The Chef in the Doorway
The chef came out of the kitchen, as I told you, and stood in the doorway. I watched her watch them. She was crying too. She said to me later, in the quiet kitchen at 2 a.m. while we were eating
leftover ceviche standing up, "This is why I cook for you. This. I cook so they can dance like that."
That was the moment, the chef-and-ceviche moment, when I understood — properly understood, the way you only understand something when you are exhausted past the point of pretense — what we were doing here. We were not running a retreat. We were not delivering a service. We were not even, as our marketing copy says, doing party-pedagogy, though we are doing that, and the marketing copy is honest. We were doing something older than any of those words. We were running a temple. We were running a temple where the deity was the human nervous system and the offering was attention and the music was the language of the priesthood and the dance was the rite. Every member of our team, from the cellist to the chef to the housekeeper who quietly turns down the beds with a sprig of basil on each pillow at 9 p.m., was a temple servant. Including me. Especially me, because the lead facilitator's job at the temple is the most invisible job and the most important: keep the door open, keep the music playing, keep the food coming, keep the hands clean, get out of the way of the gods.
Why I Love This Work
I love this work. I love this work the way other people love their children. I love it with a fierce embarrassing devotion that does not always make sense at dinner parties in New York. I love that our enterprise software, LuminOS, sends me a quiet little ping every morning when one of my retreat alumni opens the app, like a friend waving from across an airport. I love that the course we deliver to leadership cohorts back in their offices is teaching CFOs and product VPs to start meetings with a 90-second somatic check-in and then continue with their meeting in a totally normal way, and I love that "totally normal" is now slowly being rewritten in dozens of organizations to include their bodies. I love that our musicians are working again, paid well, treated like the artists they
are. I love that the kid who served my breakfast this morning is the chef's apprentice and will, in three years, be running a kitchen of his own, and that he has told me his dream is to do this, this exact work, food-as-somatic-practice for retreats like ours, and that we are building him a path. I love that none of this requires anyone to pretend to be more spiritual than they are or less ambitious than they are. Luminous prosperity does not ask you to choose. It asks you to be both.
My Favorite Part
Here is my favorite part of this particular retreat, the thing I want most to tell you about: it was not the dance floor. The dance floor was the visible thing. My favorite part was 1:24 a.m. on night three, after the music had wound down, after the band had bowed to the cohort and the cohort had bowed back and we had said the closing words and the candles had been pinched out one by one, and the cohort was scattered around the property — some in the hammocks, some on the deck, some walking down to the beach, all of them still glowing the way bodies glow when they have done what they were built to do.
I walked through the property, doing my final round, the way I always do, and I found the head of HR — the same person whose conflict had dissolved on the dance floor — sitting alone on the wooden steps that go down to the beach, looking at the moon. They did not see me. I did not interrupt. They were just sitting there. Tears on their face. A small smile. Their body completely still.
They were, in that moment, the most luminous thing I have ever seen.
That is the moment I would buy a ticket for, every time, for the rest of my life. The dance was the visible miracle. The stillness afterwards was the real miracle. Because the dance only matters
if the stillness afterwards is different than the stillness before, and on this night, in this person, I could see — actually see, the way you can see the difference between a fluorescent light and a candle — that the stillness afterwards was different. Their body had been changed. Whatever they take back to their office on Tuesday, whatever they do in their next 1:1, whatever they choose about their marriage and their aging mother and their career — all of it will now be filtered through a body that has known, even for one night, what it is to be lit from inside.
That is what we do. That is what luminous prosperity is. We do not change minds. Minds change all the time and forget what they changed by Wednesday. We change bodies. We change the substrate. And from changed bodies, changed lives proceed, slowly, surely, with the patience of any living system worthy of the name.
The Lineage Is Expanding
I want to tell you one more thing before I sleep. It is now 2:48 a.m. as I am dictating this into my phone in the kitchen, sitting on the counter, eating leftover hibiscus salad straight from the bowl with my fingers. I am thirty-eight years old. I have been doing some version of this work since I was twenty-three. I have been doing this exact work — Luminous Somatics meets Dance Psychology meets enterprise meets retreat meets music — for eight years. And I want you to know: the calling has not weakened. The calling has gotten stronger every year. There are more bodies that need this. There are more leaders who walk in cynical and walk out softer. There are more young practitioners who want to be trained, and we are training them, and the lineage is — please hear me on this — the lineage is expanding. It is not contracting. We are not the last generation of this work. We are an early one. The work is going to be done by people who are not yet born, in geographies we have not yet visited, with technologies we have not yet built, and the cellist's twelve-minute descending line will be played
somewhere on this planet a hundred years from now in some form none of us can predict, and the chef's mango will be picked, and a CFO somewhere will weep over a bean, and a CTO somewhere will write a bad poem and read it aloud anyway.
This is the work. This is the lineage. This is the calling. This is the road.
Coda
The hand of the CFO is no longer in mine — I made that part up for the opening, because the truth is she let go of my hand around midnight and went to dance with everyone else, which is exactly what she was supposed to do, and which is exactly what I hope every leader I work with does eventually: lets go of my hand and dances on her own. That is the secret of party-pedagogy. The party is not a vacation from the pedagogy. The party is the moment the pedagogy lets go of you and you keep dancing anyway, because by then your own body knows.
I am going to bed now. The chef is going to bed now. The cellist already went to bed an hour ago. The cohort is asleep in twos and threes across the property, and tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. we will wake them gently with a flute and feed them papaya and walk them to the cenote one last time and send them home.
Outlandish expertise. Incredible music. Timeless memories. Care for the lineage. Love for the calling. Epic amounts of fun.
Transcendence and party in the same body, in the same hour, in the same hand on the small of the same back.
This is what I do for a living. I am the luckiest person I know. Goodnight from Tulum.
— One of us, signing off from the road Text 3
THE TIME OF MY LIFE — A FIELD REPORT FROM THE DANCING BODY OF LIGHT
Or: How Ammanuel Santa Anna and the Luminous Prosperity
Crew Ruined Me, in the Most Beautiful Way Possible, for Anything Less Than This
I. ARRIVAL — OR: THE MOMENT I REALIZED EVERYTHING FLOWS FROM STATES
I want to tell you about the week I stopped pretending.
It started, as the best weeks always do, at an airport, where I was tired and slightly cranky and convinced — in that smug, whiteknuckled way I had perfected over twenty-three years of professional adulthood — that I knew exactly what I was walking into. A retreat. Right. I had been to retreats. I had done the silent ten-day. I had done the corporate off-site with the ropes course and the trust fall and the gluten-free wraps. I had done the yoga week in Costa Rica where the schedule was so packed I came home more depleted than when I left. I knew the genre. I had a small, secret, tightly-folded skepticism in my chest pocket, right next to my passport, and I planned to keep it there.
Then the van picked me up, and the playlist that came on as we curved down the dirt road toward the property was not the playlist of a retreat. It was a Nils Frahm piano line dissolving into a slow Bonobo pulse, and the driver — who was barefoot, by the way, and who I would later learn was actually one of the senior facilitators — looked over and said, “We don't have a schedule today. Just feel your feet on the floor of the van. Welcome.”
And reader, I am not going to pretend this hit me in some immediate cosmic way. It didn't. I felt my feet. My feet felt fine. They were feet. But something in me — some over-rehearsed, over-credentialed, over-scheduled internal middle-manager — quietly, almost imperceptibly, set down a clipboard it had been holding for about eleven years.
That was the first state shift. I didn't know to call it that yet. By Day 5, I would know to call everything that.
Because here is the secret that Ammanuel Santa Anna and the Luminous Prosperity team will tell you on Day 1, and that you will not actually believe until your body finally believes it for you on Day 3 or 4: everything flows from states. Not from goals. Not from to-do lists. Not from grit, willpower, productivity hacks, calendar discipline, or the seventeen self-help books on your nightstand that you bought instead of reading the previous seventeen. From states. From the actual, real-time, somatic, nervous-system-level condition you happen to be in at any given moment. Everything you do, everything you make, everything you say, everything you become — it all pours out of whatever state you are in when you do, make, say, or become it. Change the state, change the output. Refuse to change the state, get the same output forever.
This is, when you think about it, both completely obvious and completely heretical to the entire culture I was raised in. And I can tell you that the moment your body finally gets it — not as an idea, but as a felt, undeniable, dance-floor-tested truth — is the moment your whole life quietly rearranges itself.
Mine rearranged on a Wednesday, around 11:42 p.m., during something they called The First Dance.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
II. THE PROPERTY — OR: WHERE THE FIELD WAS SET
The retreat was held at a private finca that had been bought out for our cohort of eighteen humans. I will not name the geography precisely because part of the magic of these retreats, as I came to understand, is that they rotate — Tulum in February, Big Sur in May, Italian Lakes in July, Ibiza post-season, Costa Rica in November, the Sacred Valley in March — and the geography is chosen as carefully as the music. The land itself is part of the curriculum.
What I can tell you about this particular land: there were cellos. I mean that almost literally. As we pulled up the gravel drive, there was a hum coming from the main pavilion that I initially thought was wind through some kind of architectural feature, and then realized, with the slow-dawning delight of someone who has just been outflanked by reality, was a string trio playing live as we arrived. There was no banner. No name tag table. No clipboard. There was a string trio, a small woman with kind eyes who handed me a glass of cold hibiscus water, and a temperature-perfect plunge pool glittering at the edge of the patio like someone had ordered it from the gods.
I want you to imagine what it does to a tired, slightly cynical, overcredentialed nervous system to be greeted by cellos. Not jazz brunch cellos. Not background cellos. Cellos that are clearly, unmistakably, there for you, played by people who are paying attention to your arrival as a sacred event. My nervous system did not know what to do with this. So it did what nervous systems do when they encounter unprecedented kindness: it dropped a layer of armor it had been carrying for so long it had forgotten it was armor. Just dropped it. Right there on the gravel.
State shift number two.
By the time I was shown to my room — a small, beautiful, whitestucco-walled space with linen sheets, a single fresh-cut sprig of rosemary on the pillow, and a hand-written note that said “Welcome. We're so glad your body is here. — A.” — I was already, frankly, undone. In the most generative possible way. I lay on the bed for fifteen minutes and stared at the ceiling and laughed once, out loud, at nothing in particular, and felt my chest do something my chest had not done in years, which was expand.
III. AMMANUEL — OR: WHEN THE TEACHER WALKS IN BAREFOOT AND YOU KNOW I want to talk about Ammanuel Santa Anna for a minute, because it would be journalistic malpractice not to.
You hear about teachers like Ammanuel before you meet them, usually from a friend of a friend who returned from one of these things looking like they had been quietly washed clean of an entire decade of accumulated noise. The friend says something like, “You just have to go. I can't explain it. There's this person — Ammanuel — and they're not what you think.” And then they trail off and look out the window in a way that makes you suspect they are recalling a specific moment on a specific dance floor at a specific hour of the night, and you understand, even before you book the flight, that you are about to be initiated into something. I will not tell you Ammanuel is charismatic, because that word has been ruined by people who shouldn't have it. Ammanuel is present. That's the better word. When Ammanuel walks into a room — barefoot, almost always barefoot, in some kind of soft cream linen, with a quality of attention that feels like a small, very warm, very precise spotlight that has been turned directly on you
— the room reorganizes itself around that presence without anyone noticing it has happened. You notice it about ten minutes later when you realize you are sitting up straighter, breathing slower, and feeling, for the first time in the entire calendar year, seen.
Ammanuel teaches the way water teaches a stone how to be smooth. There is no lecture. There is no PowerPoint. There is, instead, a sequence of impossibly simple invitations — “Stand up. Feel your feet. Notice where your weight is. Now notice what wants to happen if you don't decide” — that, when followed in good faith, deliver you to the actual content of the teaching faster than any didactic explanation ever could.
And the teaching, I came to understand, is itself impossibly simple, which is why it has taken Ammanuel and the Luminous Prosperity team eighteen full-length books to articulate it. The teaching is: the body knows. The teaching is: everything flows from states. The teaching is: play is not the break from the work; play is the work. The teaching is: pedagogy without party is dry, and party without pedagogy is empty, and the marriage of the two is where every transformation that has ever mattered actually happens.
The teaching is, in other words, party-pedagogy. And by the end of Day 4, I would have been willing to get it tattooed on my forearm.
IV. DAY 1 — OR: THE FIRE, THE NAMES, THE FIELD
The first night we ate a long, slow communal dinner under fairy lights at a single table that ran the length of the patio. The chef — a woman who, I would later learn, has cooked for the Dalai Lama, Anderson .Paak, and the Obamas, and is on permanent retainer
with the retreat — served plates that tasted like they had been grown specifically to be eaten by us. Heirloom tomatoes warm from the garden. Fresh-pulled mozzarella. A peach in the noon sun, which I am now convinced is its own emotional state. I ate slowly for the first time in possibly a decade.
After dinner, we did the Luminous Warm-Up — which I had read about in the brochure and assumed was going to be some kind of light stretching. Reader, it was not light stretching. It was a fortyfive-minute, four-phase somatic protocol — Somatic Arrival, Fascial Awakening, Rhythmic Ignition, Dance Emergence — that took my over-thinking, over-caffeinated, over-managed body and, with surgical precision, opened it. Not loosened it. Opened it. By the end of the protocol I could feel my own sacrum for the first time in approximately forever. I had not known a sacrum was something one could feel. I had thought a sacrum was an architectural feature. I was wrong.
And then we sat around a fire in a circle, and Ammanuel said, “You don't have to share anything you don't want to. But if you'd like to speak your name into this fire, the fire will hold it.”
And one by one, eighteen humans — a CFO from Singapore, a poet from Mexico City, a Series C founder who hadn't taken a real vacation in nine years, a midwife, a teacher, a former Olympic rower, a quiet man who turned out to be one of the most respected venture capitalists of his generation, and several other beautifully unlikely souls — spoke their names into the dark. And the fire, in fact, held them.
State shift number three. I went to bed and slept the sleep of a child.