Workplace Wellbeing

I have come to think of silence as giving ordinary moments enough room to reach us. At our retreat in the Himalayas, watching the evening sky after practice became one of those moments; I wrote about its vividness in my reflections from the retreat.

If you’re considering a silent retreat in Singapore, you may be hoping for space like this. You may also wonder what you’ll hear once nobody needs an answer from you.

Sometimes, we do not need to explain what we are carrying before we are allowed to rest. A sound bath can offer a quieter kind of pause—one where listening comes before language, and we are simply invited to arrive, receive and notice what unfolds.

Before I began teaching yoga, I knew what it was like to move through corporate life while carrying more stress than I realised.

Looking back, what stays with me is not only what I was thinking during those periods, but what my body was quietly doing alongside me. The shoulders that had crept upwards. The breath I had barely noticed. The strange tiredness that seemed to arrive before the working day was over.

We can hear a sound without truly listening to it. In a sound healing session, the invitation is not to find instant calm, but to notice where our attention goes and gently return. Perhaps listening with more than our ears begins when we stop expecting the moment to feel a certain way.

I find the moment between meetings revealing. You click “Leave”, open the next invitation and realise there has barely been a pause. The calendar tells you where to be; it says very little about how you arrive. For anyone exploring breathwork in Singapore, I would begin here: with the breathing that accompanies the ordinary rush of a working day.

If you arrange wellbeing sessions for colleagues, you may recognise this pattern in your own diary.

Being new at something feels different when the person on the mat beside you was leading the 9 a.m. meeting.

At your desk, you know the rules. In a yoga group class, you may suddenly be wondering where to put your shoes, whether everyone else knows the poses, and what happens if your body simply says, “not today”. When I hold a practice, I return to one simple idea: people should not have to perform wellbeing.

The first note of a singing bowl is easy to recognise. Its ending is harder to name. I find myself drawn to that quiet interval, when the sound has faded but our attention remains. Perhaps what makes the silence feel different is not what has disappeared, but what we begin to notice.

I wonder how often we bring an invisible marking scheme into meditation. A few quiet breaths earn our approval; a thought about an unanswered email loses us a point. Even here, we can find ourselves trying to perform.

If you are looking for a meditation course in Singapore, perhaps this is the first expectation to question. What if learning begins with noticing your thoughts, without treating each one as a mistake?