X. The Last Thing — Why I Do This
I came into this lineage nine years ago because I was a competent facilitator with a quietly dying nervous system, and I had given up on the field around me, and I was about to leave the work entirely. Ammanuel found me at a conference. He looked at me for about four seconds and said, "You are not done. You are just in the wrong room." He said it kindly. He was right.
I came to my first Lila Retreat seven months later. By Day Four I knew I was home. By Day Five I had vowed to apprentice. I have
not regretted a single day since.
The reason I do this is simple. I do this because I love these humans — Ammanuel, Devon, Lila, Tomas, Sasha, Marisol, Jonah, Iris, Kai, Dr. P, Wren, the apprentices, the master facilitators across the global guild, the alumni who text me at 11pm on a Tuesday from a hard meeting saying "I just used the practice you taught me" — more than I have loved any group of people I have ever worked beside.
I do this because the work is the most fun I have ever had at work. I have laughed harder at a Lila than I laughed in college. I have danced longer at a Tuesday-afternoon module than I danced at my own wedding. I have eaten better in three days at a retreat than I ate in three years before this lineage found me.
I do this because the work is the most serious thing I have ever done. I have witnessed humans rewire eighteen-year marriages in a single morning. I have seen CEOs remember they have hearts. I have watched nurses remember why they became nurses. I have watched a woman stand in bioluminescent water with her arms open and look more alive than I have ever seen any human look. I do this because Ammanuel is the only teacher I have ever met who has put pleasure at the structural center of pedagogy and held it there with rigor, ethics, love, and unwillingness to scale past depth. I would build my life around any teacher with that combination of qualities. Mine just happens to be him.
I do this because the redwoods lean in.
I do this because the formula works.
I do this because eighty humans will leave Big Sur this Friday with timeless memories woven into their actual physical bodies, and they will go home and rewrite the fields they live in, and through
them the fields they touch, and through those the fields those fields touch, and somewhere out there, three years from now, a person who has never heard the word Luminous will walk into a meeting that feels different than every meeting before it, and they will not know why, but the why will be Marina, and Ben, and the engineering VP, and the sixty-eight-year-old jazz drummer, and the cellist, and Setsuko, and the cove, and the song, and the sentence, and the lean.
That is what I get to participate in. That is my calling. That is my lineage. That is my work.
I am about to land in Newark. The retreat ended thirty-six hours ago. The cello track from Night Three is still playing somewhere behind my sternum. I have not slept and I do not want to sleep and I will sleep, eventually, in my own bed, with the silver mask Marina gave me at the closing breakfast on a hook by the door.
Come play. Come work. Come home. — A Master Facilitator of the Luminous Lineage. October. Big Sur. Bioluminescence Lila. Pedagogy as party. Lila at scale. Mastery beyond modality. Forever.
Text 3
THE TIME OF MY LIFE — Five Days at The Lila Retreat with Ammanuel Santa Anna and Luminous Prosperity Inc.
A First-Person Account of the Retreat Where the Dancefloor
Married the Dharma, the Wisdom Married the Wild, and Everything I Thought I Knew About Transformation Got Beautifully, Permanently Rewired
Because everything — everything — flows from states.
I. PROLOGUE: BEFORE I KNEW WHAT I WAS WALKING INTO I had done the retreats. I had sat the silent ten-day. I had bawled into a stranger's shoulder at the breathwork weekend. I had done the boutique leadership offsite in Sonoma where they served $14 cold-pressed juice and asked me to write my purpose on a Post-it.
None of them — and I mean none of them — readied me for what occurred in those five days in the redwoods with Ammanuel Santa Anna and the Luminous Prosperity team.
This is my attempt to tell you what happened, knowing in advance that the words will undersell it. Because the central transmission of The Lila Retreat — the truth Ammanuel writes into the air of every room he enters — is that everything flows from states. Not from beliefs. Not from goals. Not from frameworks or productivity stacks or the strategic plan you printed on the heavy paper. From states. From the felt-sense quality of the field you and the people around you are inside of. Change the state, and the behaviors follow. Change the state, and the strategy clarifies. Change the state, and the meeting that used to feel tense and performative and a little dead becomes the most alive hour of your week.
I went in skeptical. I came out a different animal. Here is what happened.
II. DAY ONE — THE SOFT LANDING
or, How a Welcome Dinner Became the First Great Memory of the Rest of My Life
The drive in was already part of it. You wind through the redwoods and your nervous system, without asking permission, begins to slow down. By the time the gravel road opened into the property — chef's smoke rising off an outdoor kitchen, a string quartet playing Bach as if Bach were a casual Tuesday afternoon habit,
Ammanuel himself standing at the entrance learning every name as it arrived — I had already laughed twice and I hadn't even put my bag down.
He greeted me by name. Not "hey, friend." Not "welcome." By name. He had memorized all eighty of us before we landed. That single act — small, physical, unmistakable — was the first piece of pedagogy of the week, and I didn't even know I was being taught. Day One is engineered as the soft landing. There is no heavy lifting. No icebreaker that makes you want to die. No name games. No "tell us your why." Instead: a slow welcome ceremony on the land, a blessing offered by the local fire-keeper (real, not performed), a long communal dinner under the stars where you eat actual food cooked by a chef who has an actual James Beard nomination, and a gentle first Lila — the nightly play experience the team designs around different themes every evening — that simply asks the body to remember it can move.
By 11 p.m. I was sitting on a hay bale with a CHRO from a Fortune100 health system, a touring jazz drummer, and a 28-year-old founder whose company you've heard of, and we were laughing about how we'd all arrived on autopilot and somehow the autopilot had quietly switched off without telling us. That, I would later realize, was the whole design. They didn't make anything happen on Day One. They simply changed the state of the field, and our nervous systems followed it down.
Lying in bed that night under linens that frankly embarrassed every hotel I've ever paid for, I had my first quiet moment of oh. Oh no. This is going to be different.
III. DAY TWO — THE BODY RETURNS
or, The Day I Realized My Body Had Been Patiently Waiting
for Me to Come Back Day Two is the somatic immersion. They warned us in the welcome packet, but somehow no warning prepares you for the texture of it.
It begins, optionally, at dawn. You can sleep in. Many do. But about half of us walked out into the cold pre-light and met Ammanuel at the cold plunge — a redwood barrel of ice and moonlight — for ten minutes of guided breath, ten minutes of submersion, and ten minutes of what I can only describe as the silliest, holiest standing-around I've ever done with strangers. Then breath. Then voice. Then dance. Then — because of course — a long, slow farm-to-table breakfast with the morning sun coming through the trees in those long horizontal beams that look like CGI but aren't.
The morning facilitation lab was led by Ammanuel and a master facilitator named Sequoia who, I would later learn, has a PhD from Stanford and spent twelve years as a Buddhist nun. She walked us through somatic regulation under pressure with such fluency that I thought I was watching jazz. Hard material — trauma physiology, polyvagal theory, the architecture of the window of tolerance — taught not from slides but from inside our actual bodies, in pairs, with live cello in the corner.
By lunch I had a body again. By dinner I had a voice I hadn't used since I was twenty-four. By the second Lila — themed Bioluminescence Night, with bioluminescent paint and a DJ flown in from Berlin who has scored two Sundance films — I was dancing in a way that I had previously, secretly, believed was reserved for other people. People who were "the dancing kind." It turned out I was the dancing kind. Everyone is. Most of us have just had the kind of weeks for the last decade that talked us out of it.
I went to bed crying happy at 1:30 a.m. I was 41 years old and I had just remembered something about myself I had been holding for the right room.
IV. DAY THREE — THE FIELD OPENS
or, The Day People Start Using the Phrase "Life-Changing"
Without Embarrassment Day Three is the day the warning labels become real. This is the day, the team tells you frankly at the morning circle, that participants tend to call life-changing. They are right.
The morning is morphic field work. If you've never done constellation practice, the short description is: a small group of humans, working with deep attention, can produce a felt sense of the dynamics inside a system — a family, a company, a question — that is reliably more accurate than any spreadsheet. I had read about this. I had been moderately credulous. I was unprepared for the experience.
In a morning session, five strangers stood in a configuration that represented the central decision of my next two years. They held positions for ninety seconds, said one sentence each, and I had to leave the room and go cry against a redwood for fifteen minutes because the answer I had been avoiding for eighteen months was suddenly, undeniably, in my body. Sequoia found me at the tree, sat beside me, and said exactly four words, none of which were "are you okay." I won't share the four words. They are mine now. The afternoon was The Witnessing Circle — a relational practice where you are seen, named, and reflected back by every other person in your home pod. Six people. Each takes a turn in the center. Each is held in absolute attention for approximately seven
minutes while the other five offer back, slowly, what they have come to perceive as true about that person across the last fortyeight hours. Try this exercise once and tell me transformation is something you do in your head. By the time my turn ended I had been wept on, blessed, named, witnessed, and quietly, structurally, reorganized. My home pod — a hospice nurse, a retired sergeant, a poet, a venture investor, a 28-year-old founder — knew things about me I would normally protect. They held them like sacred objects.
The evening Lila that night was titled The Sufi Wedding. The team had hired a touring qawwali ensemble. We danced until 2 a.m. in candlelight on a wooden floor that had been blessed at sunset by the same fire-keeper from Day One. I had three of the most articulate, joyful, ridiculous conversations of my adult life that night. I will be in touch with each of those three humans for the rest of my life.
I went to bed knowing I would never be able to fully explain this day to anyone who wasn't there. Which is, I now think, perhaps the entire point.
V. DAY FOUR — THE OUTLANDISH EXPERTISE DAY
or, How the Most Wild Party of the Week Married the Most
Profound Pedagogy I Have Ever Received Day Four is the day Luminous Prosperity reveals their full hand, and what a hand it is. This is the Outlandish Expertise Day — the day they import masters from disciplines corporate L&D would never dream of and let them teach you the inside of their craft. We had a Butoh master at 9:30 a.m. teaching stillness so radical it reframed presence forever. We had a jazz drummer at 11 a.m.
teaching call-and-response listening as the highest form of facilitation literacy. We had a Pulitzer-shortlisted poet at lunch holding eighty of us in silence with one line about a dog. We had a neuroscientist of trauma in the afternoon who could speak fluent polyvagal in plain English, who made the entire room laugh out loud about the vagus nerve, and who I will quote in meetings for the rest of my career.
The pedagogy of Day Four is the pedagogy of outlandish lateral inputs — the conviction that the facilitator who only studies facilitation will never become luminous, that mastery requires masters of presence wherever they live. By the end of the afternoon I understood, in a way no MBA curriculum had ever taught me, that the deepest professional development of my next decade was going to come from people who would never appear on a LinkedIn-recommended reading list.
And then — the legendary Lila. The Day Four Lila is the most extravagant of the week. They had built a set. There was a live nine-piece band. There were costumes laid out in the hall, every size, every aesthetic, ranging from "very tasteful" to "frankly outrageous," and we were gently encouraged to choose the version of ourselves we wanted to dance as.
I cannot describe what happened that night without sounding like a person who has lost their mind. So let me just give you the facts. I danced for five hours. I sang. I did call-and-response with a tenor saxophonist who two days earlier had taught me about listening. The hospice nurse from my home pod and I improvised a duet on the floor that made the entire room form a circle around us, and I want to be clear: I am not the kind of person to whom that has ever happened, before or since. The CHRO from the health system who I'd sat with on Day One was on a hay bale, weeping with laughter, between an engineering VP and a 28-year-old founder. At 12:30 a.m. Ammanuel got on the mic and read three lines of Rumi over the music and the room dropped into one of the most
tender silences I have ever been inside.
This is what they mean by pedagogy as party. The deepest learning happens in joy, rhythm, communion, and play. The corporate world has systematically suppressed all four. Luminous Prosperity rebuilds the conditions under which learning was always meant to occur, and the Day Four Lila is the proof. You cannot get there from a slide deck. You can only get there by remembering that bodies were made for joy.
I went to bed at 2:45 a.m. and slept the most articulate sleep of my life.
VI. DAY FIVE — INTEGRATION & BENEDICTION
or, The Day You Realize the Cohort You Just Joined Will Be at Your Funeral
Day Five is slow. It is meant to be slow. The retreat ends, deliberately, with a deceleration so complete that you can carry the work back into your real life without it shattering on the runway.
There is a long morning. Optional silent practice. Optional cold plunge for the diehards. A long, real breakfast. Integration walks in pairs, where you put one earbud in and listen to the same piece of music with another human and walk, mostly silent, for forty minutes through the redwoods. Mine was with the retired sergeant from my home pod. We didn't say twenty words. It was perfect. Then the closing ceremony. The Witnessing — the proprietary closing ritual where every participant is seen, named, and witnessed by every other participant in a structured, sacred exchange. Eighty humans. Each, in turn, in the center. Each, in turn, named.
This is the part of the retreat where I lost my professional composure entirely. By the time my turn came I had already wept openly six or seven times that morning, watching strangers I had known for four days be witnessed in ways most of us are never witnessed by our own families. When my turn arrived and seventy-nine humans named me — slowly, accurately, generously — I was pulled apart and reassembled in a way that I am still, frankly, integrating.
You leave with a cohort that texts each other on birthdays. You leave with a cohort that will show up at your weddings and your funerals. You leave with a body that has remembered itself. You leave with a daily embodiment practice that you will actually keep, because it is twelve minutes long and because you were given it by humans who you love. You leave with two integration calls scheduled, a 90-day plan, a Lila APP login, and the phone numbers of seventy-nine people who saw you.
I have never paid more for an experience. I have also never paid less, when you do the math the way it deserves to be done.