrown.
I had placed paper and pens so that whatever was on their mind — without being bound by meaning, moral consideration, fear of secrets being revealed, or worry of being judged — they could put every mental noise onto paper.
Anger.
Worries and fears.
Names.
Profanities.
Memories.
Anything.
People could write without censoring themselves.
Without trying to sound intelligent.
Without worrying whether their thoughts were acceptable.
If they wanted, they could burn those pages afterward.
We had placed matches and a large flowerpot inside the room.
There was also a broom, dustpan, and bin — so that if they wished, no trace of what happened in that room would remain, and this confidentiality allowed them to pour themselves out without censorship.
The message was simple:
Whatever happens here stays here.
You leave nothing behind except what you choose.
Looking back, I think the most important thing that room offered was not release.
It was permission.
Permission for what we have suppressed inside ourselves for years.
Helping People Remember Their Relationship With Nature
Another part of the retreat was built around a simpler idea.
Modern people have become strangers to nature — the origin of us all.
During our walks, at certain predetermined spots I would gather the whole group.
I asked participants to sit or lie on the ground.
To close their eyes for a few minutes.
And to discover, touch, and smell nature without looking at it.
The roar of the river.
The symphony of the wind moving through the leaves of the trees.
Birdsong.
The sounds of life from a distant village.
The touch of the wind on our cheeks and bodies.
The scent of the earth, the scent of flowers, the scent of the village.
Then after a few minutes I would say:
Open your eyes.
Now look — at the colors, at the tonal variations of green, yellow, red… the flowers. And remember them. At the next stops they would begin to notice on their own how changing angles of light reveal countless tonal variations of color before us. The same subtle point that the Impressionist artists, and later Vincent van Gogh, had discovered in nature.
People began noticing details they normally ignored.
The different greens.
The changing colors.
The way light lifts everything in nature out of monotony and dullness.
Nature had always been this way.
It was simply us who had forgotten.
What These Retreats Taught Me About People
Among our travelers were people who had recently lost someone they loved.
People who had suffered deep emotional and psychological burnout under intense work pressure.
People who had experienced many difficulties in their relationships with society and those around them.
People carrying a great sadness within them.
And over those years one lesson repeated itself again and again.
People are deeply afraid of being judged.
They censor themselves.
Not because they have nothing to say.
But because they fear consequences.
My experience showed me that when people cannot find safe and conscious ways to face their emotional pressure, that pressure does not disappear.
It simply waits.
And eventually appears somewhere else.
What surprised me most was that the courage to face emotional pain requires a safe environment. So that we can set aside self-censorship and allow our inner self to speak to us — and then that feeling of lightness, liberation, tenderness, and a particular kind of joy comes to find us.
Emotional Release Is Not the Same as Organizing Anger
One final observation stayed with me.
There is a profound difference between healthy emotional release and collective, organized anger.
Private reflection.
Silence.
Expression.
Awareness.
These can sometimes create calm.
But collective anger driven by humiliation, hatred, ideology, or unconscious emotion can become something entirely different.
Contemporary history offers enough examples of that.
That is why I gradually came to believe that emotional expression should never aim to amplify anger.
Its purpose should be understanding.
Responsibility.
Awareness.
And perhaps that is the deeper purpose of a meaningful Meditation Retreat in Nature:
Not escaping life.
