Immersion: The Fastest Way to Remember Who You Really Are

Each year, my husband and I choose an awakening experience to do together – a retreat, a training, a practice that asks something of us beyond our everyday living. I genuinely believe that this intention has woven a deeper connection, love, and respect between us over the years.

This year, my husband chose Joe Dispenza. So off to Mexico we went into a world we knew nothing about, and to a place we had never planned to visit.

Don’t worry, I’m not about to bore you with the details of my beautiful trip.

Instead, I want to share what I discovered about myself through this kind of immersion – because it reminded me of something I think many of us forget:

You cannot become new while constantly rehearsing who you’ve been.

My intention (and my early wobble)

I entered the weeklong retreat with a clear intention: to surrender, give it everything, let go of what I think I know, and be open and present. And if I’m honest, that intention didn’t land smoothly in the first couple of days. I was caught in my familiar pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving. I struggled to surrender, and even though I wanted change, part of me kept trying to protect the old me, the one who knows how to survive, perform, manage, and stay the same.

It was humbling and incredibly revealing, because it showed me something I don’t always question.

My personality, the me I think I am, is often a set of unquestioned beliefs running predictable behaviours, producing predictable results, without my conscious awareness. And then, thanks to the guidance, the repetition, and the sheer potency of the container, something in me softened, I stopped gripping, surrendered, and let myself be immersed.

We were at a resort with around 2,200 people attending the same weeklong retreat, so you can imagine the energy, the coherence of thousands of people choosing open hearts and elevated emotions. It was intense, beautiful, and at times utterly confronting.

I left with a bounce in my step, feeling like I had integrated my experience with a strong sense of oneness. I felt open-hearted, open-minded, and connected to a new field of possibilities.

And here’s the truth I want to share, there is a big difference between your mind learning something and your heart and body knowing it.

So, what understanding did I walk away with?

1. Immersion interrupts identity

When we immerse ourselves in a retreat or any environment designed for transformation, we can move beyond the conditions that reinforce who we think we are.

When we step away from our routines, roles, responsibilities, and familiar relationships, our habits finally get a rest, our nervous system has space to exhale, and we can stop being constantly cued to behave as the old self. And in that pause, something astonishing becomes possible.

In everyday life, our surroundings quietly shape us all day long, with the same triggers, pace, and expectations reinforcing the known. But when we step outside the familiar and interrupt our patterns, we can gain an expanded view and new perspectives, where we can consciously choose.

That’s why retreat can feel like a homecoming to a self you have not met yet.

2. Immersion learns fast

Immersion is not just a nice idea your mind agrees with; it’s a full mind-body-emotion recalibration.

I completed my first five-hour meditation. If you had told me before this retreat that I would meditate for five hours straight, I would have laughed and said, “I don’t think I can do that.” But I did.

And what I realised is, I am far more capable than I give myself permission to be.

Now, I’m not saying we all need to meditate for five hours; what I mean is that immersion dissolves old limits because it places us in the unknown, and it’s in the unknown that new potential lives.

The known is who we’ve been, and the unknown is where the new self exists.

3. Outside your world, your mind gets free

When we’re in our everyday world, our attention is constantly pulled back into the predictable, distractions, obligations, and noise.

But when we are in a new, conscious environment filled with people from diverse ages, cultures, backgrounds, stories, and yearnings, something else becomes available. A collective frequency emerges that supports awareness and transformation, and this is not because we try harder, but because we are no longer swimming against the same current.

It is in these spaces that I can become the witness of my thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, rather than being inside them, I can notice my familiar loops without judgement, and I can observe my old identity without letting it run the show.

It’s really powerful when were not just learning transformation as a concept, but living inside a container that makes transformation feel normal.

In other words, when I enter a different field and change my level of consciousness, I change my reality.

The conclusion I keep coming back to:

On retreat, I was reminded that immersion is one of the fastest pathways I know to remembering what I’m capable of and what is possible, because immersion doesn’t just give you information, it gives you experience.

And this experience changes what's possible, what you’re available for, what you tolerate, and what you no longer want to carry.

I hear this frequently from clients and others: they want more freedom, peace, confidence, aliveness, truth, abundance, purpose, health, but you cannot create this desire while staying in the same environment that created the lack.

If you want a new life, a new way of being, you have to stop rehearsing who you have been and step into a new field long enough for your mind, heart and nervous system to believe it.

Perhaps that is the real invitation of retreat, to meet what is possible.