IV. Aliveness, And The Embarrassing Amount Of Fun We Have
Doing This I want to be honest about something the marketing materials never quite say out loud: we are having so much fun.
I do not mean we are giddy. I do not mean we are checked out. I mean: the team that builds these retreats — Ammanuel, the cofacilitators, the chef, the sound architect, the lighting designer, the host team, the medic, the ops lead — we are a band of people who have intentionally arranged our lives so that our work is our play. We are not faking aliveness on stage. We were aliveness backstage at 11 p.m. eating leftover chocolate from the familystyle dinner and laughing about nothing in particular. We were aliveness at 6 a.m. doing kitchen yoga with the chef, who insists on it, while she preps the breakfast. We were aliveness in the linen closet, because the host team has a long-running joke about which retreat had the best linens and we keep ranking new ones. One of my favorite memories from this particular retreat is a moment that nobody in the room saw. Day 2, around 10 p.m., the guests were tucked into bed after the celebration ritual. The team was breaking down the dining hall. Someone — I think it was the sous chef — put on a song that we have all loved for years, and within four bars the whole staff was dancing in the kitchen. Not performing. Dancing. The chef was waltzing the medic between the prep tables. Ammanuel was doing this absurd two-step he learned from his cousin. The lighting designer was using a flashlight as a disco ball. The dishwasher was singing harmony in a voice we did not know he had. We danced for a song and a half. Nobody filmed it. Nobody mentioned it the next morning. It was just the field exhaling. It was just the lineage catching its own breath in motion.
That is the under-curriculum of this work. The team has to be in
the state we are inviting the guests into. You cannot fake that. The guests can feel it the moment they walk in, even if they cannot name what they are feeling. They are feeling thirty people who actually like each other and like what they do and like their lives. That is rarer than it should be. That is half the medicine.
And — I will say this without flinching — we have epic amounts of fun. We have inside jokes that go back seven retreats. We have a shared playlist titled with a phrase I cannot print here. We have a tradition of writing each other small love notes in dry-erase marker on the staff bathroom mirror. We have, on more than one occasion, ended a retreat with the entire staff in the lake at 2 a.m. We are devout and we are delighted. We are precise and we are silly. The work demands it. Joy is not a side effect. Joy is the technology.
V. Care And Love For The Lineage
I want to say something tender now about the lineage itself, because the road would not be possible without it.
This lineage — Luminous Prosperity, the body of teaching that Ammanuel Santa Anna has stewarded and grown, the canon of practices we carry, the language we share — is not a brand. It is not a product. It is a living transmission that I have personally watched change lives for over a decade, including my own, more times than I can count.
I love this lineage the way one loves an old church one was raised in, except I chose this one as a grown adult and I have never stopped choosing it. I love its discipline. I love its refusal to take itself too seriously. I love that it has standards — real standards, the kind that mean we will redo a sound check at midnight if it isn't right, the kind that mean we will write four drafts of an opening
teaching, the kind that mean we will spend a full team meeting on the question of whether the morning tea should be black or green at this particular venue. I love that it has tenderness — the kind of tenderness that means we will hold a guest in a private side room for an hour because their grief showed up unexpectedly, and we will make sure their dinner is kept warm, and we will check in on them at 11 p.m. with a fresh hot water bottle and zero conversation if they don't want one.
I love that the lineage trains you. There is no shortcut. You do not become a Luminous facilitator by going to a weekend certification. You apprentice. You hold tea before you hold breath before you hold groups before you hold dancefloors before you hold whole arcs. You watch Ammanuel for years. You watch the senior practitioners for years. You make every kind of beautiful mistake and you are met for each of them with the same exquisite combination of correction and warmth that we offer the guests. The lineage parents you back into your own authority.
And I love that the lineage trusts the body. So much of modern wisdom culture has gone disembodied, gone abstract, gone TEDtalk. Our lineage will not. Every teaching we hold has to land in a body or it does not get taught. Every concept has to have a practice. Every practice has to have a felt sense. Every felt sense has to have a way to come home to in real life, on a Tuesday, while you are loading the dishwasher. Embodied or it doesn't count — that is one of the unwritten commandments. I love it. It has saved me from a hundred forms of spiritual nonsense over the years. Most of all, I love that the lineage sends people home better. Not high. Not dependent. Not addicted to the next retreat. Better. More themselves. More capable of their own real lives. The whole point is that the field we build is portable — that you can carry it home in your chest and return to it on a subway and inside an argument and at 3 a.m. when the baby will not sleep. The lineage refuses to be a vacation from your life. It insists on being a deepening of it.
That, to me, is the mark of the real thing.
VI. My Calling, In The Plainest Terms I Know
People ask me sometimes what I do for a living, and I have stopped trying to give a clever answer. I say: I help build fields where humans remember they are alive. Sometimes I say: I'm a state architect. Sometimes, when I'm tired and being honest, I just say: I throw the kind of party your nervous system has been waiting your whole life to be invited to.
I came to this work because I needed it. I will not pretend otherwise. I was a high-functioning, thoroughly burned-out version of a person fifteen years ago, and a friend dragged me to my first Luminous immersion under false pretenses, and I left it understanding for the first time in my adult life that I had been performing being alive instead of being alive. I went home. I tried to do the practices alone. Six months later I came back and asked to be put on the dish crew of the next retreat. Eleven years later, here I am, writing a story from the road at 5 in the morning with a dog asleep on my foot.
I do not call it a job. I do not really call it a career. I call it a calling, and I do not use that word lightly, and I will not apologize for it. There is a particular feeling I get when a participant breaks open in a way that I can tell will hold past the closing ceremony — a feeling somewhere in the chest, slightly to the left, that nothing else in my life has ever produced. It is the feeling of being useful in the exact way I was made to be useful. That is what a calling is. The lineage gave me that. I owe it the rest of my life. I am gladly paying.
VII. The Particular Gift Of This Particular Retreat
Every retreat has its own personality, and I want to name what was specific about this one before the memory blurs into the larger composite.
This was the retreat that finally married — for me, in a way no previous retreat ever fully had — the party and the transcendence into a single thing I cannot now separate.
I have been to ecstatic dancefloors that were spiritually thin. I have been in profound silent containers that were energetically dead. I have been to many, many of our own retreats where the dancefloor was excellent and the dharma was excellent and they cohabitated beautifully. But this one — this one was different. This one fused. On Day 3, during the Wild Party, somewhere around the second hour, I lost the ability to tell the difference between ecstatic and holy. They were not two states being held side by side; they were a single state expressing itself in two registers, and I was inside it, and so was the entire room.
I will try to describe one moment, and I will fail, and I will try anyway.
It was about 11:14 p.m. We were maybe ninety minutes into the floor. K had just brought the bass back in from a long, almost unbearable, devotional drone. The temple lights had gone from amber to a deep, twilight indigo. Ammanuel was standing in the middle of the floor with his hands at his sides, smiling the small smile he gets when he is genuinely amazed by what is happening. The whole room — and I mean the whole room — was moving in the same slow breath. I could see, from where I was, three different participants weeping silently while still dancing. I could see one woman with her hand on her own chest, gently, the way you hold something newborn. I could see a man with his eyes closed and his arms slightly raised, not in performance but in
something closer to response. And I felt, with absolute clarity, that the room was not having an experience. The room was praying. And the prayer was loud. And the prayer had a 122-bpm pulse. And nobody in there — not one person — would have been able to tell you in that moment whether they were at a wedding or a funeral or a sacrament or a rave, because all four were happening at once, and that was not a contradiction, that was the point. That is the marriage. That is what we are trying to build every time. Most of the time we get close. This time we got there. And I could feel the team feel it, too, around the edges of the room — the host team standing very still by the doors, the medic with tears running freely down her face and not bothering to wipe them, the chef peeking in from the hallway because she could not help herself. We all knew. The field had completed itself. We had all been let in.
VIII. My Favorite Parts (Three Specific Ones)
I have many favorite parts of this particular retreat, but let me name three.
Favorite Part One: The Tuesday afternoon sun. Day 2, around 4 p.m., we have what we call the Receiving Practice — a partner exercise where each person, in turn, lets one true and kind sentence land in their body without deflecting. It is a deceptively small practice. It is also one of the most life-altering things we do. The sun was coming sideways through the western windows of the contemplative hall. The light was the color of a violin. There were thirty-six people sitting in pairs, knee to knee, taking turns letting themselves be seen. The room was almost completely silent except for the very occasional small laugh of a person who could not believe what was happening to them. I sat at the back, my own eyes wet, and watched the entire human race remember
it was lovable. I do not know how else to say it. It was almost unbearable. It was my favorite hour of the entire week.
Favorite Part Two: The chef's broth on Day 3 morning. This is going to sound absurd. It is not absurd. The chef makes a broth — she has been making versions of it for our retreats for six years — that is engineered to be drinkable by a nervous system that has just done a long pivot day. It is salty and warming and somehow also sweet and somehow also smells faintly of something I cannot name and probably do not want named. She brings it out in small clay cups at 9 a.m. on Day 3 morning, before the keystone teaching, with no announcement. Guests pick it up not knowing what it is and three sips later they are slightly different humans. It is a teaching delivered through soup. It is the kind of detail nobody puts on a brochure and nobody forgets. I have, over the years, watched grown executives weep into that broth. I weep into it now most retreats. I wept into it this retreat. The chef pretends not to notice. She always notices.
Favorite Part Three: The closing circle, and one specific sentence. On the last morning, in the closing witness round, every participant is named by the room for one specific gift they brought into the field. It is one of the most precise hours we hold. There is no flattery allowed. Only accuracy. R — the woman who had cried in the doorway over her tea on Day 0 — was witnessed by three different participants, in three different ways, for the same thing: the moment on Day 4 when she had stood up in council and said, with no apology, I am going to start charging what I am worth and I am going to stop apologizing for being good at my job. The entire room had erupted that day. On the last morning, when she heard her own moment named back to her by people she now loved, she put her hands flat on her chest and said, very simply, I will not forget that I said that out loud. That sentence is in my notebook. That sentence is in my chest. That sentence is the entire reason I do this work.
IX. Re-Entry, And What I'm Carrying Home
I am writing this, as I said, three days after the closing ceremony. I drove the van back. I returned the cushions. I did the long phone debrief with Ammanuel, the one we always do, where we go through the retreat hour by hour and ask what the field taught us this time. We had a lot to say. He took notes. He always takes notes. The lineage learns from every retreat. The lineage has been learning for a long time.
What I am carrying home — for myself, on top of everything I carry home for the work — is the deepening of a conviction I already had, which is this: the dancefloor and the dharma were never two things. The split was never real. The work is to remember. I will remember it more cleanly now, after this retreat, than I did before. I will teach from a slightly fuller place. I will hold the next room with slightly steadier hands. I will throw the next party with slightly more reverence and the next silence with slightly more delight, and the two will continue, in this lineage, to converge.
I am also carrying home — and this part is more private, but you have read this far so I will say it — the felt sense of being met by my own community at a depth that I do not, frankly, get anywhere else in the world. The team that builds these retreats is the closest thing to a chosen family I have ever had. We see each other working at the very edge of our capacity, week after week, and we love each other anyway. We see each other tired and tender and short-tempered and brilliant and overwhelmed and devoted, and we love each other anyway. We are not pretending to be enlightened. We are practicing, together, in public, with stakes. The lineage holds us while we hold the guests. That is a kind of belonging I did not know was possible when I started, and that I now organize my life around.
X. A Last Word, For Whoever Is Reading This Considering
Coming If you are reading this — civilian, prospective participant, fellow practitioner, alumni considering returning — and you are wondering whether to come to one of these, let me tell you the truth as plainly as I know how.
Come.
Come tired. Come skeptical. Come excited. Come uncertain.
Come if you have done a hundred retreats and come if you have done none. Come if you think you do not deserve to take five days for yourself and especially come if you think you do not deserve it. Come if your nervous system is a wreck. Come if your nervous system is fine and you suspect, somewhere in the back of your chest, that fine is not the point. Come if the word transcendental makes you wary. Come if the word party makes you wary. Come especially if both words make you wary, because the marriage of them is what we make our living holding open for you.
The team will be ready for you. The tea will be ready. The music will be ready. The chef's broth will be ready. The dancefloor will be ready, and so will the silences between the songs, which are the same instrument played in different keys. The lineage has been waiting for you. It has been waiting for a long time. It is, in some real sense, why we do this work — so that someone exactly like you can walk through the doorway and be met, accurately, in the doorway, and discover, over five luminous days, that the state you have been looking for your entire life is not somewhere else. It is right here. It has always been right here. We just know how to throw the kind of party that helps you remember.
Fullness was never absent. The seeking was the play. The dancefloor and the silence are one breath. Everything flows from states. And the state, once recognized, is home.
I have to go now. The kettle has clicked twice. The dog has woken up. There is another retreat in five weeks, and the playlists do not build themselves, and the lineage does not carry itself, and the field does not tune itself — although, in a way I have come to understand only by doing this for eleven years, it absolutely, gloriously, mysteriously does.
See you on the road. — A lifer, with love, from somewhere on the way to the next one. Text 3