Campus of One: How Total Isolation on a Chinese University Campus Unlocked a New Kind of Mindfulness

This is when mindfulness really started.

In early 2020, as COVID-19 edged from a regional outbreak in Wuhan into a disruption throughout China and indeed the world, I found myself living on a university campus in southern China. It was Spring Festival, a time when the entire campus empties out, students and faculty alike returning home to their families. I had taken a road trip west, chasing a few days of quiet before classes resumed. But what I encountered instead was an eerie preview of what was to come. Towns were closed. Entire cities emptied and restaurants were shuttered. What began as a vacation turned into an escape route.

I made it back just in time, literally hours before they began closing the highways. When I returned to campus, the guards told me the gates were sealed. If I left, I couldn’t return. Because I lived on campus, I was allowed in. And once I was in, I was the only one there.

That was the beginning of my real mindfulness crash course that lasted many months.

This was institutional silence, sterile, functional, and total. No colleagues. No students. No sounds. The same buildings that once held ideas and deadlines of an educational institution now echoed with absence. And in that space, I noticed something subtle: my attention was shifting. I was forced into mindfulness because distraction had been stripped away and there was nowhere to go.

This is not an article about my enlightenment. Instead, I will explain how forced isolation recalibrated my understanding of mindfulness conditions through emerged circumstances. This was mindfulness stripped of glamour, detached from productivity, and free from hashtags. What was left was pure presence.

The Disruption Before the Stillness

Before the lockdowns came, we all experience massive disorientation.  Let me take you back.

In late January 2020, I left my university campus in Zhongshan during the Spring Festival holiday to take a road trip through Yangshuo and Guilin. At that time, COVID-19 (it wasn’t even called that yet) was still only being whispered about, mostly as a distant issue in Wuhan. There were no lockdowns or restrictions being spoken about. And yet, something was already unraveling beneath the surface.

Our first clue was at a riverside resort in Yangshuo in the heart of Guangxi province, China. I arrived as planned, but instead of being welcomed, I was waved off quickly with no explanation. Within minutes, my money had been refunded to my account. I didn’t even have time to ask why. A few miles away, in the township, the dinner scene told the rest of the story. Restaurants that had been open just an hour earlier were closing mid-service. One staff member, eyes wide, returned a still-squirming fish to the river. The only open business was a McDonald’s, and even there the tension was visible and felt.

Over the next two days, it became clear that whatever was happening wasn’t isolated to a few restaurants or towns. It was everywhere. Roads were being shut down. Towns were closing themselves off. In some places, men armed with swords stood at the entrances to their villages. Hotels and tourist sites were either closed or refusing all guests. By the time I reached Huangyao, another popular historical site, it too was shuttered.

Driving back to Guangdong province, I watched the world collapse behind me. One by one, the highways I’d just traveled began closing. At some city checkpoints, guards waved me through only after verifying my documents. It felt like I was fleeing for something and not necessary heading home. No one knew how bad things would get.

When I returned to campus, I was greeted by security. The campus was officially closed. No one in, no one out. I explained that I lived on campus, and they let me through, but with a warning: if I left again, I wouldn’t be allowed back. That was the moment the door closed, literally and metaphorically. I had returned to my place of work but also to my containment. I didn’t know it yet, but the conditions for mindfulness had already been set in motion.

Campus as Containment – Monastery by Accident

When the gates closed behind me, I stepped into vacancy of life itself.

The university campus in Zhongshan, normally a site of excitement and activity, became something else entirely, a containment zone. The internal roadways and walkways were dark, and the faculty apartments sat vacant, except for mine, of course. I was surrounded by the silence of the student dorms, still filled with the belongings of everyone as they had just gone home for the Spring Festival holiday. The classrooms were sealed, hallways roped off, and roadways barricaded with police tape and folding metal gates. Even the gym was wrapped in caution tape, a strange visual punctuation to the already surreal setting. I was, quite literally, the only person living on campus that usually has thousands. Just me and a rotating crew of security guards stationed at the front gate. The same gate I once passed through without thought now became a threshold I couldn’t cross.

What emerged in that vacuum was a kind of rhythm that lasted for months. My days had structure, but no goals. I ran laps around the empty track, and I shot baskets alone in the outdoor courts. I cooked simple meals, fed the stray cats that lingered near my apartment, and walked loops around the campus perimeter, again and again. I wasn’t trying to find insight or anything at all.  I was just trying to stay moving.

There was something strangely monastic about it all. Not in the romantic sense of peace or simplicity, but in the enforced withdrawal. The university became a kind of accidental monastery, but with its gates closed, its rituals suspended, its residents absent. And like a monk, I began to notice what filled the silence: my habits, my resistance, my attention, and my resilience.

The philosopher Michel Foucault once wrote about institutions such as hospitals, schools, and prisons as spaces of control and structures that shape behavior. What I experienced was a version of that, inverted. A highly structured space with no operating system and no social reinforcement. And in that absence, the structure itself became the teacher. There were no distractions left to manipulate my attention. And without intending to, I had entered a condition of mindfulness through circumstances beyond my will.

Mindfulness as Condition, Not Practice

I’ve intentionally practiced mindfulness in the past on a yoga mat or at the end of a long day. But nothing in my prior experience prepared me for what mindfulness felt like when it was no longer an option, a technique, or a lifestyle choice.

The stillness of that campus wasn’t peaceful. It wasn’t quiet in the soothing sense; it was quiet because nothing else was happening and, in the beginning, it was a little eerie and scary. The entire framework of social and professional distraction had been stripped away. There was no one to check in with and nothing to respond to. No errands to run, no classes to teach, no conversations to interrupt my thought loops. And so, I started noticing. I noticed the exact hour the light shifted through my window each afternoon. I noticed how often I reached for my phone and then realized there were no notifications waiting. I noticed how my thoughts repeated themselves, how they layered over one another when left unchecked.

With nothing left to engage my mind, I had no choice but to sit with it. The philosopher Simone Weil once wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” In isolation, it was more like exposure. Attention turned inward by default rather than a conscience choice.

Jon Kabat-Zinn describes mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.” But what happens when the “on purpose” part is removed, when the present moment is all you have, and the judgment dissolves not through insight, but from fatigue? That’s what I lived. A kind of feral mindfulness. It was impossible to simply “practice” it at that time and I found myself inhabited by it.

Mindfulness as Social Commentary

I know it would be easy to claim anger in a situation like this, as many people felt during their own lockdowns. For me, I was just inconvenienced.

That sentence surfaced in my journal during the early days of lockdown. I wrote it half as a joke and half as a confession. But the longer I lived with it, the more revealing it became. It pointed to a deeper truth, not just about me, but about the culture I’d come from: that we don’t know how to be still unless we’ve earned it, paid for it, or can post about it. And even then, only briefly.

What the lockdown revealed, at least to me, was just how deeply our lives are structured around interruption and around our planned escapes from presence. Under normal circumstances, we curate mindfulness into the margins of otherwise chaotic schedules. It’s something we add, a 10-minute breath-focused counterbalance to a 14-hour workday. But when the structure collapsed, when time wasn’t divided by meetings or commutes, when the days bled into each other with no deadlines, there was nothing left to balance. Just awareness… and a lot of waiting.

And waiting, it turns out, is not something we’re very good at.

I realized how addicted I had become to the small stimulations of daily life. The email to check. The message to answer. The coffee run. The to-do list. Without them, I felt more exposed and vulnerable. It turns out that low-grade productivity had functioned like white noise, masking a deeper discomfort with just being. In that context, mindfulness took on a new tone similar to confrontation. It meant meeting whatever showed up in the space left behind. Boredom. Anxiety. Flatness. Restlessness. And yes, sometimes peace. I had to face all those demons head on. 

Psychologist Susan David speaks about “emotional agility”, the ability to sit with discomfort without rushing to fix or escape it. That concept came alive for me. Waking up to another day where nothing had changed like my own form of Chinese Groundhog Day syndrome was monotonous, but what choice did I have but to simply notice it?

What I began to understand, slowly and uneasily, is that much of what we label as “normal life” is built to protect us from stillness. Mindfulness isn’t difficult, but we resist it because it threatens the architecture of distraction we’ve built to shield ourselves from our own experience. Lockdown didn’t make me more mindful. It just removed my ability to not be. And that, in its own uncomfortable way, was clarifying.

Re-entry and Residue

When they finally allowed me to leave campus, for two hours at a time, to buy groceries, I didn’t sprint toward freedom although I tried desperately to do so. The guards checked my documents each time I exited. Checked them again when I returned. And each trip felt less like a break from isolation and more like stepping between worlds. Zhongshan had changed. The streets were quiet. The markets had signage and temperature checks. But people were moving again, and the rhythm of daily life was slowly recalibrating. I, on the other hand, wasn’t quite ready to rejoin.

Something had shifted during those months alone. My thoughts had slowed, and my expectations had loosened. I no longer needed constant input to feel like I was doing something. There was a kind of residue that clung to my body and to my soul. Being back in the city felt less like a return and more like a visitation. I wasn’t aiming to socialize, and I wasn’t even particularly eager to reconnect. I just wanted to witness what came next as someone who had been rewired by silence.

And slowly, that rewiring began to make its way into my work. Into the way I thought about teaching and the way I prepared content and the way I spoke and listened. My mindfulness journey and deep study into the topic was born not long after as a response to something I couldn’t unlearn; that stillness isn’t the absence of thought, but the space in which thought can breathe.

This is probably the biggest lesson of my life:  The deepest learning doesn’t happen in a classroom, but in the long, silent corridors between what we plan and what we’re forced to live through.