Awakening, Part 1: The Sleep We Call Life — And Why a Private Retreat Might Be the Only Thing Loud Enough to Wake You Up
There’s a particular kind of tired that no amount of sleep fixes.
You’ve built a life that looks, on paper, like it’s working. And yet some mornings you catch yourself going through the exact same motions — the same reactions, the same arguments, the same private disappointments — and a quiet, unsettling thought surfaces: is anyone actually home for any of this? Now try and imagine hearing this on the beach at sunrise in South Africa as you stop thinking and become present, contemplative and aware with Mark. That is the The Power of Awakening Retreats. It goes way, way deep inside the soul.
That question sits at the centre of the three-part series I’m publishing here on the blog, in the podcast, and across social media: Awakening, inspired by the teaching of the Jesuit priest and psychotherapist Anthony de Mello.
He spent his life saying one simple, uncomfortable thing to packed rooms of otherwise successful, capable people: you are not awake. You are sleepwalking through your own existence. And in twenty-five years of working with people in the middle of addiction, burnout, divorce, anxiety and the quiet unravelling of a life that “should” be fine — I have watched this be true more often than I can count.
This is Part 1. And I want to be direct about something before we go further: everything in this post is exactly what I teach, in far greater depth, inside the The Power of Awakening Retreats I run at the Center for Healing and Life Transformation (CHALT) in Knysna, on South Africa’s Garden Route. This isn’t theory I keep separate from my work. It is the work.
The Eagle Who Never Knew He Could Fly
De Mello was famous for teaching almost entirely through story, and one of his most quoted opens this series.
A man found an eagle’s egg and placed it in the nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched among the chicks and grew up believing he was one of them. He scratched the earth for worms. He clucked. He flapped his wings a few feet off the ground and called it flying.
Years later, he watched a real eagle soar overhead on wind currents, barely moving its wings.
“What is that?” he asked.
“That’s the eagle, king of the birds,” a neighbour told him. “He belongs to the sky. We’re chickens — we belong to the earth.”
So the eagle lived — and died — believing he was a chicken.
The point was never subtle: you are the eagle. Somewhere early in life, most of us were handed a story about who we were allowed to be, and we built an entire identity around never questioning it. That identity may have kept you safe once. But it was never the whole sky.
Waking Up Is Not What Wellness Culture Has Sold You
“Awakening” is used loosely these days — slapped onto candles, supplement labels, and weekend workshops until it barely means anything. So let’s be precise as we deeply teach our guests about The Power of Awakening Retreats.
Waking up is not:
- A permanent mood of bliss. De Mello much like I am, was deeply suspicious of chasing any feeling — he considered happiness that depends on a state just another attachment in disguise.
- Becoming a different person. You don’t wake up into someone new; you wake up out of someone false.
- A single event. Not one retreat weekend, one breakthrough, one ceremony after which you’re “done.” It is a practice you return to for the rest of your life, because the sleep is extremely good at finding new disguises.
What it actually is: seeing clearly, often for the first time, the mechanism that has been quietly running your life without your permission. The reflex to control everything so nothing can hurt you again. The compulsion toward perfection so you’re never judged. The performance for approval so you never feel unloved.
In my own framework, The Paradigm Process®, I call these patterns the Ego Insurgents — not villains, but an occupying force inside your own mind convincing you its voice is the only one there is. We call it the false self, the personality or mask you wear: the identity assembled out of other people’s expectations, unprocessed wounds, and fears you never named. You can read more about how this false identity forms, and how it’s dissolved, in How to Dissolve Your False Identity and 10 Masks of Personality.
Why Almost Nobody Actually Wants to Wake Up
Here’s the part de Mello never softened, and I won’t either: most people, most of the time, do not want to wake up.
The sleep is comfortable. It’s organised. Your identity, however painful or limiting, is a house you’ve lived in your entire life — even if the walls are the wrong shape for who you actually are, you know where the furniture is in the dark. Waking up means admitting the house was always a story, and underneath it is open sky. That’s disorienting enough that most people retreat back into the familiar identity the moment they get close to real seeing.
This is precisely why I don’t run generic wellness weekends. It’s why the retreats I hold at CHALT are deliberately private, small, and immersive — because this kind of seeing rarely survives a group workshop, a hotel conference room, or a life that hasn’t actually stepped away from its usual noise. It requires real distance: from your phone, your role, your routines, and often from the very relationships the patterns are playing out inside of. That is The Power of Awakening Retreats at depth!
Research on solitude backs up why this distance matters: time spent in genuine quiet has been linked to better emotional regulation, reduced anxiety and greater self-awareness — the exact internal conditions this kind of inner work requires. That’s the whole design behind our Private Luxury One-on-One Retreats — for individuals doing this work alone, for couples untangling the patterns that repeat inside a marriage or a divorce, and for people who simply cannot do this kind of interior work anywhere near their ordinary life. If you are navigating a separation, a divorce, or the quiet end of a long relationship, this is deliberately built as a private divorce and relationship recovery retreat — space to understand the patterns of attachment and conflict that shaped the relationship, before you carry them, unexamined, into the next one. For those further along in senior or high-performance roles, the same depth of work is available through our Sovereign Mental Wellness Executive Retreats, and twice yearly we open a small group container for this exact material at Rewire Your Reality, our flagship residential retreat on the Garden Route.
The First Act of Awakening
De Mello returned, again and again, to one answer for where this actually begins: awareness — without judgment — of what is actually happening in you, right now.
Not awareness about your life. Awareness of it, as it’s occurring. He’d point out that people go through entire decades without being present for a single moment of their own existence — eating without tasting, walking without feeling the ground, talking to the people they love most while three-quarters of their attention rehearses an old argument or a future one.
Try this, right now, for five seconds: notice one thing you can feel in your body that you weren’t paying attention to a moment ago. Don’t fix it. Don’t judge it. Just notice it.
That is the entire doorway. Not mysticism. Not technique. Attention. De Mello used to say the moment you pay attention to something, it changes — not because you forced it to, but because awareness itself is transformative, the way light changes a room simply by entering it. This is also the foundation of what I teach as Contemplative Intelligence — the capacity to observe your own inner world clearly enough to stop being run by it.
You Are Not the Chicken You Were Told You Are
Underneath the story, the costume, the Ego Insurgents running their old survival scripts, there is a part of you that was never asleep — what I call the Sacred Self. It isn’t something you build. It’s something you uncover, the way clouds part to reveal a sky that was there the entire time.
If anything in this post landed somewhere real in you, that’s not a coincidence, and it’s not something to file away as “interesting” and move on from. It’s usually the first sign that your life is asking for more space and more privacy than a podcast episode or a blog post can hold.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a private awakening or healing retreat? A private retreat is a one-on-one or couples-only immersive experience — as opposed to a large group workshop — where the entire itinerary, pace, and focus is built around your specific patterns, history, and goals, guided directly by Mark Lockwood and his team at CHALT in Knysna, South Africa.
Are private retreats suitable for someone going through a divorce? Yes. Many people come to CHALT specifically during or after a divorce or separation, to understand the deeper relational and emotional patterns at play before entering another relationship, and to heal in a setting that is completely confidential and away from their day-to-day life.
Do I have to attend with a group, or can I come alone? Both options exist. Solo private retreats are available for individuals wanting undivided, confidential attention, and we also run couples retreats and small, carefully selected group retreats such as Rewire Your Reality.
Is this therapy? Mark Lockwood BA (hons)(psy) works as a Life Strategist, addiction specialist, coach and author — not as a clinical psychologist although he has an honours degree in psychology, he partners with some of them, but prefers to remain open, holistic and free from conformity — drawing on more than 25 years of experience, 20 000 hours of group therapy and of course the The Paradigm Process®, a framework blending psychological understanding, contemplative practice and personal transformation.
Ready to Wake Up, Privately?
If you recognise yourself anywhere in this post — the eagle who forgot the sky exists, the exhaustion of doing everything “right” and still feeling asleep inside your own life — the next step doesn’t have to be another book or another podcast episode.
Enquire about a private, solo, or couples retreat at CHALT →
Part 2 of this series on The Power of Awakening Retreats and “The Chains We Call Love,” explores Marks de Mello influences on teaching on attachment — and why almost everything we call love is, quietly, something else. Subscribe to the podcast and the blog so you don’t miss it. Don’t miss The Power of Awakening Retreats.
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