The Bring Me the Horizon lead vocalist reveals he and wife Alissa spent a month in a monastery to care for their mental health amid the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
- Feb 5, 2021
AceShowbiz - British rocker Olly Sykes spent a month living in a Brazilian monastery to escape the coronavirus lockdown blues.
The Bring Me the Horizon frontman and his model wife, Alissa Salls, jetted off for a little spiritual rehab last year (20) when quarantining became a bit too much for them.
"For a while I just went into a very dark place, a place that I've been in before, but it was the start of a beautiful thing finding myself again," Oli tells The Sun. "I think everyone experienced some level of this during lockdown. Even the most positive of people can't hide from the fact that these are very dark times."
"It was depression for me, for sure, but that worst kind of depression, where it's not like you're feeling sad but where you're feeling nothing at all. You're really just out of touch with your own emotions."
Oli gave up all his "devices" as he entered the monastery, which is close to his wife's family home. "We went and lived on an ashram, without all our devices and disconnected and basically lived as if we were Hare Krishna for a month," he explains. "We woke up at five in the morning and prayed to Krishna and sang and danced, to just connect with who we are.
"And these people are just the happiest people in the world, these monks, you go and meet them and they're the most positive and spiritual people, and I just thought, 'I want a piece of that. I want to see what it's like'. It was like a rehab to be honest. I went to rehab a few years ago for drugs. But when I came here it was a detox, but from everything... emotional issues, dependency on devices, dependency on being a musician. I just learned how to be still and wake up and think I've got nothing to do today and that's absolutely fine."
