THE TIME OF MY LIFE — A FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT OF THE LUMINOUS RETREAT WITH AMMANUEL SANTA ANNA AND LUMINOUS PROSPERITY INC.
A 4,500-word, slightly-too-honest field report from someone who arrived in a button-down, left in bare feet, and has not stopped telling the story since. On the wild party and the profound pedagogy. On the dancefloor that married the dharma. On the week when everything I thought I needed to fix turned out to be a state I needed to remember. On peak experiences I will be carrying around in my body until I die.
I. ARRIVAL — OR, THE NIGHT I DROPPED MY PHONE INTO A WOODEN BOX AND THE WORLD GOT QUIETER I want to begin where it began, because everything that followed flowed from this single, almost embarrassing gesture: I gave them my phone. I walked into a stone-floored entry hall in a converted villa somewhere in the Tuscan hills, and a woman with kind eyes and a voice like warm honey held out a beautiful walnut box and asked me, with no hurry whatsoever, if I would like to put it in. I said yes the way you say yes to a doctor offering anesthesia — half-relieved, half-terrified, fully aware that I was about to be unconscious to the things I had been clinging to. The lid closed. A small bell rang somewhere. I have, in the years since, told this story at dinner parties, in board meetings, at my brother's wedding, and to my therapist, and every time I tell it I notice my shoulders drop. The wooden box was the first teaching, and the teaching was: you are about to be met, and you cannot be met while you are still scrolling. Ammanuel was standing in the courtyard with a cellist behind him and a glass of something pale
and cold in his hand. He did not introduce himself first. He walked over, looked at me directly — directly in a way I had not been looked at in maybe a decade — and said, "Welcome. We've been waiting for you specifically." I want you to understand what that did to my nervous system. I had flown in from a quarter-end. I had done three back-to-back board calls in the airport lounge. I had not eaten a meal sitting down in eleven days. And this man looked at me as if I were the only event on the calendar. He was telling the truth. He had read my intake form. He knew my partner's name. He knew the question I was living. I did not yet understand that this level of attention was not a flourish — it was the substrate. It was the ground on which everything else would be built. Within twenty minutes I was eating a slow first course of fennel and blood orange under a tree, and the cellist was playing, and the people at the table were introducing themselves not by job title but by the question they were currently living, and I realized — half a sip of wine in — that I had, somehow, without noticing, exhaled.
II. THE FIRST TEACHING — EVERYTHING FLOWS FROM STATES
The next morning Ammanuel gathered us in a sun-drenched stone room with no chairs — only cushions and rugs and a cellist tuning quietly in the corner — and offered the teaching that, in retrospect, was the spine of the entire week and possibly the spine of my life since. He said, almost casually, everything flows from states. He said it the way someone might say, the kettle is hot — as a description, not a slogan. He said: you cannot think your way into a different life. You can only feel your way into a different state, and from that state your thoughts, your decisions, your relationships, your strategy, your art, your money, your sleep, your sex, your prayer — all of it — will reorganize themselves around the new ground. He said most of us have been trying to fix our outputs while keeping our underlying state untouched, which is like trying to remix a song by changing the album cover. He said the work of the week was not to teach us anything new. The work of the week
was to help our nervous systems remember a state they had once known and forgotten — the state of being alive without apology. From that state, he said, everything we needed to do would become obvious, and most of what we had been agonizing over would become irrelevant. The room got quiet in the specific way that rooms get quiet when something true has been said. I noticed I was crying without knowing exactly why. The woman next to me — a private equity partner from Singapore who had been all crisp linen and crisper smile — was also crying, and she reached over and took my hand without looking at me, and we sat there, two strangers, hands held, while a cellist played the opening of a Bach suite, and Ammanuel went around the circle and asked each of us, with no pressure and no hurry, what state are you in right now, in this moment, in your body? That question — and his refusal to settle for any answer that came from the mind rather than the body — became the doorway. We walked through it together, and on the other side was the rest of the week.
III. THE BODIES IN THE ROOM — LUMINOUS SOMATICS AND THE DAY MY SHOULDERS CAME DOWN
By Day Two my body was beginning to revolt — not against the retreat, but against the years of being treated like a meat-puppet for a calendar. The morning began with what they called Luminous Somatics, which is what regular people would call "breathing and moving and feeling things," except that under the hands and voices of the Luminous facilitators it became something closer to an initiation. We were guided through breath sequences I did not know my chest was capable of. We were paired with strangers and asked, with consent at every step, to walk slowly toward each other and notice what our bodies did before we got close. We did a practice they call the Tuning, where you stand opposite another person and breathe together until your two nervous systems entrain — and I want to tell you that this should sound like nonsense, because two days earlier it would have, but I stood across from a venture capitalist from Berlin and our breath synced
and his eyes filled and mine filled and neither of us spoke and the facilitator quietly said good, that's it, that's the whole practice and walked away, and we stood there for another four minutes, breathing in time, two completely defended men who had just discovered we were not, in fact, alone in our specific kind of tiredness. By the time we broke for breakfast my shoulders had come down what felt like four inches. The chef — this small wiry Italian woman who treated breakfast as a sacrament — laughed when she saw me and said, good, the body is here now. I did not understand until later that the chef was, herself, a facilitator. Every meal was a teaching. Every plate was timed to where we were in the arc. The poached eggs on Day Two morning were softer and lighter than they had been on Day One, because our nervous systems were softer and lighter, and the kitchen knew this without anyone having to be told. That is the level of integration we are talking about. The kitchen and the cushion room are the same room, in different costumes.
IV. LILA DAY — THE AFTERNOON I LOST A BAREFOOT SOCCER MATCH AND FOUND MY LIFE
The third day was given over to what Ammanuel called Lila — the Sanskrit word for divine play — and I had assumed, going in, that it would be the throwaway day. The fun day. The day before the real work resumed. I was wrong about this in a way that has reorganized how I think about my company, my marriage, and my Tuesdays. They started us on improv games at ten in the morning — proper improv, with the rules and the yes, and — taught by a woman who turned out to be a former Second City performer and current senior facilitator and possibly the funniest human I have ever shared a room with. We laughed. I want to be clear: we laughed until we could not stand up. A hedge fund manager fell off a stool from laughing and lay on the floor wheezing for two full minutes while everyone else cried laughing at the sight of him crying laughing. Then we went outside and played barefoot soccer in the olive grove. I am terrible at soccer. I have always been
terrible at soccer. I was, in the year 1994, picked last for soccer in front of my entire seventh-grade class. I had not thought about that incident in thirty-two years, and yet here I was, barefoot in Tuscany, my pant legs rolled up, and a woman from Mexico City was nutmegging me with such joy that she fell down laughing in the grass, and instead of the old shame I noticed something completely different — I noticed delight. Delight at being beaten by a person who was so clearly delighted to be playing. We had a cooking competition in the late afternoon, judged by the chefs, who had been bribed in advance with wine, and my team made what was — objectively — a very ugly tomato tart, but we made it while singing, and the chefs gave us second place out of pity and second place from love is, I have decided, better than first place from skill. That night the festival began. I will get to that. But what I want you to know about Lila Day is that the play was not a break from the work. The play was the work. By the time I was nutmegged in the olive grove, my chronic professional self had been laughed out of my body. I had become available. The teachings of Day Four would not have landed without the Lila of Day Three. Ammanuel knew this. He said it explicitly the next morning. He said, you cannot teach a defended nervous system. You can only teach a delighted one. So we delight you first.
V. THE FESTIVAL — WHERE THE DANCEFLOOR MARRIED THE DHARMA I want to write carefully about the Festival, because it is the moment of the week that everyone who has been to a Luminous retreat references when they tell you about it, and it is also the hardest part to describe without sounding like a person who joined a cult. So let me just tell you what happened. After dinner on Day
Three, the long table was cleared, the candles were left, the doors to the terrace were thrown open, and a band — a real band, with a real horn section, with a real bassist who had played with people whose names you would recognize — began to play. The cellist from earlier in the week became a string section. The composerThe Notion Living System Orchestra
in-residence picked up a guitar. The chef came out from the kitchen with her apron off and a hibiscus flower in her hair and she could, it turns out, dance. Ammanuel did not stand on a stage. He came onto the floor first and started moving in the way a person moves when they have done a great deal of inner work and no longer care whether they look ridiculous, which is to say, beautifully. Within twenty minutes the entire cohort was on the floor. The hedge fund manager who had fallen off the stool was now leading a small breakaway troupe of dancers in what can only be described as a barefoot conga line. The Singaporean PE partner was teaching a Berlin VC how to salsa and he was laughing so hard he kept missing the steps, which made her laugh, which made the rest of us laugh. There was a moment — and I do not exaggerate this for effect — when the band shifted into a slow, wide, almost devotional groove, and the room shifted with it. People stopped dancing in pairs and started dancing alone, eyes closed, swaying. A woman near me began to weep without breaking her movement. Ammanuel walked through the room slowly, placing a hand on a shoulder here, a forehead there, doing whatever invisible work he was doing, and the song stretched on and on and the band, reading the room, kept it going for what must have been twenty minutes. When it ended, no one clapped. We stood in silence. The composer struck a single low note on a singing bowl. Ammanuel said softly, yes, that, and walked off the floor, and the band came back in with something joyous, and we danced until 1:30 in the morning. The dancefloor and the dharma had married, in front of my eyes, with a horn section. I want you to understand: I had been to clubs before. I had been to weddings. I had been to a meditation retreat in Bhutan. I had never, ever experienced a room in which celebration and devotion were the same gesture. The Festival is the experience that taught me, finally and irrevocably, that joy is not the opposite of depth. Joy is the vehicle of depth, when the container is right.
VI. THE EDGE — DAY FOUR AND THE QUESTION I HAD BEEN AVOIDING FOR ELEVEN YEARS
The morning after the Festival was the most carefully held day of the week. They knew. They had known all along. The schedule was slow. Breakfast was long. The first sit was gentle. And then, mid-morning, in the cushion room, with the cellist playing softly, Ammanuel introduced what he called the Living Assessment — and the Living Assessment is, in plain language, a structured interview with yourself, conducted in a circle of witnesses, in which you answer four questions: what is alive in you right now? what is dying? what is asking to be born? and what, specifically, are you not yet willing to look at? The fourth question is the one. I had, for eleven years, been avoiding a particular truth about my company — a truth about the role I was playing, a truth about a cofounder relationship that had become quietly sour, a truth about the version of myself that had hardened into someone I did not actually like. I had avoided this truth in therapy. I had avoided it in journals. I had avoided it on long runs and in the shower and in the dark at 3am. And on Day Four, in a room of strangers who had become, in three days, more intimate than my actual friends, I said it out loud. I said it crying. I said it with my face in my hands. I said it knowing that nothing in my life would be the same after I said it, because saying a thing in front of witnesses is the moment a thing becomes real. The room did not flinch. Ammanuel did not rush to fix me. The facilitator next to him — a woman named Yara who had a way of sitting that made you feel, somehow, geologically supported — simply said, thank you for that. It was already true. Now the rest of us also know. And the cellist played a slow phrase, and someone reached across and put a hand on my back, and I cried for what must have been ten minutes while no one tried to make it stop. That is the Edge. The work that no other facilitator I have ever worked with has been able to take me to, because no other facilitator had built a container strong enough to hold what came out. The Edge was the day that flowed directly from the Festival, because the Festival had loosened my body enough to let the truth move through it. Everything flows from states. The Festival had put me in the state. The Edge had given the state
somewhere to go. By dinner I was lighter than I had been in years. By candlelight that night, the cohort and I were laughing again, and the laughter had a different quality. It was the laughter of people who had seen each other at the bottom of a well and come back up together.
VII. THE COMPOSITION — DAY FIVE AND THE LIVING SCORE I CARRY IN MY POCKET
On Day Five they asked us to compose what they called a Living Score — not a list of resolutions, not a set of OKRs, not a five-year plan. A score. A piece of music we would live by. The composerin-residence walked us through the metaphor and then, beautifully, into the practice. He asked us: what is the tempo of the next chapter of your life? what is the key signature — the underlying mood? what are the recurring motifs — the practices, the people, the rituals you want to return to? what is the rest, the silence, the empty bar that gives the music its breath? I sat under an olive tree with a hand-bound journal they had given me and a fountain pen and I composed my Living Score, and when I read it back to myself, I noticed I was writing in a different voice than the one I had arrived with — a voice that was slower, warmer, more honest, more amused at itself. The Score had a tempo (slower than I had been living). It had a key signature (a kind of warm major, with an open sixth). It had motifs (the morning sit, the long walk, the weekly call with my mother, the no-phone meal, the monthly council with three friends). It had a rest (one full day per month with no agenda). It had a coda (a question I would carry into every decision: am I composing or am I just producing?). When we presented our Scores to each other in the afternoon — each one read aloud, each one underscored by live music chosen on the spot by the composer to match the speaker's emerging archetype — I cried again, and laughed again, and watched a man I had thought of as a humorless Goldman type read his Score in tears while a cellist played a tender, almost devotional waltz, and I thought, I am going to remember this Tuesday afternoon for the
rest of my life. I have, two years and four months later, the printed Living Score in the inside pocket of every jacket I own. I revise it twice a year. I have not missed the morning sit in fourteen months. I called my mother yesterday. I am composing.