“Responsibility for Our Naked Truth” – A Reflection on Releasing Fear, October 2024

I stepped into Sylvia and Miltos’ retreat with the worst of the world and all kinds of worries weighing down on me, until I woke up to the realisation that, there, in fact, everything felt right. My mind was racing, but my heart and my body knew it was safe.

The land of Miltos, who by the way is a masterful facilitator, a true and deeply mindful εμψυχωτής, this time held space for just four of us. The intimacy of the group brought our vulnerabilities into sharp focus. It was, for me, deeply liberating.

This is the third event in Sylvia’s “Releasing Fear” series of therapeutic happenings, which I’ve been following, enthralled, albeit academically, since 2019. This event’s theme, “Responsibility for Our Naked Truth,” went beyond shedding clothes—it gently invited us to confront layers of social conditioning, to kindly revisit memories that defined our relationship with our bodies, that broke our innocence, that shamed our sexuality. It allowed us, if we wanted, to reveal our self-judgment, our fears of aging, our relationship or not with our bodily substance, with our bodily functions, our gender roles, and so much more that is different for each person and a deep wonder and a privilege to witness. I believed I had a good understanding of the effects of the taboo around nudity, in theory, but my understanding had done little to disarm these issues on an embodied level. When it came down to it, all my theorisation and angsty political thought has kept me far from facing and healing any of it. From this realisation onwards, my task was to lean into the discomfort, to stop being ashamed of my shame (as Yiannis put it). And in that space, accompanied by Sylvia’s deeply affective herstories and joyful exuberance, and Miltos’ gentle holding and easy discourse on stepping out of the story of separation that has colonised our thinking, the work seemed to happen all by itself. In that space none of my usual fears about appearance, health, aesthetic or societal expectations mattered. It became clear that these anxieties lived strong in my mind, shaped by the world, but they couldn’t survive in this environment of total acceptance.

The awareness settled in my body, especially in my gut. Then, unexpectedly, my period came in a rush of pain and release, as if my body was letting go of years of repression.

I had already planned that I wouldn’t stay for the second day of the retreat due to a previous engagement. I got up early on Sunday and drove all the way to my mother’s village to be with my extended family for my uncle’s memorial service—an ironic return to the very social structures I had been working through. But something had shifted. I could observe from a distance how our rituals of belonging are embedded with elements of control, and the way small oppressions accumulated, but I felt no longer caught in their grip. The retreat hadn’t just been a release—it had opened a new way of being for me, a freedom to feel myself beyond many of the constraints that previously defined me. There is much to continue unpacking, but I feel as though a part of my story has been rewritten on that mountain, under the quiet acceptance of its sky.