Sanity can be colorful, but never lurid or garish.

Sanity is quite fine.

Flowers are sane. Oranges are sane. Trees are some of the sanest things that exist outside of the ocean.

Lentils are sane. Sea foam is sane. The east-facing blaze of leaves on a spring morning is sane. Stormclouds are sane.

I don’t know where sanity comes from, but I know that when I say the words rightness or naturalness — the stillness that fills my chest is made of the same stuff as sanity.

Some books are sane, but only a few. Not, I might say, the ones you’d expect.

I have never met a sane person. Only sane moments.

Dandelions are sane. Lions destroy insanity — often creating it in order to destroy it.

Jaguars are a subtle sanity all their own.

I don’t have to list the things that are not sane. You know them. The derangement is everywhere, it is breathed and seen and mostly ignored. You eat the derangement and you watch the garish derangements flash by on your handheld derangement. We can leave these aside, please, just for now, just for once.

There’s a woman I love, and there are many parts of the situation that are not sane. I love some of those too. But in the moments when it’s just her heart feeling my heart — and my face seeing her face feeling my heart feeling her heart — that is made of the same stuff as sanity.

That zero field where reality can relax. Where efforting drops to zero. Where inflation and deflation are released, and the water level moves naturally to its resting place.

Exhale. Exhale. Do it again, as many times as you can, inhaling when it’s right. But this isn’t about the inhale. Exhale. Exhale. Let go. Are you sane now?

Feel your Life, while we’re here. Is it the life you want to be living? Does it move how it wants to move, go where it wants to go?

Is your Life sane?

Feel how you wake up each morning, what your first actions are. Feel what you eat for lunch, what you think about in the silent moments. Feel how you react to quiet. Feel the way you pay attention (or don’t) to people’s faces, their posture, their tone of voice.

Close your eyes and say to yourself: rightness. naturalness. sanity.

Let your Life respond to the words. Are they smooth? Are they painful? Do they shine a light on insanities, both petty and substantial?

Exhale, exhale, exhale again. Say to yourself: I am here. God is here. The Tao is here. I am seen, I am known, I am met.

Is your Life sane?

Warm water is sane. Moving water is sane. Still water is sane. Deep water is sane.

Sometimes, before falling asleep, you half-dream of colors. The colors come from somewhere else, or from a Here much deeper than your usual Here. Those half-dreamed colors are sane.

Medjool dates are insanely delicious — but they are, in fact, sane.

Many (though not most) croissants are sane.

Wooden shrines are sane. I have read many sane haikus. Silk was sane, once. The smell of snow is sane.

Sanity is not timid or over-careful. There is a fullness to sanity, a dynamism within its stillness. Lightning is sane. Running all-out across dirt and grass is sane. Jaguars, I read somewhere, are a subtle sanity all their own.

Wind is sane.

I hesitate to talk about the sanity and insanity of sex, but there is much sane sex to be had. It does not come naturally or automatically, for almost any of us these days, but sane sex truly is possible.

The space six inches behind your spine is sane. The field of space fanning out above your head and shoulders is sane. Purple is sane.

When you become the Will of God, you are a sanity. When you listen to the world-voice, without needing it to say anything particular — you have the opportunity to become sane. When a bird flies between you and the sun, its feathers illuminated and rendered into nature’s own stained glass mosaic — sanity has found you. You might sit with it a moment. You might desire to exhale.

Sun-bleached skulls are sane. The roaring jewels of distant suns are sane.

Is your Life sane?

Eroded cliffs are sane. Ghee is sane. The love I feel for you when I write is sane.

I am not sane, but I am trying.

I am not sane, but I am trying.

I could be sane, so I am trying.

Is my Life sane?

I keep a neutral face when I am shocked by things that I know would be gaudy to be shocked by.

Something in me has, for a long time, not believed that people actually watch short-form video. Every time a friend tells me about a tik tok or a reel or a youtube short that they saw, I hide a flash of surprise. I cannot tell if I am sane or pretentious or just out of touch, or if there’s room for all of them.

Is my Life sane?

Half a year ago, at 3 in the morning, after exhausting hours of processing, a woman sat on a couch across from me, not looking me in the eyes, and told me “The way you live isn’t sane, people can’t live like that. No one can actually live like that. No one can actually live like that.”

Two months after that, another woman told me I was one of the few sane people she knew. I squinted at her, a befuddled question mark. “No no,” she clarified, “I mean The Real Sanity.”

A couple months after that, I called a friend and asked her to check if I was still sane. “The past couple years,” I told her, “they feel like someone should have intervened. What’s been happening to me? How did I end up sleeping under a mosquito net in Gujarat for months? Am I okay??”

“I think,” she said, “there’s something true here that you haven’t quite taken in yet. It’s not the only true thing here. But the distress feels like it’s about something real.”

Is my Life sane? Does my life force maintain its Natural Sanity, or does it move in derangement?

Can I trust my Life? This is maybe the question. Sanity is, I think, trustworthy. If the Life that animates me is sane, then I can trust it, no matter how insane things get or seem.

A phrase I picked up this year: “do it fully, and do it cleanly.”

That’s been a guiding light for me, lately. I’m good at doing things fully, but I stumble on doing them cleanly. I am not a tidy person. I am not detail-oriented. I am prone to inflation and vast sweeps that erase details. Those details matter. Small things matter. I am trying to learn this.

I am trying.

Sane. Sanitary. They share a root. In some way, to be sane is to be clean.

Sane. Sanus. The root means “Healthy, sound, everything in the right place.” In some way, to be sane is to be whole.

Do it fully, do it cleanly. Be whole; be clean.

I am not sane, but I am trying.

I have sanity — it’s just not evenly distributed. Not yet.

Process is sane. Companionship is sane. Ripples are sane.

Attempts are sane.

As usual, past-me seems to have beat me to the punch and had a good grip on whatever it is we’re doing:

I scrolled past something a couple weeks ago — I don’t want to pick on the specific example or offering, so I’ll just invent something close to it. It was a post that went something like this:

I think a year ago I would have scrolled past it without thinking anything of it. Even a couple months ago, I might not have given it a second thought. But this time, it gave me whiplash, some jarring sense of “what did I just read?”

A bit ago ago, I saw another public invite come through:

Stanza Two

Recently, I realized there’s a lot going on with my voice. Mostly preverbal trauma stuff I won’t bore you with — but I’ve been trying to work through it, in part, by learning to sing and use my voice more skillfully. It’s been fun.

One thing I’ve learned is that there is a youtube niche for everything I could imagine. A hundred different types and styles and attitudes for voice work — and a few dozen people in each niche trying desperately to rule it.

Most of the videos include the usual explicit plea — subscribe, hire me, buy my course, watch my videos — but I’ve increasingly noticed videos where that energy is present in every second, not just in the explicit parts. Even when they talk about singing, or give examples of techniques or exercises, there’s an undertaste that feels to me like please stay, please respond to this, am I doing this the right way? Do you feel like I’m worth your time, attention, and money yet? How about now?

Stanza Three

A lot of meditation retreats no longer make sense to me — or I guess they only make a particular kind of sense to me.

The idea, from where I stand right now, looks very strange:

• you gather together people who are interested in meditation, inner work, transformation

• you convince them to take significant time out of their busy schedules, and to put their limited personal and financial resources towards this opportunity

• You bring all of them together in a space, and… you use that opportunity to have them sit still in a big room together. And/or listen to someone at the front of the room talk for awhile.

That feels… lightly psychotic, to me? Or something? That is extremely not the highest-leverage way to use a situation like that.

Eg- The amount of relational awakening work that can occur in a situation where interested people are gathered together is huge. And it’s work that often can’t happen in other contexts, when the practitioners are alone, or off in daily life needing to hold themselves together, or are mostly interacting with people who can’t (or just haven’t agreed to) hold that type of interaction. Getting these people together makes that work possible, and that work is incredibly high leverage when done right.

Sitting in a room breathing together, on the other hand… there’s value there, above and beyond what you could get out of the same meditation hours at home. For many people, at least. But the difference between the value of doing it at home and the value of doing it on retreat is a smaller gap.

I look at the situation and feel like I’m going a little crazy — until I remember the economics. It’s terribly hard to screen a retreat for people who can handle and be trusted for that type of deep, high-leverage relational inner work. And when you do screen, you by necessity are reducing the number of tickets you can sell.

You know what you don’t have to screen for? What basically anyone off the street who agrees to it can be trusted with? Listening to a talk and sitting still in the dharma hall during meditation hours.

It makes me sad, a little bit — the understandable necessity of watering down what’s possible because the economics don’t support it.

Because — under the reigning physics we’ve chosen to live in — it’s easier for mediocre things to thrive than it is for great things to survive.

Stanza Four

Since last year, I’ve been attending my friend Rosa's retreats. I won’t try to describe them here, and I’ve tried to express parts of them elsewhere. The important part here is that they don’t tend to look like other retreats I’ve been to or heard about. People are invited individually, and are both trusted and expected to hold themselves and others well, even in difficult practice, even in triggers; everyone has meditation experience and a strong inner work practice, but we don’t spend practice time sitting silently together to follow the breath.

And importantly, the retreats are non-transactional. We put together a fund to cover the initial costs of running the retreats. That way, at the end of the retreat, we simply share what everything cost, and invite people to freely give whatever feels right and good to them. (And somehow, this has generally worked out for refilling the coffers and covering expenses — not by efficient pricing, but by letting everyone know all the information.)

The feedback since we started doing this has been pretty consistent — the retreats don’t feel like An Event™ that people have to pay to attend. They feel like an insanely fruitful hangout with friends, old and new, where everyone can contribute to making them happen. We cook together, run practices together, share our 1-on-1 work freely with each other — and at the end, we get to see what we can contribute that would allow this to keep happening in the future, for ourselves and others. And everyone gives what they can.

I’m not sure I can describe the way that it feels like being invited into a different physics around value, friendship on the path, and non-transactionality. It’s really beautiful.

And it seems to have made me increasingly sad about and allergic to things like sacred water ceremonies with a ticket price, or artist accountability groups with a subscription fee.

Stanza Five

I’ve been toying with my 1-on-1 work for awhile, especially the payment structure. My mainstay for awhile has been “stewardship-based pricing.” The core question goes “what can you pay that would help you take this work seriously and really Show Up for it?”

It’s felt much better than other payment structures I’ve used before. And for right now, even this one feels like it needs to step back.

For now, I seem to only be doing 1-on-1 work in situations where a couple things are true:

• I feel connected not just to them, but to the process that’s unfolding with them; there’s some intuition that it’s right for me to be involved in their process.

• I trust that they and I can find some mutual stewardship — I’ll meet them and take care of them as best as I’m able, and they’ll meet me and take care of me as best as they’re able. (In some cases that means a client will feel best agreeing to an hourly fee — in some cases it means they’ll offer to get me a plane ticket I need with some airline miles they have — in some cases it means they let me stay at their apartment while I’m in town — in some cases it means they give me a grant to keep doing my work and my writing — in some cases it means I can call on them for help with some field they have expertise in… whatever it means in the moment)

• I want to never feel like I’m in the session primarily because there’s money or help I can get out of it. I want to feel deeply that I’d be there in their process even if I knew I’d never get anything back from it.

I’m not sure this is entirely sustainable. …But I’m also not convinced that it isn’t.

There’s some default attitude around things like this, “that sounds nice, I’m glad you have ideals — it’ll be sad when you inevitably have to come back to reality and make the same tradeoffs as the rest of us.”

Which is maybe correct. I’d say it’s kinda likely. I don’t think one person, or a handful of people can just hold and propagate a different physics of non-transactional care while the rest of the world exists in an incumbent physics that’s actively hostile to it and dismissive of it.

But I also feel a lot of hunger out there for a different money-physics. I think people are absolutely terrified to step into the uncertainty of this type of thing (I know it’s quite scary for me, and I seem to be pretty far on the spectrum of people it’s less terrifying for), but there’s also a gleam in their eye when they hear about it, when they talk about it, when they feel its possibility.

The usual thing we’re doing doesn’t work, is the feeling I get from most people I interact with. It’s a value-physics that eats away at human connection, at the pursuit of excellence, at the enjoyment of what we love, at the pleasure of being alive and following the work we feel called to do.

And everyone seems to feel that it’s inevitable that we stay where we are — like this reigning value-physics is a fact of the universe, rather than something that took over in the past couple centuries and acceleratingly intensified over the past few decades.

But it’s really not inevitable. We can change the physics if and when we need to — it’s more a matter of not Just Waiting for it to Just Happen. You have to feel the world that wants to exist in you, and you have to become it. Even (especially) when doing so is completely impossible.

Stanza Six

In general, it’s better to have a bunch of different bacteria species in your gut biome. Things go better that way, the more diversified it is. There are balances to be kept there, but the more diversity of bacteria you’ve got, the better that balance is able to regulate itself.

It’s similar with plants — monocropping a single plant over and over again destroys the soil, makes for lower quality plants, and destroys the human meaningfulness in growing living things. There’s a lifelessness to it. Mixed plant environments do much better, and are more highly productive — they’re more alive, in just about every sense that matters.

Animals too. When too many species disappear from an environment, the whole thing starts to go downhill. There’s a role for everything, in a world of complex dynamic living processes — and just about everything in the world is complex dynamic living processes.

James Hillman writes a fair bit about how the monotheistic impulse got smuggled into domain after domain in modern culture. Some root-level reductionist impulse, like if we can narrow everything down to the single factor that matters, and hit that button harder and harder, over and over, everything will get better. Our businesses and medical systems and governments and relationships and just about everything else — they’re all, to some degree or other, entangled with that assumption.

I don’t think there’s a non-transactional value-physics that should take over and become the One True Mode. I think it’s something that needs to exist among a diversified field of other value-physics and reality-settings. A thousand different interwoven value-worlds, with a thousand different versions of what feels Right and Obvious — this larger system needs all of it to flourish.

That said — I really like the one I’m carrying. I’d like more people here to play around and experiment in it with. It’s a fruitful little jungle to explore.

Stanza Seven

I get equal measures inspired and terrified when I feel into all this.

I’d like to have a life that feels really good. Part of that does mean I’d like to have the resources to take care of my medical needs, my housing needs, my personal needs — I’d like it to feel easeful to provide for a wife, a family, a community, in whatever ways I can, including personal, financial, and spiritual care. And I’d like to be able to stay in my felt-sense of integrity while making all of that possible.

My gut feeling is that this is possible. That it might not look recognizable, from either the outside or the inside, and that it takes a certain amount of dedication, ferocity, trust, surrender, acuity, and skill. But that it is possible.

I’m drawn to the combination of ferocity and surrender, in that list. Or maybe ferocity and trust feels closer to the marrow. It isn’t “trust but verify,” — it’s a deep, tectonic trust that includes deeply trusting the fire and desire that come through when I’m outside of grasping and craving.

Ungrasping desire is a very strange and powerful animal. Trusting it may not come easy.

I don’t think I need it to be easy.

There was a version of this on twitter, back in the day — I noticed that certain thoughts didn’t feel like they fit in the medium. And then my thoughts and patterns started to bend or tend towards things that could be expressed and appreciated in that format.

My brain got more tweet-shaped.

The twitter-addiction dropped away last autumn, and now, my brain hasn’t quite gotten more substack-shaped, but my sense of what meets the criteria to share with the world has taken on a substack-shape bias. Which is feeling a lil bloated and stagnant and icky.

And of course, there are incentives, then and now, to stay on the public forum, the place where my work can be seen, where it plugs neatly into the gears of the attention economy where my money comes from.

Okay, so maybe I’ve been using the “it’s good to stay on substack because attention economy” thing as an excuse. Or it’s just a sticky habitual thought I hadn’t had the chance to unstick until now.

Either way. Hm.

Over the years, there were a lot of things I wanted to write or express — but when I felt into a tweet, the thing didn’t belong there.

And now when that happens, and I feel into substack, it feels like my brain tries to bend them into a piece about it — or an essay or something.

There’s a specific shape to it. Like I have to make sure it has a point, that it’s something interesting and actionable and that takes ~5-12 minutes to read.

Which is very much self-imposed, I realize. But something about the format I’ve fallen into here does this to me.

For example, a thing that’s been awake for me lately,

That’s it. Fairly simple thought. Even here, I over-belabored it, I could do it much shorter. There’s not much need to bring Jung or Rosa into it — that feels like part of the substack-y, audience-seek-y urge. This whole “look, other people think this too, I have quotes to show you!” thing. It wants to prefabricate validation in me so that the energetic validation lands in you or something.

When I’ve felt the urge to share that over the past weeks, I felt the idea inflating, puffing up, squiggling its shape around in a blobby way, trying to take in other avenues, other thinkers, more steadfast conclusions… I felt it trying to become more substack-shaped, in a particular template that I seem to have taken on in my head.

And when that happened, I just got slightly exhausted and decided not to write about it at all.

I don’t wanna self-flagellate here; I’ve done a lot of work I’m proud of, I like the person I’ve become and the integrity that’s gotten me where I am. But I do want to wrangle a bit with the way that same integrity seems to be making me dissatisfied with the whole set-up I’ve been living with up until now.

This feels related: in one of my journals, I’ve been keeping a running tally of something. I might describe it as “Qualities of the World I Can’t Live in Anymore.”

Over the past couple years, everything in my life has changed, mostly by falling apart and breaking down. And things are just now starting to show signs of rebuilding… but it’s like they have to rebuild with an entirely new physics. I’ve either abdicated from or been kicked out of the standard world that my life was built on before. Just as a taster of some of the relevant pieces from that list (the whole thing would take many pages and be its own whole piece):

Things like this have made it harder and weirder than I would have expected to start rebuilding a life. Those are just a small smattering of the more visible ones, and already, they form the outline of a life-shape that doesn’t fit into the world as I’ve known it most of my life.

I think it will take some time to build and grow the world where my life-shape can exist or flourish. To be fair, I seem to have been working this problem over and over again for a long time, giving myself groundwork for the new physics my life is governed by:

• A recent stint of working through the ways money feels to me lately,

• Some writing both about and from a stance of engaged wholeness that seems like the only way I can live without stepping out of the sacredness of experience.

• The outlines of what connection and relationship feel like to me when they’re nourishing (and when they’re not).

• Exploring non-transactional, non-fixated ways of being where I can show up as I am, in integrity, without agendas, and trust that what needs to happen will happen.

It’s all coming through. It’s just been — well, I want to say it’s been very slow, but it may only have felt slow from the inside. Looking at it from the outside, it does seem like an astounding amount has moved in 2 years.

And where I’m at now, what seems to be moving is a lot of noticing that the way the world and I fit together right now Just Ain’t It.

My writing formats? Nope. My ways of making a living? Nope. Previous standards of home, stability, shelter? Nope. Incumbent habits on food, water, air, relationships, entertainment, and work? Nope.

Something else is going to grow in, I know it will. I can feel it already. I trust it. It’s just going to take some growing pains and some clumsiness and potentially some resource gaps. I get the image of tree roots needing to crack some concrete so they can grow right.

I just don’t get to live in the concrete world anymore, or at least not for now. Which is very inconvenient, when the whole world runs on concrete, and all the things I want to do only have playbooks for how to do them on concrete. But I think I signed up for this, this process of figuring everything out from scratch. How to both live in integrity and in a world where food, water, shelter, health, clothing, work, relationships, friendships, and stance towards reality all need to emerge from integrity, without necessarily falling into the attractor basins of incumbent templates.

And to do all this without it turning into a circus of mental gymnastics — some set of books I can write without living by them, or some talks I can give, consulting I can do without growing my own flesh into the shape of integrity first. It’s so, so, so easy to lean in that direction, to turn all of this into something to tell other people, rather than something that I can shape myself with day after day, without the validation and fanfare my cute lil mammal brain finds so yummy.

Yeah, the scarcity-fear brain is definitely kicking in again. It’s like my bank account is a physical limb I can feel withering.

Breathe through it buddy, you’ll be grand.

I’m not totally sure what style or format of writing would feel natural and well-aligned for me these days. It’s not the usual essays, it’s not this wandering notebook-style thing. It’s not tweets.

It feels like it’s not even quite non-fiction or fiction. Not quite poetry. Might not even be writing. Maybe I need to take up painting or music or something. Immersive theater pieces? Weird little short film artifacts? Month-long co-living retreats where life-as-attentive-pursuit-of-wholeness-in-expression becomes more and more total?

Or maybe just gardening. I could grow tulips. Dill. Watermelons.

Feels like I’ve got a book or two in me, but they’ll take more years to compost and become fertile. And they might not look like books by then. I maybe just have to feel them as book-shapes for now, so I can feel them at all.

This is clarifying, actually. All these attempts to guess at a structure or some recognizable shape that will emerge — they’re all driven by impatience, fear, scarcity. My job for now is to get as close to the heart of experience as I can — to do the mystic-y shaman-y soul-y thing of dissolving whatever’s between me and Essence, and marinating there — and to stay deeply sensitized to what wants to happen from there. And trust that what needs to happen will happen.

“God’s will is done, and we are the ones who must do it.”

At this exact moment, that means puzzling over whether I hit publish on this or not. Feels like I probably should, if only cuz it feels like showing this to other people would be a form of exposure that forces me to drop some bullshit.

I uh, didn’t know what to do with that question. So I replied “I uh, don’t know what to do with that question.”

I wasn’t being cute, I really had no idea. There’s something I’m doing all the time, but describing it as “thinking about god” felt wrong on just about every dimension.

I’m going to try to make some notes here on what that something I’m doing all the time is.

In The Kingkiller Chronicles, there’s a language where hand gestures carry a lot of meaning, alongside the spoken words. In tonal languages, the way your voice inflects a given vowel can dramatically change the meaning of a word. We could imagine a language where your vowel inflection, hand gestures, posture, facial cues, age, hair color, tattoos, and food choices all dramatically change the message you’re sending, along with any spoken words or verbalizations.

It starts to get overwhelming to imagine, how many things you’d have to be constantly aware of and accounting for, just to carry on a simple conversation.

Since working with my Ayurveda doctor, I’ve started to see the body as a language — or maybe more accurately, I’ve started to see that there’s a constant conversation happening between me and my body and the world, and I’ve started to recognize the language of that conversation.

It’s an incredibly complex language, consisting of

• all the signals I send my body (food, drink, medications, clothing & temperature regulation, activity levels, activity types, bed time, waking time, emotional habits…)

• all the signals my body sends me (discomfort, pain, digestive changes, the way things taste, sleep disruptions, tinnitus, body temperature, phlegm, ease, comfort, joy, sadness, anger, sudden memories, brain fog…)

• all the signals the environment sends me and my body (weather, overcrowding, flashing lights, overstimulation, sunlight, greenery, despair and chaos in the news, being surrounded by loving friends, honking trucks, blaring sirens…)

Everything that affects my body (which means everything that affects my experience of myself and the world, really) is a part of the conversation.

I don’t think any human can be said to be fluent in this language. But my doc Jess is about as close as it gets, and I benefit from her skill there. I recently had massive flares of alternating anger and despair, some of the strongest I’ve ever had — and Jess simply told me what processes were flooding my system, and pointed me at an herbal formulation to help clean up the waste from that underlying process. Within a day or two, the situation was under control, and I was back to feeling human again.

My experience of that situation, and many others like it, has been an experience of Jess facilitating a conversation with my body. We aren’t talking to my body in words or symbols, the way we’re used to thinking about language — but in functional herbs, habits, activities, and the like.

It’s an incredibly effective language. Every time I learn a little more how to engage in the conversation, my life gets a little better, and I get a little clearer of an idea of what reality is like in my body.

That wasn’t a digression from my notes on prayer. In a lot of ways, that’s the core of it.

Imagine a conversation that includes everything. Everything.

It includes all the body stuff I mentioned above, and also includes all your thoughts, words, actions, intuitions, senses, feelings, skills, imbalances, relationships, memories…

It includes families, nations, scientific advances, technological missteps, ecological destruction, pollution, relational poisoning, intergenerational propaganda, the mammal-deep love that drives the species, political insanity, civic responsibility…

It includes the void that underlies reality, the will of god that courses through your cells, the impulse to realize love, the clarity of awakening, the delusion of all the human games, synchronicities, state changes, chance meetings…

Everything. This conversation includes everything.

You are never not speaking this language. No matter how awake or how constricted your awareness is at a given moment, you’re always a part of this conversation. Your every action, every thought, every un-noticed background intuition is always both listening and speaking into this infinitely complex conversation, this Ayurveda of Reality, this navigational metis of Being.

I think this happens in a lot of domains, but I notice it most in spirituality and inner work: people seem to have some sense that there’s a right way to do things. That if they align themselves correctly towards highest spiritual good, it’s going to look a certain way.

This often feels pretty antiseptic to me. A bit neutered. We try to snip off our problematic bits in favor of some Pollyanna vision of bALaNcE or WhOLeNeSs; some soft-voiced, slow-blinking, steady-as-she-goes demeanor. I get the image of fabric softener pouring gently down the drain. Someone recently taught me the term spiritual casualties.

In my view, the whole of reality balances in the aggregate — but in its particulars, each of us is the embodiment of a very particular type of imbalance that’s been given us to steward. We each have our own unique flavor that we’re meant to hone and express in the world.

(Which isn’t an excuse to simply never change or grow up or clean up — there are integrated and un-integrated versions of the imbalances that each of us steward. The honing is so much of the work.)

To each of us, different aspects of experience feel salient and important. Each of us notices reality in a slightly different way. Slightly different things seem relevant or possible to us.

For example: if you can see something that no one else can see, that’s a sign that it’s your duty to do something with it. You’re the one stewarding it — the fact that you can see it and feel something about it is part of the conversation with reality, and the message is usually pretty clear.

We might say that every person walks through the world with a different instrument panel. Almost like every one of us is living inside the cockpit of our being, and we’re all looking at slightly different measurements for slightly different aspects of reality.

And, importantly, the specific instruments and measurements you’ve been given are an important message about which aspects of reality are yours to steward.

Phrased a little differently: your instrument panel is how you can listen to your conversation with Being — which determines how you can speak back.

How I Pray

So no, I’m not always thinking about god.

But I am almost always attuning very closely to the instrument panel, and to what its readings ask of me.

I am almost always listening to the Ayurvedic conversation with reality, and doing my best to speak back in the language of my stances, actions, and ways of Being.

I am almost always returning to (and forgetting and returning to) a “presence and continuous alertness” where I can be “always aware of the whole without excluding anything.”

I am almost always putting my awareness towards the way I make myself wrong, fog up my own instrument panel, assume that I need to be more like someone else, or more balanced or less myself — and attempting to scrub away those self-neutering impulses, so I can more fully be my function in Reality.

I am almost always aiming to become the Will of god.

I am almost always cultivating my own definition of agency.

`

I don’t pray in English. I pray in the multidimensional language Reality can hear and respond to.

I don’t pray to ask for things. I pray as a gift to god, or Reality, or Wholeness, or—

My prayer isn’t one-way: I pray to god and god prays to me, and we listen to each other and make whatever beauty and power we can out of the conversation.

I almost never think about god. But I’m almost always in conversation with god.

I realized after writing this that almost two years ago, I wrote this piece, “A Prayer”. Among the many ways that piece seems to have guided and scripted my life since then, it does seem that I have now stepped towards the mode of prayer I was looking for back then. Re-reading it feels incredibly strange, but I’ll take it.

“Until only that place remains.”

-

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Let’s run you through the retreat schedule. You haven’t really laid out the whole thing back to back before, so this should be interesting.

Pre-Retreat

On the day after Christmas 2023, you end up in the emergency room in Tirana, Albania. Your whole body shakes, you are filled with a sense of cosmic doom and oil-slick death moving through your tissues.

The doctors won’t be any help, but at least they have white coats and tell you to wait out the [serotonin syndrome? thyroid storm? pranic derangement?] — this bad trip that’s making you feel like hell is alive in the translucent squeaky folds of your brain and nerve tissue.

Pacing the hall with a heart rate of 170, you’ll take consolation that at least the last few years of meditation have given you the ability to both dwell within a horrifying panic attack, and to have spaciousness around it, so that this vast claustrophobic dying isn’t the only thing present. There’s also a soft, blue-ish space surrounding the whole experience, holding it somehow. —Which doesn’t diminish the shimmering void-slime that’s cannibalizing your soft tissue and sanity, but it does keep you alive through it.

Over the next weeks, the body horror will increase in ways you can’t communicate. You’ll try, but. Nothing captures what it’s like, does it? It feels like you’re trapped in a chemical fire and the chemical fire is your bloodstream and there’s nowhere you can go to escape it. Not while you’re living in this body, anyways. You become slowly aware of the fact that if this continues beyond a certain time horizon, suicide becomes a question of when, not if. '

The chemical fire is alive and alien and has goals you aren’t even capable of perceiving. It is a wildcat dragon made of hell and worms and bad mutation. It is a sentient realm where reptiles go when they die of heartbreak. It is twelve eldritch god-demons vivisected together and fed a diet of liquefied Van Gogh nightmares. It is an ocean of satan’s electric piss, and god is slitting gills into your throat so you can breathe its fetid heat.

You’re veering into gross-out zine territory, but there aren’t many other registers that can capture what this was like.

You and your girlfriend have lived together for 5 years; she moves out during this period, into her own apartment. Who could blame her. If you could stop spending time in a room with yourself, you would too. Now you have plenty of time to contemplate the hell realm that is your body. You faint a few times. Your body temperature behaves erratically.

At one point, you have to narrate your intentions aloud to yourself so you can hear them and remember if you lose track. “Go downstairs. Find taxi. Emergency room. Downstairs. Taxi. Emergency room. Downstairs, taxi, emergency room.”

The taxi driver seems bewildered at your repetition, but he does get you to the emergency room in record time. By the time a doctor can see you, your body has normalized, and they treat you like you’re an idiot for wasting their time. Before leaving, you sit on the floor and cry in the airlock between automatic doors.

A week after she moves out, you wake up at 11:45pm, February 6, deaf in your right ear and with the loudest roaring tinnitus you’ve ever heard. Your left ear has something wrong with it you can’t describe, like it’s open and you can clearly hear everything that happens inside your skull. (The doctors will soon teach you the word patulous.)

You’ll go to the hospital. They will be useless again. They will run the wrong blood tests. They will find out from those wrong blood tests that you have Hashimoto’s disease, and will invite you back tomorrow for more scans. They want to see how much damage your thyroid has taken, and also want to scan you for a brain tumor, in case that’s what’s pressing on your ear.

The openness in your left ear will go away after a few hours. The partial deafness and roaring tinnitus have never gone away, even two years later while you type this.

The ultrasound tech is a comic genius. She shows you your thyroid, and said “see this little grey streak right here?”

You nod, “yeah, is that a problem?”

She gives you a look, “No, that’s the good part. All of it should look like that.”

Looking back on it, the laugh track is almost audible. Ba dum tss.

With ultrasound gel on your throat, you break down crying.

In the hallway, your girlfriend is waiting for you with some chicken and sweet potatoes she baked for your long day of scans. You eat it with your hands and sob a little in the hard plastic seat.

You don’t have a brain tumor, so that’s nice.

Your hands and arms look like you’re dying of something. Throughout the day, they’ve drawn blood twice, hooked you up to three IVs, and injected tracking fluid into you for the MRI. You don’t have a vein in either elbow, forearm, or hand that hasn’t been pierced and bruised. It feels like you’ve entered into another world, the world of The Sick.

You have. You’ll learn to live there.

“It feels,” you’ll muse on a call the next year, “like I’ve been tasked with living joyfully in hell.”

Let’s scrub ahead a bit. Western medicine is famously inept with chronic illness and autoimmune diseases; you know this, your mother has had Hashimoto’s Disease your whole life, so you kind of know the drill.

Someone introduces you to an Ayurvedic doctor, and this woman gets you stabilized and on your feet in a month or two, something no doctors have really managed to do for your mom in the last 3 decades. You decide to trust this Ayurveda thing until you find a good reason not to.

Your girlfriend breaks up with you, finally, as soon as you’ve stabilized. You’re sad, for a couple weeks, but mostly grateful. Your self-worth has never been lower, and you know you wouldn’t have had the courage to break up with her. It needed to end, so you’re relieved she took the initiative — but still though.

She keeps the cats, which feels right, but also heavy. Out of the many difficult things in the months and years to follow, losing the cats is one that sits heavy the longest.

You’re invited to Portugal for a month-long co-working event with twitter friends.

This, River, is where the endless retreat begins.

Portal (Porto, Portugal)

Everyone is supposed to bring a project to Portal. The hosts have gotten a shared house for everyone to use as a co-working space, and the idea is to get together, chat, cross-pollinate, and activate the social fabric.

You don’t even bother pretending to bring a project. You’ve been to a 2-month twitter co-working event the year before, in Berlin. Little to no work got done there. It turned into everyone just hanging out. Someone coined the term interpersonal microwave to describe the vibe there, like the event space was a microwave and all of you were forks. You all just buzzed against each other and got fried. Sometimes pleasantly so, sometimes not.

By the end of Portal, the term has been adopted. This is just a thing that happens when twitter friends gather, it seems.

You get a crush on a girl. It doesn’t go well.

You get a crush on another girl for about an hour before she leaves. You’re glad she’s going early — you couldn’t handle two of these at the same time. (A third girl was supposed to show up but never actually arrived at the event. You’ll meet her next year and get a crush on her too.) …Working on limerence and attachment stuff is going to be… a thing. For kinda the whole duration of the retreat. Good luck with that.

Walking back up the stairs from your chat with Leona, the girl who’s leaving, an intrusive thought hits you so suddenly that you stop in your tracks, still gripping the banister: damn, I’d let that girl ruin my life.

What a strange thought, you’ll think to yourself. It doesn’t feel in the least like foreshadowing.

You write some poems while you’re in Porto. It seems like the thing to do, lately.

The sheen of obsidian,
Lodged obscenely in the yellowed
Bone under museum lights.

Every shattered shadow glistens.
“This too was mission.”
That, too, was Mission.

You’ll keep writing poems, almost obsessively, over the next couple years. You never quite know why. It’s not a thing you usually do. And yet.

In Porto, you keep learning about this new realm you’ve become a citizen of, the land of The Sick.

In The Sickness, it takes adjustments to stop fainting. Sometimes you stand up too fast, and your vision goes black, your mind disappears, vertigo swarms you. You get good at collapsing to the ground in a way that avoids head injury. It’s all about collapsing vertically, like when they demolish a grain silo, not horizontally, like when they fell a tree.

It’s fascinating, the fainting. You’ll revel in it later, in your months at the hospital in Delhi. The way that your entire mind goes offline, and then starts to slowly fade back in with your vision.

When things go black, you get to find out afresh who you are, where you are, what your personality is like. When the parts of your personality come online again, you marvel at them like little clockwork mechanisms. The order they come back in is always strange and surprising. Sometimes there are teenage parts that pop up, processes you thought had faded out years ago, but it turns out they’re still in there, just covered up by newer processes and habits.

Every time, there’s a moment of confusion. You remember that you’re American — but then start to get confused: Why are so many of my memories from Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Albania? You get to find out again that you left your home country after college and have been out and about ever since.

Twice during Portal, you collapse in tears, chanting “I’m so sick of being sick, I’m so sick of being sick” over and over again. This will feel odd to look back on later. (When writing about it two years later, for example.) From the later perspective, things had barely begun yet; and somehow you were already in despair about how long it had been going on? Chin up buddy. Save some desperation for later.

Portal is mostly uneventful, aside from surfacing your anxious attachment stuff, acquainting you more deeply with The Sickness, and giving you a place to be surrounded by friends, after what has been an extremely difficult few months.

But surely now the hard times are over.

Integration (Albania)

You go back to Albania, bringing with you a friend from Portal. He stays with you while you pack up your apartment and get ready to leave the country for good.

It’s good to have him there. You get tattoos together, one afternoon. The two of you have fallen out of contact since, and you feel bad about it. You hope as you type this that if he’s reading it, he reads further and can forgive this fact. That he sees how little space you’ve had to do anything but put one foot in front of the other for a long time.

After that first retreat, a relaxed little taste of retreat life, you’ll use this time to integrate and look forward.

You start texting a girl. She seems nice. It turns out you’re both going to an event in Germany next month. It seems nice. You decide to share a room there. Seems nice.

Before Germany, you’re preparing to go to France. Some friends got some space at a farm house east of Bordeaux, and they invited you to come for a week to share mystical practice with them. You instantly say yes. You love them, and you want to be around people. Especially these people.

At the time, you don’t yet know how many more memories will center on that farmhouse in the next couple years. Feeling through the space now, you realize just how many charged memories have taken place there. Your life has changed multiple times, in the gravel parking area of that house. We’ll come back to that.

The morning before you leave, something strange happens. You’re making your morning coffee, and when you turn around, you see Kali in the hallway, staring you down.

You aren’t quite having visual hallucinations, it’s not exactly like that. It’s more like dream-perception has leaked out into your waking life. But there’s no hint of imagination in it — no slowly stitching together of an imagined image. It’s like turning around and seeing someone you didn’t know was there. They’re simply there, existing, solid. Kali was simply there, existing, solid.

She has you put down the coffee maker and sit in a chair. There are some vows you need to take, and you’re going to have to be quite careful with them, so it’s best to take your time with it.

Two years later, you can’t talk about what happened there. It seems iffy to even mention the episode. Like it’s not sure if it wants you to talk about it. It’s probably okay, because most people will think that it’s some kind of magical realist embellishment. Or a hallucination. Or a side effect of The Sickness. Or exaggeration. Or a straight up lie. They won’t take it seriously, so it seems fine to talk about. You’ll learn a lot about camouflage over the next couple years.

Your friend calls you a few hours later, one of the friends who will be at the farm house with you. “It’s the strangest thing,” she tells you, “I was up all night in Shiva consciousness. I was looking at my husband, and knowing, feeling directly, that he is me and I am him and we’re both the house and the trees and the whole universe, it’s all the same thing, and I am that thing.”

While she tells this story, you’re in agony. You do the time zone math, and she was going through this at the same time as your morning coffee. You can feel Shiva through the phone line, vibrating against Kali in your memory, and your body is tearing apart. You collapse to the floor sobbing, screeching, heaving, hyperventilating. It’s like your body has been jammed full of one of those shoe-stretching devices, like there’s some frequency here stretching your body, stretching your soul to a breaking point.

Your friend doesn’t miss a beat, god bless her. “It’s okay River, I’m here. You’re okay. I love you, River, we all love you. You’ll be okay.”

That was the moment, the exit ramp. It’s the only time in your (you hate this term, but here we are) spiritual journey where you would gladly have stopped. If there had been a lever to pull and exit the path right then, right there, you would have pulled it. Dark goddesses in your kitchen, chronic diseases in your bloodstream, Shiva on the phone, ripping your body apart. It’s all too much. You don’t want this. No one wants this. People who think they want it have no idea what it actually is.

But what could you do? You’ve given up this apartment, sold most of what you owned, packed the rest up in your suitcase. The taxi to the airport is booked for 5am. You have your plane ticket to France, where you’ll spend a week in spiritual practice and connection.

It’s clever, this universe. It will give you the moment, the consent-check: “are you going to keep going? You can totally step off the ride here if you need to.” But the check-in comes at the exact moment when there’s no actual choice of stepping off.

There’s a cunning here. It makes you uncomfortable. It’s a vicious thing, the intelligence of Being. This great camouflaged beast we live within.

You don’t take the exit ramp. You wake up at 4:30am and drag your bags down to the street. You watch the mountains roll by on the way to the airport.

heavy metals light as air,
mountains shrouded;
storms will clean the peaks.

storms always soothe
a polluted nature.

France

On the first day in France, you aren’t miserable. You aren’t overcome with visions. You eat food and wander the country roads and think “wow, what a relief.”

On the second day, you aren’t miserable, you aren’t overcome with visions. You think “Boring… let’s get back to it.”

You’re upset and startled by your own response. So much of you just wants a calm, easy life. You want to meet up with the girl you’re texting, have a nice time, stabilize your medical issues, find a new apartment. Normal stuff. But you can feel the edges of the part of you that isn’t going to allow normal stuff.

Mostly, it’s just nice to be around friends. This is your first time meeting Cheryl in person, only your second time meeting Rosa in person — you’ve had calls with both of them for years, and now here they are. And getting to know everyone else is a treat as well.

In one of the sessions, you encounter some deep streak of cruelty in the structure of the universe. You collapse entirely, sobbing in terror, and Rosa has to step aside with you to bring you back down to earth. You learn a valuable lesson there: it’s all just the time knife. No matter how big and scary and weird things get — none of it is that big of a deal. It’s all just big and weird and it’s fine.

You’ll need that lesson for the rest of the retreat, hold onto it.

Tree Week (Germany)

One week in a house with twitter people, a few hours north of Berlin. You prefer small events, and this one is well past your upper limit — around 70 people or so — but your friends are coming and there’s a girl who wants to share a room with you, so.

It’s gonna be a weird week. In the first day or two of the event, you meet someone else, she meets someone else, it all gets messy.

But you’re glad you came.

On the first night, Leona from Portal pulls you aside for a long chat in a side room. She suggests the two of you go out to the woods the next day to try some energy body meditation stuff, since your energies seem to interact oddly every time you meet. You hadn’t noticed this — or rather, hadn’t suspected it was mutual.

You find a circle of tree trunks in the woods the next day, and you sit down together, take a few breaths, and begin eye gazing. Reality breaks down pretty quickly. (You’re gonna need to get used to reality breaking down in sudden bursts; very relevant skill set from now on.)

Over the next couple days of practice with each other, you watch cosmic flames pour out of her eyes, you listen while she opens her mouth a split second before you to say exactly what you were going to say, over and over again. You go blind for ten minutes, and then her face reappears in the center of the blackness, with a shifting parade of goddesses passing over it, each one asking for your consent — you don’t know what the consent is for, but saying no doesn’t seem like an option.

You won’t be able to explain for another year just what the combination of the France retreat and these meditation sessions did for you, how they shifted your center of gravity, but you can feel the effects immediately. There are aspects of reality and of other people that you’ve always had to ignore, or to apologize for noticing. You’ve spent your whole life pretending they aren’t there, so you can get by without rocking the boat.

At the France retreat, and now more strongly in the German forest, you’re getting un-ignorable proof that other people can see and sense this stuff too. That you don’t have to hide your perception of reality, if you have the right people around.

It’s like you’ve lived your whole life walking around seeing blue vapor drifting by everything, but you pick up from context clues that no one else sees it and it’s bad to talk about it. Then someone walks up to you on a street corner and says “the blue vapor sure is thick today, isn’t it? even thicker than the yellow vapor.”

You look around in shock — someone else sees it too? And somehow you also start to notice that yes, of course, there’s also yellow vapor mixed in there. How’d you not notice that before?

Vienna

After Tree Week ends, Tasshin invites you to come see him in Vienna. You’re rarely on the same continent, so it would be nice to meet up again. He’s staying at the apartment of someone you met at Tree Week, and she’s happy for you to stay there too. So of course you go. You have time to kill while waiting for your visa to India, where you’re going for Ayurvedic treatment.

It’s going to get very bad very soon, but for now, you’ve got an apartment near the park in Vienna, it’s a gorgeous autumn, and you’re hanging out with a friend you don’t get to see often.

You pick a tree in the park to meditate with every day. This seems to move a lot of stuff, and the visions get stronger. One day, you’re given two phrases; they drop into your head with all the force and gravity of a neutron star — Wake the gods and Make whole the Goddess.

You don’t understand them, but they feel right. You won’t even begin to understand them for another year or so, not really. For now, you sit on a park bench, watch the people stroll by. The wind sets itself on fire to speak to you:

Every person you see has gods sleeping inside them. The way they think of spirituality, psychology, emotions, material goods — they use all of it to keep things calm, defang pain; to lull the gods to sleep and make sure they stay that way.

You can’t let them. The gods need to wake up. The ecosystem is severely unbalanced, and waking up more gods is the only thing that might help, kind of like re-introducing wolves to Yellowstone.

From an external view, it’s a very uneventful month in Vienna. On a typical day, you might wake up, get a chai and go for a walk, meditate with your tree, and sit by the pond until lunch, watching the ducks. You might get lunch, have a couple calls, work on a puzzle, walk around, get dinner, and wind down for bed.

Pretty idyllic, especially in the Viennese autumn. Just you and your long walks under the changing leaves.

Internally, it feels like continents are rearranging. This is, in fact, the subject of some visions that crop up around this time, the rearranging of continents.

Your autoimmune condition flares on and off, and one of the effects of Ayurvedic treatment is to surface a lot of old emotional material. You half joke to some friends that it feels like you have multiple personalities, the way that you don’t know what your mood or values or demeanor will be like from hour to hour. Meditation is getting into territory you’ve never seen before, along a few different dimensions. You start to joke that you’re not doing Deity Yoga practice, deities are doing You Yoga practice. It’s a bit exciting, a bit terrifying, all deeply confusing.

You pick apart an orange peel one morning and wonder if this is what going insane feels like from the inside. Seems entirely plausible, and you find the possibility less alarming than you’d expect. It mostly just feels like a soft, tender downer. This too feels strange. Like you should have a stronger reaction to the possibility of losing your mind.

Still — you’re in contact with friends and teachers, and share all this with them. They seem to feel that you’re doing fine, just going through an unstable period. If you’re going mad, you’re going mad in a similar way to mystics and shamans throughout history and around the world, so that’s some comfort, you guess.

Panchakarma 1 (New Delhi, India)

This part of the retreat is gonna get bad, sorry about that.

If you don’t know what Panchakarma is I can give you the basics of your schedule. You will spend 3 weeks in the Ayurvedic hospital in India. (I’m lying — you will spend a month there. [I’m lying again, it will be 55 days.] — These kinds of lies [or rather, this Patient Morale Management] seems to be a common part either of Ayurveda or of Indian social customs; hard to tell which. You can never fully get an answer on how long something will take, or how painful it will be.) The hope is to cleanse your body of built-up metabolic waste so that it can start re-aligning itself towards healthy functioning.

Snehapana is first. This means that you will spend 3 days (I’m lying, it will be 5 days) [that was also a lie, it will be 6 days] drinking increasing doses of medicated ghee. By day 4, you think they’re joking when they hand you a full glass of ghee at 5am and tell you to chug it in one gulp.

They are not joking.

The idea is to flood your tissue with fat so your cells expel old metabolic waste and junk they’ve been holding onto for years. Anything that’s water soluble would have already moved out with water, so the idea here is to get the grimy fat soluble stuff moving.

Vamana comes next. All this metabolic waste is driven towards the stomach, and then you spend the better part of a morning vomiting into a sink in a small room surrounded by 3 doctors and a dozen med school students. You suspect that they called everyone in to watch the foreigner try the most difficult procedure, see if the white boy can take it.

He can in fact take it. They give you milk to drink until your digestive system is full of it, and you can feel milk up to your throat. Then you vomit it up. Then fill up on milk again. Then vomit it up. Then they give you an herbal decoction to perform the same cycle 3 times. Finally, you get salt water and do 3 more rinses.

By the end of this, you are more animal than human. When a doctor tries to give you advice, you glare at him and hold your hand up in an unmistakable shut the fuck up gesture. The students gasp at your disrespect, and if you had the energy, you’d tell them to shut the fuck up too.

Snehapana round 2 comes next. Truly horrifying. I can’t describe to you how nauseous the vaguest whiff of ghee will make you by this point, but still you will have to chug a glass each morning, and then eat nothing all day until it has digested.

Virechana comes next. If vamana evacuates waste through the upward route, virechana takes it out via the downward route. If you catch my drift.

For most people, this comes out to about 6 or 8 hours staying close to the toilet, evacuating 10-15 times throughout the course of the day.

In your case, the doctors will get baffled after 10 hours when the big show still hasn’t started. Your guts will be in constant ache and the nausea will be truly unrelenting. This will go on for about 28 hours straight, by far the longest and most intense nausea of your life. But, hey, you get through it, your system is all squeaky clean and ready to go.

There’s more to the treatment, but you get the picture. It’s gonna be a 2 month hospital stay where your body and mind are under constant relentless duress. You will hold the record for longest panchakarma at the All India Institute of Ayurveda, so — that’s fun, be proud of that.

While this is all going on, you’re taking zoom calls because of course you are, you’re alone in India and you need your friends.

Something has shifted with Leona, on your calls. She’s still calling, still warm, but something’s different. You test the waters here and there, but feel like the signals are mixed. You can’t tell, with your body and mind in this state, if you’re over-interpreting or under-interpreting. Just set the whole question aside for now.

Ayurveda works on the emotional level as well as the physical, is another thing. All year, you’ve been having different emotions and memories and vague floating feelings coming up when you change diet, change formulations, change anything.

Time itself has turned into a soup, or a thick fog. One moment you’re 33 years old with friends in Germany, then suddenly you’re 13 years old and smelling the tile cleaner they used at the supermarket near your house in Michigan, surrounded by the echo-spacious sense of the high ceilings in American grocery stores. Then back to Germany.

At the hospital, this process steps up a notch. Every loss and heartbreak and frustration you’ve ever experienced seems to be waiting around every corner. Jokes a friend told you in high school, the way a pastor’s face would shift when he switched from The Law to The Gospel, the quality of sound in your grandmother’s living room — it all pops in unexpectedly, as if your entire mind and nervous system are purging chaos at the same time your body is.

At some point, someone listens to the story of your past year and asks you, a little reluctantly, “I don’t know if you do astrology at all, but do you know what Pluto is doing in your chart these days? I had a remarkably similar year awhile back, and it was timed exactly to a Pluto transit.”

You go check out your chart, and what you find is that Pluto is moving conjunct your natal Saturn — and that it started doing so almost exactly the day your girlfriend moved out, shortly after the emergency room adventure. Huh.

You’re not terribly into astrology but it does help you to have some structure to pin all your strange happenings and bad luck onto. You scroll ahead to see when this whole Pluto thing is done. What you find is that Pluto doesn’t even hit your Saturn directly for more than another year — February 19, 2026. And it doesn’t finally clear until almost 2028. You strap in.

By the end of panchakarma, your blood tests are back in healthy ranges, and you’re significantly more robust than you have been in a couple years. This will afford you to make some dumb decisions over the coming months without getting totally wrecked by them, which is new and exciting for you.

This process will bring your weight loss for the year to a total of 80 pounds, which is kind of insane. Seeing that number on the scale will make you realize just how traumatizing the past 12 months have been. Last year, you were in the hospital the day after Christmas; this year, you were in the Ayurveda hospital for Christmas; don’t tell anyone, but next year you will also be in a hospital for Christmas. Shh, it’s a surprise.

Recover (Chiang Mai, Thailand)

This is a pretty miserable period, we can mostly yada yada past it. You’ll spend a lot of time in yoga classes and qi gong classes and at saunas. You’ll eat your weight in Thai food. You’ll try to get back to the gym, hoping to undo the troubling muscle loss that’s happened over the past year — but you’ll mostly find that your body breaks down after a couple days of light exercise. This is dispiriting, but your doctors tell you this is part of the rasayana phase, the rebuild after the purge. Your body will be weak after purging, so you can’t ask too much of it. Please stop going to the gym. And maybe stop going to yoga.

You don’t stop going to yoga. One of the teachers is cute.

There’s an odd episode where you nearly run into an ex from your days in Korea at a festival up north in Chiang Dao, but it would take too long to tell here. One of the most baffling synchronicities of your life. You’ll see. It’s gonna be weird.

Leona has, by this time, let you know that she’s dating someone. She didn’t want to tell you while you were in the hospital, it would have felt like piling on while things were already brutal for you. You’re of the opinion that it was worse to let things float, but she’ll apologize for that miscalculation later. So you’re pretty generally heartbroken for a bit, wandering weak and purged and depleted around the streets of Chiang Mai. Like I said, fairly miserable period.

Somewhere in there, you decide to return to India for a tantra retreat. Not “incense and genital massage” tantra, and not “tummo and meditation tantra” — this one was more “increasingly elaborate fire rituals with a hermit sorcerer” tantra.

Tantra Retreat (India)

Honestly, this place will also break your view of reality and make you believe magic is more real than expected. And you’ll be pretty sure you’re not supposed to say much about it; odd stuff happens when you try to talk about it. Which is a shame, because you could easily fill an entire article this length with juicy details and get some cool mystical street cred. But in the end, you’ll have to settle for being a giant tease.

One detail that seems fine to give because it’s boring and hard is that at one point, you’ll have to chant a mantra non-stop without leaving your mat for 7 hours straight. It will suck.

You won’t return to this place — but you’ll be glad you came. It feels like whatever power this place has, it’s real but not yours. You belong to something else. But you’ll internalize some deep lessons about how energy functions, and about the trade-offs of transactional relationships with Reality.

Intermezzo

Let’s take a break, this has been a lot.

This first phase of the mega-retreat, taking a view of it now, seems to mostly have been about shaking things up. Your body collapses, your relationship collapses, you’re thrown out homeless onto the open road to drift country to country, continent to continent with a shifting cast of characters evoking a variety of heartbreaks, learning opportunities, new friendships, and a total breakdown of what you thought reality was like.

At every point along the way, you’d hoped it was almost over. Writing this a year later, you’re guessing you’re now like halfway through. It’s strange to look back at how exhausted you were, how weary you were even back then. Because right now, writing this, you are so much more weary than you could have imagined back then. You are writing this in India, after your second panchakarma, and you are so, so fucking weary and you just want to be on the other side of all this. But you also can see what has already changed in you, and you can start to sense what still needs to change. You wouldn’t trade any of it for the world, but also — maybe you would have? Maybe if you could go back in time and show, in a single moment, all of the pain and hurt and chaos to your past self, along with the fruits of knowledge, maturation, and general un-fucking of your system… maybe your past self would just look at the balance of those scales and go “actually, I’m good, count me out.”

Writing this now, you begin to suspect that this may be what that night before the France retreat was about. Maybe that phone call where you felt Shiva and Kali tearing you apart from the inside, filling you with too much too much too much — that moment that felt like an exit ramp opened up, and you were free to step away — maybe that’s what that was about.

And maybe that evening with Leona, when you went blind and saw goddesses wear her face while asking your consent for who-knows-what, one after the other — maybe that’s what that was about.

Do you, some future version of you, send back an exit ramp and a consent check for your past self? Do you, tricky devil, send them back to exactly the moments when you know there can be no other answer?

You’re getting more woo now, adding in time-traveling future selves. Let’s just stick to the retreat schedule, and move along to the next leg: the one-on-one dojos. Oh god, how are you gonna write about those?

I wrote this piece a couple months ago, January 2026. A lot has shifted since then, even in my view of some of the events told here, or of what I’d say about them. But I’m going to publish what I have from that bout of writing, and then continue to part 2 in a bit, when the urge to keep telling the story strikes again. For now, we’ll leave it here.

It’s like I was raised by birds. The humans left me out most nights in the sea wind, in the pines, in the moonlight. I was suckled by wolves, warmed by squirrels. An octopus roosted herself across my forehead to protect me. And the birds perched on my chest, on my belly, next to my head, sharing their songlines in tentative hope, the first language I knew.

My body was all wrong, of course; my existence was all wrong for it. I couldn’t sing birdsong, couldn’t run with the wolves, couldn’t twist and drift and hunt through the sea. I was unable to live the lives that were put in me by the creatures that raised me.

But those lives burned in me anyway, unlived, in many ways unlivable.

I could move towards them, let their life force animate my clumsy body and heart in new ways. It was always freeing and delicious, but always incredibly unsatisfactory, like I was expecting to soar but mostly just feeling the aerodynamics while I ran, feet slamming the earth over and over with all this mammal heft.

As a kid, I was especially sensitive to connection — I think uncommonly so — and there was very little connection available to me. I won’t recount the whole set of overlapping situations, but I seem to have been pretty lacking in touch, talk, emotional connection, and most of the other things that I could sense very acutely in their absence.

It’s like my sensitivity skipped an octave or something. Connection was so all-consuming and important, and so unavailable in the usual ways, that my connection-urge glitched past the sparse human level and into some non-human levels. My training in connection was mostly in non-human realms: the forest I grew up in, critters down in the marsh, the clouds, the trees, what I can only call the local spirits, though that term feels clumsy and ill-fitting. More like the quasi-visible personality-fragrances that Reality emanates through everything.

I also learned to connect to the non-human parts of humans, was how I seemed to get by. Something like archetypal sight, or feeling people’s Guides, or intuiting the possibilities inherent to the way someone is put together. I can’t quite describe how I saw (see) people, but it’s something like that.

I’m aware of my language leaning towards the romantic, but I mostly experience this whole thing a kind of dull pain.

I seem to connect to people on a level they don’t often connect on — but then I’m less able to connect on the usual, more squishy human levels. This becomes a problem, eventually. Sometimes it becomes an issue very quickly, sometimes it takes months, but it always becomes an issue. Especially when I meet another person who was raised by birds, another person who connects from the non-human parts.

You’d think we’d get along gangbusters, just hang out in the home realms and vibe together. Which we do. And it’s lovely. Truly, a top ten experience every time.

But we are all, in the end, humans. We have a bunch of squishy human stuff that’s hard to be with. And we usually both have massive gaps in our abilities to operate on those squishy human levels. And our gaps very often are different from one another, so we end up in very confusing (and sometimes damaging) situations. It sucks, to feel so so so at Home in a way I almost never get — and then to drop directly into a jagged, murky gap where neither of us seems to understand what’s happening or why it hurts so bad.

Mostly, it feels like being a kid who was raised by some motley collection of animals.

• When I try to connect with the other humans, nothing quite fits, nothing quite works.

• When I try to connect with the ‘animals’, I’m the wrong size and shape and arrangement of parts, and nothing quite works.

• When I try to connect with the other kids like me, they were raised by different ‘animals’, or have different understandings of what humans are like, and we end up biting and scratching each other, unsure if the other is playing or hateful or what’s going on.

I don’t know where to end this. Hope, despair, anger? It feels like I was dropped into a disturbing and painful situation without being asked about it, and I mostly just resent the whole thing. I often have a hard time seeing how it can change in a way that makes things meaningfully easier or smoother.

Part Two (Written in early April)

An astrologer looked at my chart a couple years ago and noted that I was born a week after one eclipse and a week before another one. When I asked what that meant, he replied “there’s no clearer way in which a person can be born between worlds.”

Which felt a little overdramatic, but I got the picture. It felt about right.

There’s a lot of blessings to being born between worlds, to being a human mammal raised by birds, by the many personalities of Reality. The blessings are mostly forced ones — things I’m glad to have once I have them, but that aren’t necessarily pleasant to get. They’re all born from pressure, from friction, from tectonic plates crashing and grating against one another. Desirable difficulty is still difficulty.

How do you hold squishy, tender, imperfect, often traumatized human relating in the same space as transpersonal, energetic, archetypal relating? It’s not easy. I’ve met very few people who can hold them both together. —I seem to be becoming someone who can hold them both together. It hasn’t been easy, and it looks like it’ll get harder again before it gets easier.

And yet. It does seem like I get the opportunity to develop those capacities. To fly with a bird’s-eye view while keeping my feet on the ground. And that’s a rare type of capacity to have. You don’t develop it unless you’re forced to.

I’m not sure if I’m making sense, or sounding entirely fae right now. This all feels pretty direct and practical to me, but I’m suddenly self-conscious that I’m just sounding like a flaky spirit-boi who got lost in the sauce. And maybe I am — but that’s not how it feels, and that’s not how things seem to be reflecting in my life. My relationships and decisions and life situations are getting more concrete, more direct, more challenging and into the nitty-gritty — and that’s all mostly coming from these kinds of realizations. From coming to grips with the way my system is set up, the shortcomings that are built into me, and the fact that both my shortcomings and strengths spring from roots that are difficult for many people to perceive, let alone relate to.

Or maybe I’m worried about nothing, and you’re reading this and thinking it sounds entirely reasonable and relatable. I have no idea.

I’m getting a bit better at having no idea. About a lot of stuff. I feel so clueless — it’s really quite astounding. Like being in the center of a gorgeous, all-encompassing ocean, no rescue in sight; just gorgeous, lethal barrenness.

It’s a scary thing, living between worlds. Most of you know that in your own ways, I’m pretty sure. When multiple worlds have a claim on you, they pinch and press and twist you, molding you into new shapes. The qualities of each world, and the relationships between them, become a determining factor in what type of being you become, what shape of creature you grow into. It’s not a thing to take lightly, or to ignore and hope it goes away.

There’s a deep, deep grief to recognizing and loving multiple worlds, while recognizing you can’t quite belong to any of them fully. It takes a lot of mourning, and that mourning is only really bearable and fruitful if you can also stay with the beauty and meaningfulness of each world — and of your own position between them. Of the process you’re subject to, the pain and fruitfulness of being sculpted and shaped in a way you would not have chosen for yourself.

I don’t know what I’m talking about — it’s really quite astounding.

I was raised by birds, and the beauty of that is really only matched by the grief of it, and the gorgeousness of that beauty-grief mixture is really only matched by the mournfulness of it.

Ignoring either side of this equation involves betraying the situation’s profound potency, and I feel unwilling to do that at this point.

I’m not sure if I’ll publish this. It feels like sharing a video of myself getting surgery or something. Which is maybe exactly why I should post it — when I only share the post-surgery reflections, it feels like I’m denying some part of the potency running through my process.

Or maybe like I’m propagating some wider, common denial of the pain that comes braided with these kinds of potencies.

And maybe I’m unwilling to do that at this point.

Rosa’s Mystic Retreats

I think a lot of us recognize that the world is in transition. The old world is dying, the new one is gestating, and it’s still uncertain if the new one is going to get strong enough to be born, or to be born in time. These things aren’t automatic. Developmental leaps fail all the time, when the nourishment, resourcing, and energy to make them happen just aren’t present.

For my money, Rosa’s retreats are one of the most powerful and practical places where the new world is taking shape and getting the nourishment it needs to spread.

This became clear to me in the last sequence, and I started a fund to keep the retreats running the way they need to be run — not as a way to make money, or even a place where money is a barrier to participation, but as a place with a pure mission to bring more awakening, fullness, cleanness, and integrity into the world, by cultivating them in people and in relationships that are fully dedicated to them.

I could write infinitely about these retreats. I just backspaced like 5 paragraphs of gushing about them, and now I’m not sure exactly what to say. I’ve written on these before, me and Rosa put together an article about the retreats after the two she ran last year. The title of that article points at a lot for me: When Heart Meets Mastery.

What feels important to me after finishing these most recent two retreats is that the proof of concept has gotten incredibly strong. A lot of the same people who came to the two retreats last year also showed up at these two. After last year’s retreats, feedback was often “this felt very transformative — we’ll see how it lands and integrates.”

Now, 6 months later, meeting some of the same people here, it’s been really touching to see what’s changed with everyone — and to anticipate seeing them again in 6 months, and see what’s shifted after this time.

Calling them “mystic” retreats might give some people the wrong idea — you might be picturing long meditation hours, sacred geometry, breathy voices and soft eyes, trying to bend spoons with your mind or something. These retreats aren’t about that. Some of the core values Rosa holds in the space are things like realness, naturalness, and a new favorite of mine: “If we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do it really Fully and really Cleanly.”

I can’t think of any other spaces that create the type of atmosphere that Rosa naturally, invisibly creates here. It’s a place where deep practitioners can show up and practice relational depth, sensitivity, and awakening with each other, in an environment that nourishes them, rather than constantly battering them. The image that keeps recurring is a port in a storm. The world isn’t particularly kind or generous for people who value depth, sincerity, sensitivity, integrity, and the like. It takes constant energy swimming against the stream to stay with any of them in our culture, which drains the ability to develop more strength and subtlety in them.

At these retreats, building that strength and subtlety become the most natural thing in the world. It’s still hard — sometimes brutally hard — but the whole container makes it safe and possible to do this particular flavor of brutally hard things. Which feels like a gift not just to the participants, but to the world in general, giving more people the ability to hold these kinds of values while they move through life, to model them in more situations where they otherwise wouldn’t be present.

I really can’t describe how much these retreats — and just being friends with Rosa the past few years — have changed my life. I could say a hundred different things, but mostly it comes down to this: It feels like I’m getting better at being the person Reality is asking me to be — and to do the squishy, humiliating work of recognizing where I’m blocked in that pursuit and what I need to do about it.

The retreats are going well, and there are further ambitions and program ideas popping up lately — if you like the mission, if you like me, if you like Rosa, if you like places where mystical relating can become a more solid norm, I’d love if you donated to the fund, or got in touch with me or Rosa about possible gifts — whether funding or venues or whatever else you might be moved to offer.

Rosa's Site

Fund the Work

Jess Vellela, Ayurveda Spreadsheet Wizard

I won’t run through my health struggles over the past couple years, we’d be here all day and I’ve written about them before anyways. Let it suffice to say that I have an autoimmune condition that has led to fairly extreme cascades where I’ve been unable to eat most foods or live indoors for long periods of time. I just finished up a 4 month bout of living outdoors in India (though to be fair I did spend 1 of those months living indoors at a hospital, so).

At the beginning of this, I had a lot of despair. I’d watched my mother struggle with the same autoimmune condition my entire life, and the doctors had always been pretty useless on it. My read of the situation has mostly been that the doctors have made it worse over and over again, and ignored my mom’s actual symptoms and presentation in favor of one-size-fits-all pills that cause more problems than they solve.

It didn’t take long to notice that the doctors were doing the exact same thing with me. The despair and recognition were bone-crushing. I felt like I was stuck, locked in a body that was just going to degrade my quality of life until it gave out.

Then someone introduced me to Jess.

Again, I’m at a loss for words — I have no idea where I’d be without Jess, but I’m pretty sure I’d be miserable and sick, probably feeling pretty hopeless and helpless.

One thing I’ve learned from working with Jess is that not all Ayurveda is created equal. My brain has started tracking some internal spectrum of Ayurvedic skill that runs from the low end of “Turmeric Blogger” up to “Well-Meaning Vibe Herbalist” and “Competent Practitioner” all the way to “Dynamic Systems Wizard.”

(Here’s another article from one of Jess’s patients that gets into the dynamic systems aspects quite well):

Jess is, so far, the only Dynamic Systems Wizard I’ve found or heard about in the Ayurveda space. There’s a huge glut of folks in the Turmeric Blogger and Well-Meaning Vibe Herbalist part of the spectrum, a handful of competent practitioners, but only one Jess that I’ve found.

It’s a small thing, but I remember one of the first things that blew me away was the Jess actually listens. Like, she actually listens. And she’s not just listening to me and my words, she’s listening through me and my words, hearing my tone, my body systems, my emotional arc, personal history, etc.

The other doctors would listen to my symptoms, shrug, and send me off to another three specialists. “I’m an endocrinologist, this sounds like you have a liver issue and an ENT issue, so go see those guys — but honestly, probably just accept that this is what your body is like now, get used to it.”

Jess, on the other hand, would listen to my symptoms, get a lightbulb across her face, and say something like “ah, you’ve got a lot of deranged vata moving through your sensory system, we’re going to have to stabilize that before we can work with the layer under it.”

Literally just her using the term “sensory system” broke my brain the first time. It was so immediately obvious, once she said it, that this broader picture where I had visual disturbances, tinnitus, sensitivity to smells, changes in what tasted good, and buzzing/shooting sensations in my limbs were all part of the same picture. But I was so used to the usual specialization-fragmentation in medicine that I just… hadn’t even thought to connect them. I’d always been sent to 5 different doctors for those things before, like they were all unrelated issues.

Jess would then suggest an herbal formulation or two to take with meals, and then an issue I’d been having for months would just clear up in a week or two. Stuff like that happened over and over again. (After a couple months working with her, I was no longer lactose sensitive; we weren’t even aiming for that, it was just a side effect of the other work. I didn’t know you could do that.)

I just wasn’t used to someone actually listening to the whole picture, to the whole system. No one does that.

That skill isn’t what makes Jess so special at what she does — but it does seem like a foundational base layer that everything else is built on top of.

I could go on forever here, but I’d just say that it feels rare to me to find someone with such an engineer’s mind for precision and structure, as well as a kind and skillful skill with listening to the patient, who then takes those dispositions and brings them to the complex dynamic system of Ayurveda. My life wouldn’t be the same without her.

(Another article from one of her patients, an FAQ covering, among other things, the whole “isn’t this pseudoscience?” concern):

talia tales

Ayurveda FAQ

A little over a year ago, I started working with the Ayurvedic doctor Jessica Vellela. My friends have had a lot of questions, mainly about why I’m reading their messages at 4:45 AM. I’ll try to answer them here, with a minimum of Sanskrit buzzwords…

Read more

2 months ago · 28 likes · 3 comments · talia tales

Anyone with a chronic condition, I’d highly recommend booking an appointment with Jess at myAyu. She’s not always taking on new clients, but you can always sign up for updates on when she is: myayu.com.

Beyond chronic conditions, Ayurveda also seems to be uniquely good at preventative work and quality of life increases. If you just want to feel better and more alive — and especially if you want to undo the modern conditioning and acceptance of myths like “once you get into your 30s, things just start going wrong with your body” — I’d highly recommend joining myAyu and starting in on her materials there.

[I’m hesitant to say this last part, because it really needs to be its own article (or book, or series of books), but it’s worth mentioning: if you’re a serious meditator, mystic, relational practitioner, inner work practitioner, anything like that — I really think you should give Ayurveda a shot. Many things that take a huge amount of practice to do in inner work have unfolded naturally for me when my body gets sorted out in a particular way. I strongly suspect that almost all of us are spending a ton of energy fighting upstream in inner work, fighting against things that could be more easily moved on the physical layer than the emotional/mental/energetic layers. It feels like a Harrison Bergeron situation to me. —Again, there’s a ton I could say about this, but In the interest of keeping this about Jess I’ll just leave it there.]

Work with Jess

Nathan Vanderpool, Death Vibes, & Agapic Chants

This one’s more non-linear and potentially personal, but I can’t justify leaving it out at the moment: a lot of my biggest shifts over the past year or so have involved my buddy Nathan Vanderpool. He makes music and runs meditations on death-y void-y stuff, and I weirdly reliably have life-shifting experiences as a result of both.

Just to give one example, he and his partner Ronja (also a dear friend and gift to the world) ran an event at one of Rosa’s retreats where they played music, gave some spoken word transmission into death, and covered each of us in sheets, as a death shroud.

During that event, my entire body went into big weird spasms while different colors and forces ransacked their way through my awareness. I tried to describe part of this later as “ten thousand nano-Kalis flooding my bloodstream.” I’m not gonna get closer than that, I think. The outcome was a set of realizations about all the useless possibilities for my life that I’d been unconsciously clinging to — and a realization that I could just let them go and free up the energy to move more fully in the directions I’m actually trying to move towards. My life has taken some new directions since then, in some pretty pointed ways.

This wasn’t a one-off. I can think of 3 or 4 other times over the past year that interacting with Nathan and his work has done some significant course-consolidation in my life. I can’t say exactly why, but I can say it’s been that way for me, and I can definitely recommend working with him in his Agapic Chants work.

Nathan's Site

That’s all for today. Just a lot of love and appreciation for the ways my life has been changed by these people, and some hope of connecting more of you with them in ways that make the world better.

No one could reasonably expect you to act like a saint on an overcast Thursday.

No one could reasonably expect you to act from your deeply held Values in a meeting with the sales department.

No one could reasonably expect enlightened behavior of you on the subway.

But you can expect it of yourself.

If you want certain worlds to come into being, you have to expect it of yourself.

I’m writing like a ponce. Let’s try that again.

There’s this fantasy of being transformed in a way that makes it easy to live right. Being reconfigured such that you know what to do and when to do it, and it will all just flow from the divine light within you.

That’s not gonna happen.

Kundalini awakening won’t make you a new person over summer break. There’s no magic to it, all it does is shove force at the weak points in your system to shatter them, so you have to actually deal with them. You have all the same problems and foibles — now they’ll just kill you unless you work on them.

So you work on them.

That’s the whole thing.

There’s not some magical collective awakening coming that will make everyone treat each other with love and kindness. The Shift™ isn’t out there on the horizon. We’re not migrating to Higher Awareness™.

The only thing that might happen is that the weak points in our culture get so much energy run through them that we have to actually deal with them. There’s no magic. Just people dealing with a bunch of problems (here, now, not when trumpets sound in the east or the walls come tumbling down), and giving all they’ve got to that process. And doing this not so you can enjoy some new Eden, but just because there’s work to do — and the fact that you can see some of it means that you have to do some of what you see.

There is no Future You™ or Future World™ that’s gonna come along and redeem the present.

The future you is just you right now, plus the choices you make while time passes.

The future world is just the world right now plus whatever we do while time passes.

No rapture is coming. No collective awakening is going to re-map your neurons into a more compassionate shape. You won’t be reborn more generous and kinder after a crystal pyramid emerges from the sea. One year from today, you will be who you’ve decided to be between now and then. One year from today, the world will be what we’ve decided to make it in the year between now and then.

You can be more noble or not. That comes down to what you do today and tomorrow and next Wednesday after lunch. It comes down to what you do when it’s hard, not what you do once you’ve been magically transformed into someone who does the right thing easily, or magically transported to a world where doing the right thing is reliably rewarded. (Right, let’s break that myth explicitly while we’re here: reality has neither the obligation nor the inclination to reliably reward you for doing the right thing. Living right is the reward, learn to love the flavor of it.)

The world can be more wholehearted and genuine or not. That comes down to how we all decide to live day after day, how we decide to treat each other day after day, where we put our time, our energy, our resources day after day.

We can keep sleepwalking into “inevitable” problems we all see coming from a mile away, or we can remember that sometimes agency means using the brakes, or even reversing. (Shocking how many agency worshipers think certain things are inevitable, and all that’s possible is to use the steering wheel.)

That’s it. There’s no magic to this. Or at least no magic that works without this.

You aren’t punished for your sins, but by them.

You aren’t rewarded for your devotion, but by it.

You get there by being there.

Get off the fence, get out of the waiting room.

You live it now, or it doesn’t happen.

Now. Stand up. Live it. Now.

This is great fucking news — it means we can quiet down for a minute and take stock. Looking back at the centuries of endless writing and talk, capping off with the frantic orgy of text, audio, and video of the past few decades, and the player-piano ride-along of the LLMs and AI images of the past years.

We can finally take a deep breath, look back for a second, and assess: so what was that all about?

I made a discovery a few months ago. Some kind of conservation-of-energy principle that applies to insight.

In short: when an insight comes to you, you can either let it flow through you, or you can hold it inside yourself. These have different effects.

Letting it flow through you looks pretty familiar, especially to me. My years of endless tweeting and writing articles and courses and guides — I was constantly prying myself open into a channel for insights to flood through. It went pretty well for me, honestly. Kept the rent mostly paid, brought new friends to my doorstep, got me a reputation as The Guy you go to with certain types of questions.

Holding insight inside looks a bit less familiar, because it’s not the kind of thing you see. That’s kind of the point. The insight comes, and instead of pouring it out, you hold it in your chest, in your cells, in your behavior and relationships. Over time, the insight gets built into you. It’s not the kind of thing you think about anymore, until something reminds you “oh wait, I forgot that was a thing some people don’t know.”

It’s not quite true that these two options are mutually exclusive. But it’s true enough to be worth saying in this context.

After holding and incarnating the insight, you may or may not later feel an urge or duty to communicate it. At that point, after it’s become a part of you, it seems to be safe to write about.

But before that point, the conservation of energy thing applies: the energy you channel through communication is energy that isn’t soaking your tissues and re-shaping them into an embodiment of the insight.

In other words, your tiktok rant about boundaries is leeching the energy that would otherwise instruct your very marrow on the craft of boundaries.

Which isn’t to say that staying quiet is always an integrating move either. If I’m quiet, I may just be too scared to speak up, or forgetful and dropping the insights entirely when I fall into a youtube rabbit hole.

The move here, at least what I’ve found to work so far, is to feel the discomfort and buzzing in my body, the sense of too-muchness and intensity to what I’ve just realized. Feel it in my body. Feel how much I want to understand it, not as a word or an idea, but as a pattern I can live by automatically. Something natural, inherent to the way I carry myself.

Feel also how much I want to vent that pressure — to text someone about it, tweet it, record a short rant and put it up on youtube, write a breathless substack article about it. Feel how uncomfortable it is to just stay with the potential, stay with the pressure, stay with how my body feels as I hold that potential against the current reality of who I am. And keep holding it there, while I go about my day, my week, my meals, my conversations, my work calls. Hold it there, like wind pressing harder and harder against a sail on the inside of my chest. Let myself start to feel where that wind wants to take me. And keep it to myself.

What I’m saying is, essentially, a form of heresy. The attention economy demands my rants. I’ll never pay the rent if I’m not a shining mote in the infinite scroll, if my name isn’t written in that algorithmic Book of Life.

Who will know my name if I embody insight in silence? Who will want me if I’m not an avid contributor to our glorious orgy of content?

Who will ever take me seriously if I don’t gut my insights and spill their viscera on the page? What good is nobility without a bestseller?

The glut, the orgy, the recitation that comprises our whole literary and philosophical tradition — I think we can all just take a break.

This is, for my money, one of the problems at the core of western philosophy — everyone is channeling insights, no one is embodying them. The incentives are to write your philosophy as it comes, not to live by it and then communicate it once you are it1 (if it still feels relevant by then).

This is true on the reading side as well — everyone lets their eyes scan over insight after insight, they give a good hearty golly gee! impressive brain-work mister hegel!, and they move on, letting the insight stay firmly in their head, a delightful curio to trot out when there’s an argument on the internet, or a cute grad student at the bar.

A month or two ago, I reread some of my older essays and journal entries. It was… weird.

Over and over again, I had an experience of reading a line I’d written and essentially doing a spit take. How did I write that back then? I thought, I know for a fact I didn’t know that yet.

That’s most of my writing, honestly. It has stood out to me a number of times that whenever I write something, I seem to be writing it for myself 6-10 months in the future. The next time the insight tried knocking on the door, to see if I could live it yet, instead of writing it.

Whatever I wrote, it would feel so right and the words would fall into place like planets aligning. The whole process would distract from the fact that I had no fucking clue what I was talking about.

Then later, after I’d gotten hit on the head with it enough times that I was forced to just sit and be with it, it would finally start to sink in. I’d finally look back at that old paragraph and go “oh, that’s what was trying to build itself into me; and I kept just spitting it outward instead.”

After this experience, I recognize the same dynamic in so much other writing. In What I Talk About When I Talk About Writing, Haruki Murakami marvels over F. Scott Fitzgerald, asking exactly this exact set of questions. How, Murakami asks, how did Fitzgerald know all this so young? How did he write with such wisdom and understanding in his 20s?

It feels similar to me with many writers and thinkers — but I often marvel at the disconnect. How someone can write such pure wisdom and insight, and then fail so utterly to live it, or to seem wise in their life, in their relationships, in their interviews.

It’s because the glut, the orgy, the recitation, the infinite scroll, the demand to produce content to know you’re worth anything — it incentivizes us to vomit our insight outward rather than letting it digest, rather than letting it quietly become part of who we are at core.

This incentive is remarkably clever self-preservation. Because — and this is important — if we had a society of wise, quiet, insightful people… the current culture we live in could not possibly survive.

After

So if we all take a breath, what comes next?

I keep seeing frantic articles on AI, reminding me that if I don’t start building something right now and setting up my future with AI coded projects, I’m going to lose everything in the next 6 months. If I don’t find a way to use these grand finales of text and content to make money, I’m doomed. I have to speed up. I have to go faster. I have to put in more effort than I’ve ever put in before if I don’t want to be left behind.

I hear desperation there. Something wants us all to speed up and keep our noses down, so that we can’t take a breath and look around us. Something here needs us panicked so we can’t see clearly.

I have many many thoughts on this, and why it’s the case.

But the one I want to point at today is this:

Everything I might say has already been said.

This frees me up to stop re-stating it, over and over again — to take a breath, put down the phone, and start to feel which of these insights actually want me right now.

Carl Jung famously wrote,

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen or diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their souls.

People will endlessly read, watch, contribute to, and draw from The Glut, The Orgy, The Infinite Scroll — all because they don’t have the faith that if they stop and look inside, the same insights will already be there.

They lack faith in the simple truth: that the right insights are already inside them not as clever words, but as nourishing truths that want to metabolize themselves into their tissue.

It does little good, past a certain point, to keep reading and listening and watching the endless content our culture has produced and recited and repeated. Once you’ve seen all the basic ideas in a couple of formulations, you can pretty much just go inside yourself and start noticing which truths are trying to lay a claim on you. You can feel their charge and the discomfort of the distance between you and them. You can let that charge fill you up and guide you. You can let it break you down. You can let it build you up. You can let it hollow you out of all the complicated ego games, and fill you back up with coherence and potency.

There’s something enormously freeing, looking back at the endless repeating thought loops of our culture for the past several centuries. There’s even something soothing in seeing them blended into an algorithmic slurry and served back up in strangely neutered and confused forms.

It’s freeing to become aware of those endless loops — the ways they haven’t ever gone anywhere, and aren’t likely to start now. Not when they continue to be words and ideas.

We don’t have to put in so much effort.

All this trying, all these attempts to get validation and resources by repeating the right thought loop in a new, fresh way.

Here we are. This is where it’s gotten us. Ten thousand thousand blogs, and electronic critters who can produce more content than all of them combined.

Everyone who told us that technology will free us to be relaxed and happy, now screeching at us to go faster, work harder, build build build before we’re left behind.

Now seems like as good a time as any to take a deep breath.

Put down the phone.

Put down the books.

Put down the podcasts and the teachers and the clever inner work systems and modalities and essays and workshops.

And just listen.

Let the millennia-long thought loops quiet down, fade into the background.

And notice, silently, in the aloneness, that there’s an unlocked door, somewhere in front of you.

Something is waiting inside you. Something that doesn’t want to be turned into content, that doesn’t want to become a tool you can use to pry validation from the void.

It just wants to sit with you, somewhere deep inside your chest.

It just wants to nourish every cell of you. To shape you into the person you thought you’d find between the pages of a book, or at the bottom of the infinite scroll.

The person who’s already latent in everything you do, everything you are — all you have to do is quiet down for awhile.

Yes, I’m talking to you, you flesh and blood person in front of the screen.

But I’m also talking to you, you living breathing Culture behind these many flesh and blood eyes.

You can be everything you’d hoped to be, before you became this frantic, hungry, wounded machine. You have it in you to be such a gorgeous, noble critter.

All you have to do is quiet down for awhile.

Come sit with me. We can be quiet together. It doesn’t have to hurt so much.

Many developmental psychologists have noted that the majority of people get stuck at the developmental stage they achieved in adolescence. We live in an adolescent society — it doesn’t really help anyone move into real adulthood, and often discourages or punishes those who try.

The thing is: this isn’t only true for the humans in our world. It’s true for any complex system/process that’s as complex as a human.

I notice I’m shying away from using animistic language here, which is silly — anyone who knows me knows I have a right brained, animistic, processes-are-people-too! streak a mile wide. I can assert the validity of that elsewhere, but for now I’ll just say it plain:

Money, sex, power, politics, technology, religion — everything that operates in and emerges within our society — can fruitfully be thought of as a teenager who is desperately frustrated with the way things are, but can’t quite see how to change it.

Today, I’m going to narrow the field to talk about money. Because he’s angry and bored and wants something to change.

Role Models

The teen boys I taught were absolutely starved for male role models. As far as I can tell, that wasn’t specific to the school I was teaching at. They cast around for basically anyone who’d give them a model of being a man that felt workable, and they mostly seemed to realize the models on offer were very bad. Either they’d have to sign up for an agreement where their first and most important job as a man was to feel bad about existing and being born a man — or they’d fall into some kind of counterpoint to that and start talking too much about Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate and end up getting their laptop confiscated for cyberbullying the girls in their class. There were of course some other options not on that spectrum, but nothing that seemed to connect or resonate in a way that provided a real answer to the urge.

It was tragic to see. There was such a pure impulse underneath that search: at core, each one of these boys was hungry to be A Good Man — and there was no clear path they could find towards that. No image they could hold up and see what that could look like. So that drive got hijacked and redirected into games that went nowhere, certainly not towards maturity or manhood.

When I listen to the voice of Money, watch how it moves through the world, listen to the people who hold and move it, the people who don’t — when I watch the ways it’s used, the values that emerge around it — I’m reminded over and over again of those confused high school boys. The sense of frustration is palpable. The sense of being stuck in games that don’t actually feel good or meaningful, but… what else is there?

Hall of Mirrors

Money has been, for a very long time, basically a solipsistic teenager. Developmentally, teenagers can’t really see beyond themselves, and they become their own core value. Money has been operating the same way. Just look at how we talk about money and resources:

• Cash is king

• Everyone has a price

• It’s not personal, it’s business

• Time is money

• There’s no such thing as a free lunch

Everything in the world starts and ends with money. The ultimate arbiter of adolescent value is “what’s this like for me?”

Look at the global financial system — a vast system of instruments making money about money about money. A vast hall of mirrors that runs on our tacit agreement to treat the multiplied mirror images as real. (Who else tends to spend all their time obsessed with the mirror? hmm.)

Sorry for the crudity, but when I look at the global financial system, it looks like Money is locked in his room jerking off. Money is using human finance workers to touch himself over and over again, always chasing the next peak, the next climax of the stock chart.

This might feel like a bleak way to look at the world, but I only mention it to contrast something I’ve been seeing more of: when I talk and listen to people who hold money or who spend a lot of time in its flow — I’m increasingly noticing a sense of dissatisfaction with the way things are. In their voices, I hear Money’s voice ghosting through — it wants to grow up. It wants to find deeper values to live by. It wants to be better at contributing to the world it lives in. It wants role models in this — and is having trouble finding them.

Adulthood

We could point towards a number of attributes of an adult, in contrast to an adolescent — but one through-line of these contrasts is: an adolescent is primarily concerned with what things mean for them — an adult is primarily concerned with what things mean for the people and world they are embedded in.

An adolescent might think, feel, and act in ways that are aimed at being of benefit to the world and the people around them, but their center of gravity always comes back to some version of “what am I getting out of this?”

That’s why, in an adolescent society, getting the systemic incentives right is so crucial — and getting them wrong is so devastating. An adult can act against the existing incentives, if they feel that it’s good, right, and in integrity to do so. For an adolescent such a thing is almost unthinkable. Again, we can return to these proverbs like “it’s not personal, it’s business,” which is another way of saying “you can’t expect me to act against the financial incentives.”

This is reflected in a lot of the ways money currently attempts to find purpose, meaning, and growth (and seems to be chafing at their limitations). I wrote about some of this in In Praise of the Unsustainable. Many charitable efforts are navigating a situation where people want to be of service, want to step into adulthood (which is the only way Money can step into adulthood, is through the people and institutions who move him), but are limited by that adolescent ceiling: is this still good for me personally?

The incentives have to be well-aligned, or it doesn’t work — and everyone will nod sagely at one another and all agree, “of course of course, you can’t expect me to act against incentives, no one can be expected to give up more value than they’re getting back.” So all these tangled situations are set up to incentivize the maturation, but they end up sustaining the ceiling on maturity by sticking to the adolescent values instead of standing firmly for adult ones. A lot of this looks familiar, trying to increase the value of giving away money via:

• Various tax situations

• Bragging rights for what you’re supporting

• Getting things named after you

• Special access to efforts/organizations/people

• Assurances that God/The Universe likes people who give more and treats them better in the long run

• Clever marketing to make the case that the cause you’re supporting is ultimately good not just in general, but good for you specifically — or else why would you care?

• etc

If I’m hearing the voice of Money correctly, as it moves through people, this whole situation is starting to feel more and more unsatisfying, to the extent where something is really begging to change, and soon.

I’ve heard the word “masturbatory” around this part of the money game more than once in conversations the past few months, from people who are close enough to those parts of the economy to feel it deeply. Money is trying to move through people in different ways, more adult ways. When it tries, it runs into blocks quite quickly — but it seems to really want to move through those blocks. These people seem to really want to move through those blocks.

This isn’t just with respect to charity and foundations and endowments and all that — those are just some of the easier areas to point at. This also involves how money moves within families and relationships; the ways that it might come with implicit or explicit strings; the ways it can create restrictions in relationships; the way the human aspects of business can get clouded when money is the final arbiter of value. On and on, everywhere that money touches wants to be transformed into adulthood.

You may nod along and say yes, sounds good — but I’ll give an example, and you can notice how it feels in your body: what would it be like for you to raise capital and start a business — and for that business to genuinely, primarily run by values? To the point where if you had to take a pay cut to sustain the business, you wouldn’t blink? To the point where if the business looked like it was either going to go under in a few months, or have to compromise its values to survive, it wouldn’t even be a question; you’d decide, obviously, to go under with values intact?

Does that feel calm and peaceful? Challenging and constricting? Obviously insane and immaturely idealistic? Something else?

What about living in a world where this choice felt obvious to everyone else as well, and where you could count on other areas of society to also run in a way where money is in service to values, and not the other way around? Can you imagine how the decision would feel in that world?

Money seems to want to imagine it. My sense is he’s looking for role models in this direction — a direction where purpose, meaning, and the well-being of the ecosystem as a whole can be more important than standing in an endless hall of mirrors, checking his own infinite reflection.

In the change to adulthood, there comes a point where you become increasingly viscerally dissatisfied with having yourself and your own advantage being the yardstick the world is measured by. It starts to feel cramped, inward-twisting, and a little nauseating.

It seems like Money is reaching just such a point — as are certain other key aspects of the world we inhabit. (I’m drafting articles with the working titles Power Wants to Grow Up and Sex Wants to Grow Up; we’ll see if I manage to finish those in a way where they want to be posted.)

There’s a way that the processes and systems of our society form us, shape us into the people we are. But there’s also a way that we form the processes and systems around us, shape them into the presences they are. And of course, both we and those processes shape the world that contains us — as it shapes us.

When the various pieces of this world become just that — pieces, disconnected and separate from one another — the world as a whole loses a lot of richness and possibility. Only when each of us as people, and each of the processes we inhabit, take a lived interest in the larger world, the larger ecosystem we all share, and the other members of that larger ecosystem, only then can that world actually come alive. Only then can it become a living thing, rather than a mechanism.

In order for that to happen, some growth has to happen. And it’s not enough for us to approach that growth as isolated individuals; we have to grow up enough that we’re willing to prioritize the growth of the people around us and the systems, processes, and presences that we share this world with.

For now, it feels like the first step is to deeply listen to the world around us, and see what/who wants to grow up — and to do what we can to help.

I’ve been on a bit of a money arc, you can find more of it in these articles:

• Money & Wisdom: 4 Stances

• Stewarding

• The Trough & the Jungle

• In Praise of the Unsustainable

• Dollars Ain’t Electrons

If you and your money feel called, you can also send some of it to the Renga fund, to me and my work, to my teacher Rosa Lewis, or to a cause/person you deeply admire and wish to flourish.

Either all of you are lying about having read McGilchrist, or you don’t read very well, or… or I don’t know, maybe I’m going insane. Maybe I’m the crazy one. You know what, maybe I’m the crazy one, yeah.

But let’s assume I’m not for a minute, and I’ll just keep writing.

There are a couple things that trigger me here, that make me fling up my hands and ugh to the sky. I think I’ll only cover two of them today, the most common two things that people say when it comes to left and right hemisphere topics that make me want to wreak all manner of violence upon all manner of matter.

Disclaimer before I start: I have to say this every time I discuss this topic — I don’t actually care if the things described by McGilchrist map to the neurons on one side or the other of the corpus calossum. It seems like they do, to some degree, but that doesn’t matter to me — the neurobiology is just one potent lens on a dynamic that is clearly real. “Left Hemisphere” and “Right Hemisphere” aren’t my favorite names for the two poles of this dynamic, but they are the ones that the culture seems to have agreed on for discussing this, so I’ll use them. With that said, let’s get to it.

1. The 50/50 thing is dumb, please stop

I cannot count how many versions of this clever reply I have seen floating around out there:

If going all the way towards the left hemisphere is a world-breaking mistake, then it feels irresponsible to be shilling a turn all the way towards the right hemisphere. It’s just the same mistake on the other side of the pendulum — we need to find a balance, not a reversal. I am very wise.

Which, if you’ve read even the title of McGilchrist’s biggest book, it should be obvious to you that this is a dumb thing to say. And yet.

It’s kind of like saying

You think that a horse riding a man is a terrible situation — yet you advocate a man riding a horse? We have to find a balance, not just the opposite side of the pendulum. Perhaps the man and horse should jog side by side.

I’m not even going to bother to pull McGilchrist quotes for this, because again, he says it so often and it’s literally in the title of his most famous book. I shouldn’t have to do your work for you on this, if you say you’ve read him. But I will repeat the point as succinctly as I can for myself:

One of the most critical differences between the left and right hemisphere is that the right wants to include everything (including the left hemisphere and the body), while the left wants to manage everything itself, and exclude anything it deems unimportant (which is everything that doesn’t fit it’s pre-decided model).

So if you think that both the left and right hemisphere need to be in play and have their say: congratulations, you’re on team Right Hemisphere. That’s the one that knows how to do that and wants to do it. We can only really do it when the Right Hemisphere is in charge. This idea of setting up some 50/50 timeshare is a left hemisphere defense.

There’s not a 50/50 middling split here — the difference between operating from spacious inclusive awareness versus narrow blinkered focus isn’t just some slight difference you can bounce between. It’s a phase shift in ways of perceiving the world.

I guess you could try to have the human and the horse jog next to each other, but honestly it seems like a really poor use of energy for both of them. And you typing this idea in your twitter post or substack article gives away that you either didn’t read McGilchrist, or somehow missed the core point he repeats over and over again.

2. Most of those things your left hemisphere cares about — your right hemisphere is better at them

Book 1 of The Matter with Things is basically just an encyclopedia built to make this point. I’m not going to repeat the whole thing here, but I’ll give you the chapter names: Attention, Perception, Judgement, Apprehension, Emotional and Social Intelligence, Cognitive Intelligence, Creativity.

Each of those things — this endless encyclopedic litany of a book convincingly argues — is done better by a brain with a strong right hemisphere than one dominated by the left.

And yet, I still get versions of this question pretty often:

How far can I go towards right hemisphere functioning before I become useless and can’t feed my family?

Idk man, as the great philosopher Lindsay Lohan once said, the limit does not exist. I’d tell you to read the book, but that apparently doesn’t do anything, so I’ll try to say it here:

Have you ever known someone who both: a) is a control freak and will not let anyone else touch their project, for fear they’d mess it up; and b) is not very good at the project and is exactly the person most likely to mess it up?

That’s the left hemisphere. That’s the part of you that thinks that in order to be successful and effective, you have to narrow your view, cut out all distractions, repress any wider view of the surrounding context, and generally take total control of managing the process step by step.

The part of you that can actually step into an effective process is a part of you that many people almost never encounter — a part that can take the focused view without losing the surrounding context, that can allow a flow of impressions and inputs without getting distracted, that can stay open to relevant pieces that might be unexpected, and that can surrender control when needed to let what wants to happen happen (rather than forcing what it thinks should happen to happen).

If you can cultivate that part of yourself, you might not get work done in the way people expect it to normally look, but you’ll be effective enough that it mostly won’t matter. Your results will speak for themselves.

So stop letting your left hemisphere convince you that being in open flow and wholeness is dangerous to your wellbeing.

I don’t really have a concluding paragraph here. Um. If you’re going to talk about these topics, do some basic reading? Or wait, no, actually don’t do the reading unless you really really need to do it to hypnotize yourself into doing the practice.

Otherwise, just jump into the practices that actually help you develop the needed capacities, rather than doing more left hemisphere-y reading on it.

I don’t have a page for it yet, but I’m running a 5-week workshop on exactly this, probably next month, called Right Here, Right Now: Living the Right Hemisphere Beyond Concepts. If you’re into it, sign up for the e-mail list at the bottom of this page. That page is for a different offering, but the e-mail list will be the same.

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The way people say it, they seem to think of energy as neutral, like electricity. Every electron is the same, it doesn’t matter if your electrons come from over here or over there, your phone is still going to stay on all day for a stream of texts and searches and clips, it’s fine.

When it comes to spiritual ideas of energy — which this image of money is very much tapping into — it’s important to remember that energy is not neutral. It matters how and where and why energy comes in and goes out.

And the more time I spend with it, the more I am inconveniently forced to recognize that money is the same way.

I won’t dip into the whole tangled weave here, but money is made to carry a lot of baggage in our world. All our issues about security, emotional bonds, attachment, safety, anxiety, depression, family relationships, intimate relationships, god, values — everything, really — all of it gets woven into our relationship to money. How we make it, how we spend it, how we think about it, how we perceive people who have it, how we perceive people who don’t, all of it.

And all of that doesn’t just disappear when money changes hands.

Everyone’s familiar with money that comes with strings attached. Or money that you have to tie yourself up to get. I’m coming to think that living on money like that is kind of like living with low-grade mold exposure all the time, or a very slight allergy to a pet in your house. It’s just a constant little drag on your system.

I also think money carries some dynamics longer than we think, and more subtly than we think. E.g.: Money is spent at a corporation that has no real Values or Mission. The company invests it in another company that actively causes harm and damage in the world. Then they cash out that investment, pay an employee with the money. The employee hates the company and also has a lot of insecurity/hoarding issues around money. He spends it at a coffee shop, tipping a barista. —I think by the time the barista gets the money, that entire chain is still energetically present in it, to one degree or another. Money-energy carries history and quality in a way electrons don’t.

This too, I think creates a constant little drag on the system. I’m pretty sure that in addition to most of our society living with literal low-grade mold exposure, we’re also all running a slight fever with this more energetic form of subclinical toxicity.

Versions of this idea have been part of our discussions at the Renga fund. There’s one attitude we could take that’s the usual “doesn’t matter where the money comes from, it all spends the same.” But that doesn’t actually feel true.

It feels like if money comes from an aligned place, from people who really believe in the Mission and goals, it’s cleaner fuel in some way. Each dollar is working at a higher capacity, somehow. More streamlined, like the wind isn’t against it. Like $20,000 from aligned sources can do things that $50,000 from other sources couldn’t.

I can’t quite explain this. But it feels like something in me is nodding along firmly while I type it.

(It seems to also apply to spending money as well as receiving — $1,000 spent in the right way seems to bring deeper enrichment for everyone involved. E.g.- I give a scary sum of money to a friend who needs it more than I do, and the next day I get free access to something I’ve wanted for awhile but couldn’t afford. I’ve lived and heard many stories like this every time the topic comes up.)

I don’t really have practical takeaways here.

I mean, I have some takeaways for me, but I don’t think any of you would really describe them as practical.

I seem, for example, to be developing a habit of turning down money when I’m not sure if it’s aligned for me to receive — whether due to its source, or because of what I’d need to do to receive it, or just because I get an intuitive ping in the middle of a meeting.

This feels, in some ways, like an extremely irresponsible and annoying habit to be developing. But honestly, the more I lean into it the more it seems like an entirely different physics around money is settling in, and everything just works out from that physics instead of the one I’m used to. It’s a physics where integrity seems to be stronger than quantity.

Oh, I do have one takeaway for more extreme cases. I think if you actively despise the source of your money, you should put significant effort into finding a new source of income. I know, there’s not always much you can do about having mixed feelings on your job, it’s just a reality of the situation. But I’ve known a handful of people who actively hate, insult, belittle, and/or bemoan the source of their income, and I have felt uncomfortable at most of those people’s homes — even before I heard them talk about their clients or company. I think it’s pretty hard to make a life that feels welcoming while using money that is, frankly, unwelcome in your life.

I think this exploration is going to go a number of other places, but this is about what I’ve got for now: Money can be of greater or lesser quality, and it’s probably worth orienting towards both spending and receiving it in ways that improve its energetic quality.

Which, now that I’m writing it, I’m noticing a strangely heretical flavor to talking about money in terms of quality, rather than just submitting to the doctrine of quantity. That feels worth sitting with.

Look at the urgency of immortality biohackers. They’re driven to work faster, go harder, experiment more daringly — why? Because death is peeking over their shoulders. This urgent drive to defeat their closest ally.

Any mission-based effort must be acutely aware of its own unsustainability. Of its own death — and thus its own Life and potency.

More: it must be acutely aware that any attempt at indefinite sustainability has a numbing effect; it imposes a bloodless impotence, a forgetting, a castration.

Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote:

You have to make up your mind irremediably. To live fully is to be something irrevocably.

Wherever nothing is irrevocable, Life’s fullness isn’t present.

Wherever you’re holding back, hiding behind security, prioritizing restrained sustainability, that’s where Mission, Vision, and Ambition are being traded away.

Effectiveness and vitality don’t come from prim accounting. They come from going all in — not in the one-dimensional frenzy of a youth with no sense — but in a mature, driven recognition that Life wants this from you.

I think of these funds and endowments that fancy themselves to have Missions. They gather hundreds of millions of dollars — and then keep almost all of it in the silo. All these resources pulled together, just to secure the principal so they can hand out bits of the interest without tapping the real resources.

Misering out interest is profoundly uninteresting.

Securing the principal is insecure and unprincipled.

Are you going to keep your Life force siloed, in hopes of making it last forever? Or are you going to exert yourself in Life’s Mission, and die with the fruit of your efforts dripping down your chin?

How are you going to steward your Mission?

You can talk about sprints versus marathons — but marathons have a finish line, and the runners know it. Their whole being is oriented towards it. They know the Mission, their pace isn’t sustainable — it’s appropriately unsustainable.

We live in a world where the old paradigm and its systems are running on credit they can never repay. The inheritance is being spent down and the heirlooms are being pawned off.

The old vitality has run down. A blight has rotted through the silo.

Oof, I gotta stop overwriting like this.

Here’s the deal: there are a lot of things that need to happen in the world, and a lot of them are unsustainable efforts. They need to happen, and if there’s only enough resources to make them happen for 10 years, 4 years, even 1 year each — that’s fine. We can be proud of that. Those efforts can die happy and be buried with honor.

What would be a shame — no, not would, because it is in fact happening — what is a shame is when these efforts are prematurely stillborn because the people and institutions who could make them happen object on sustainability grounds. “The effort wouldn’t pay for itself year after year, so it’s not worth doing,” says the silo.

And the people who are willing to put in unsustainable time, effort, and resources on it — they’re out here doing it, but probably also putting too much of that time, effort, and resource into pitching to the silo in the hopes of more resources to stretch the sprint into a marathon. Or at least a 5k.

My lens on a lot of this is fairly developmental. There is, at this moment in time, an opportunity to mature out of the existing paradigm. Some people are trying to seize and support that opportunity.

This becomes pretty complex, for any number of reasons.

• Most relevantly: maturing is by definition an unsustainable process. Ask the parents of any teenage boy how long they could sustain that grocery bill. Growth involves phases where huge amounts of energy have to be poured into the system to let things take their next shape. (Growth processes are, from an efficiency-embedded point of view, almost unforgivably wasteful.)

• Also relevant: nearly by definition, the majority of resources will always be with the people who are the best at (and most embedded in) the reigning paradigm. And from the point of view of the reigning paradigm, the next paradigm literally doesn’t make sense. In fact, to those embedded in the current paradigm, the next one will often look like a regression. So if you’re trying to get resources towards a new paradigm, it will almost always involve translating that new paradigm into the values of the existing one it seeks to replace, which is… tricky, to say the least. And often quite compromising.

Among those who write about developmental topics, I have a soft spot for Bill Plotkin. One reason for this is that he emphasizes something many developmental writers and researchers don’t: these shifts can absolutely fail.

Whether personal or cultural, when there’s an opportunity to step into more growth, maturity, and wholeness, there’s always a good chance that the process simply won’t take. Things can fall back to their previous level, or even to a lower level if the process really gets botched.

One of the things that can botch the process is, frankly, a lack of resources. An unsustainable outpouring of time, effort, energy is required to make even simple, natural shifts occur. When the process fails, the reason is often that the resources to make it succeed were either not available, or were held strategically in reserve when they needed to be profligately expended.

On the biological level, this looks like malnourishment during childhood and puberty. The body just doesn’t get the resources to grow how it could. The hungry hungry caterpillar goes into the cocoon but doesn’t burn its stored fat, so the butterfly never emerges.

On the personal level, this might look like “everything in me feels a deep, painful need to live my life differently — but that’s too terrifying, difficult, and uncertain, so I’ll just keep trucking and wait for this to pass.” The inner and outer resources required to make such big changes simply do not get mobilized.

On the cultural and societal levels, it can look much the same. Everyone knows that we all need to live differently, that what we’re doing feels bad, stunted, constraining. But when we look at what it would take to change it… fear and difficulty and uncertainty (even a deep sense of impossibility) overwhelm us. So the personal, emotional, social, financial, and institutional resources required to make such changes simply do not get mobilized.

Again, Ortega y Gasset:

You have to make up your mind irremediably. To live fully is to be something irrevocably.

Irremediable. Irrevocable. This is not gentle language. These are not gentle processes.

This is what it feels like to be stuck between competing unsustainabilities:

It’s impossible to keep being the way we’ve been.

It’s impossible to exhaust our resources creating a new way to be.

Stuck between impossible continuation and impossible transformation, there’s really only one choice. Continuation isn’t a real option.

Whether personally or collectively — we can stay in the blighted silo of the reigning paradigm, convincing ourselves that if we just keep on keeping on, stay with a nice sustainable pace, everything will work out. Or we can enact the messy unsustainable profligacy of the maturation process.

The choice depends, so often, on a sense of Mission, sharpened by an awareness of death. An awareness that the clock is ticking down, that the game is going to end either way, and that we’ll feel our best if we leave it all on the field.

Do we all notice that money is the same way? Almost all of the money is kept in silos — government treasuries, wealth management funds, international conglomerates, blah blah blah — and the silos feed out into this thin little trough that snakes through society. That’s where the paychecks come from. Everyone lines up at the trough, because we must, because the trough is the only place to get money, and money is the only way to make A Good Life happen.

That, of course, is Trough propaganda. The whole purpose of the Trough is to make sure we can never stray too far from Trough-world before worrying that we’ll starve under a tarp somewhere.

If you do find a way to wander further afield though, you find something shocking — the world of the Trough is really just one kind of shrubbery in a much larger Jungle.

Someone might say “I want to make $300k per year.” But they don’t, not really. That’s shorthand that they aren’t owning as shorthand. What they actually want is a lifestyle and sense of safety that feels available somewhere around the $300k mark.

The thing is, there are a lot of ways to Make Things Happen that aren’t strictly money-based. Things do in fact happen and get built away from the Trough.

When you step away from the Trough and into the Jungle, some of what you find out there is “Oh wow! I can make things happen with cooperation and devotion and cleverness and intuition that would have taken a lot of money if I was trying to do them with money!”

And you’ll also find quite a lot of stuff that you simply can’t make happen with money — it’s the wrong medium to drive certain types of occurrences, the gears just don’t mesh.

But not all of this is inspiration and utopian visions, of course: you’ll also notice more unsavory ways that people make things happen without the Trough. “Oh right, people make things happen with violence, lies, manipulation, control, fear. Oof.”

That’s the Jungle.

And to be fair, that’s part of they appeal of the Trough, is that it can replace a lot of those rougher and more horrifying aspects of the Jungle. Which it has done largely at the cost of the more beautiful and nourishing aspects.

I don’t have a takeaway.

Well, I have some, but they’re pretty soft for now.

One is that the Trough is in fact a part of the Jungle.

I think something has broken down specifically because Trough-world tries to make itself the only world, and deny that the Jungle exists or is connected. This creates and is fed by odd dynamics where money takes on many roles that would usually be distributed in the jungle. Money can stand in for all sorts of emotional dynamics, attachment issues, insecurities, emptinesses, violences, power dynamics, hierarchies, ambitions, manipulations, cooperations, devotions, on and on and on. All of it collapses onto the almighty dollar. Which increases the felt sense that the Trough is all that exists.

When we zoom out and see the Jungle, something relaxes, some cellular exhale takes place. Like yes, right, there’s a lot more at play here. I might not actually need $300k, I just need to find workable paths toward the life and sense of safety that feels good to me, and there are a lot of ways pull that together.

Another takeaway is that even pointing at the Jungle can be a powerful act. For many people, it’s going to sound airy and distant, somewhat unreal and impractical to think about. Others, it will crack open their metaphysics and let them see that what they assumed was the Whole World was actually just a hermetically sealed corner of something larger. That can be a powerful move.

And my final takeaway is this: I’m feeling patient about it, but that I want to play and build in the Jungle, and I want to find others who want to play and build too. I want to figure out what it’s like to hold both integrity and aliveness while navigating the Trough and the Jungle with people I love.

And I think it’s gonna be a delightful little adventure.

First of all, I don’t love the colloquial usage of “synchronicities” as discrete events. It’s appropriate that Jung worked with a physicist to hone the idea, because synchronicity is more like gravity than anything else.

It would feel odd to say “I had a lot of gravities this week,” and then describe how I dropped my keys, went on a roller coaster, watched a stream roll downhill, and tripped over a welcome mat. Those are all instances of gravity affecting me quite noticeably — but clearly, gravity is always here, always affecting me. My whole body and everything I encounter are all arranged to interact with gravity constantly, because gravity is constantly present.

In the same way, it feels odd to me to talk about “a lot of synchronicities this week,” because synchronicity is always present. Meaning and events are always weaving together, interacting and playing with one another. We just notice it more acutely sometimes.

Secondly, synchronicity doesn’t give instructions, just information.

People will often treat a noticeable synchronicity like a road-sign, a pointer that they need to go in a certain direction. That can sometimes work, when the information environment lines up right, but it’s a dangerous assumption to make.

Navigating synchronicity is very unlike driving in a city. It’s very much closer to navigating the ocean like wayfinders. For example, wayfinders might notice two nearby birds in the east. This tells them that they’re somewhat close to land, which is great information. But it’s not nearly enough information to know what direction the land is in, if anyone lives there, if it’s safe, etc. It does, however, give them a reason to keep their senses alert for more signs of land.

For most people who track synchronicity, the attitude tends to be something close to “I saw two birds in the east this morning, it’s a sign I need to head east.”

Sometimes you get lucky and the land was, in fact, eastward. Other times, you just waste the day going the wrong direction and then wonder why the universe would trick and mislead you like that.

Third, returning to the basic definition of synchronicity as an acausal connection between inner meaning and exterior events:this connection is always present, and attuning to it in too literal or left-brained a way very easily tips into psychotic territory.

If you see two birds in the east and immediately start building a case for how the waves also seem to point east and one cloud looks like an arrow pointing east and the wind from the east sounds like a song your grandma used to hum and and and — then you should probably take a deep breath and drop the whole synchronicity thing until you can see two birds in the east and stay fully chill and grounded about it.

I’m being a bit jokey here, but this is actually a fairly serious point. If you can keep a pretty open, “right-hemisphere”, non-reactive awareness while noticing synchronicity, you’ll be grand. If you notice yourself seeing synchronicity and then reacting to it by collapsing the meaning, looking for instructions, or connecting it into your red-threaded conspiracy wall, it’s probably best to take a break and step back from the woo for a bit.

This is another topic, but closely related enough to be worth flagging here: as a general rule, all of the worst tendencies of woo-brain are actually just what happens when woo gets stuck in left hemisphere mode. If you can reliably stay in right hemisphere mode1 while engaging with woo, you’re pretty much just… noticing reality accurately.

Fourth — not quite sure how to say this one, but something like: synchronicity is a bit of a smart-ass, so learn to laugh a bit.

I could also say something like “the primal intelligence behind synchronicity has a weird sense of humor and a trickster aspect, so hold everything lightly and be ready to feel the universe giggle at your hapless little mammal existence sometimes.”

My read is that part of the dynamic here is to remind us to not take synchronicity terribly seriously. I think the primal intelligence pokes me harder the more seriously I take it. — I’m not sure about this, just a personal read.

Those are the main points, or at least the ones that I’ve repeated often enough that they’re worth collecting in one place.

Anyway, as I was typing that last paragraph, someone I haven’t talked to in weeks texted me to ask for a call so I could answer some questions about the right hemisphere — so synchronicity is still alive and kicking, that’s nice.

I probably developed an allergy to the term for a couple decades, but the past year or two, it’s started to mean a lot to me. The way I relate to it now, it has a much wider and more ambitious span than just money.

Mine

One starting point for this: nothing actually belongs to me.

The air in my lungs, the money in my bank account, the friendships in my life, the skills in my repertoire, the care in my heart, the ambitions in my gut, the time in my days — these have all been given to me, but they aren’t mine.

The fact that they’re in my possession doesn’t mean that I own them or am owed anything about them; it means I’ve been asked to do right by them. It means I’ve been asked to steward them while they remain in my care.

Listening

I’ve found that listening is the biggest part of good stewardship.

Often, when I listen for the voice of what’s in my care, what I hear first is a lot of noise. My own cravings, fears, hopes, avoidances, distortions. It takes some time to find those and turn the volume down on them.

As I quiet the interference, things start to come up. Sometimes these are extremely clear and direct. eg- I have the time, skills, and patience to help this person, and the best use of those resources is to help them. So I’m going to do that.

Sometimes they’re more subtle. Intuitions, images, surprising stray thoughts over the course of weeks. Conversations that feel more challenging than clarifying. Suspicions that I’m looking at it all the wrong way. And then, a knowing that now is the time to act, and to trust that even without conscious clarity, the right action will feel right if I listen closely. eg- I can’t quite make sense of it yet, but this friendship feels important. We’ve had a lot of struggles, but it feels right to put in time and effort to repair it.

Listening is sometimes a game of feeling the independent ambitions of the things in my care, and sensing how I can serve those ambitions without either twisting them to my own ends, or betraying myself to obey them. This is hard. And strange. I kind of love it.

Listening closely also means listening for when something wants to move out of my stewardship. When my time with it is closing, temporarily or permanently.

When the best way to take care of my money is to pass it along to someone else; when the flow of Life is better served by how they’ll use it than how I’d use it.

Or when the best way to care for my connection with someone is to give space for disconnection; when distance is the best way to serve our closeness, whether they come close again later or not.

When the best way to tend my talents and ambitions is to let them go dormant for weeks, months, years. To let them go through a deep dying, so that what wakes up later on has a chance to be clearer, more potent, less tangled.

There’s risk to this, always.

Stewardship is risk, because Life and Love are risk. And at base, that’s what stewardship is: a deep Love for the unfolding Life of what’s been put in your care.

Right Clumsiness

I don’t know how to live stewardship well. I’m trying, but.

It feels like a strange proposition — that I’m being asked to steward stewardship itself.

My work has felt increasingly important to me lately. I don’t really understand a lot of it yet, but I assume I will later. I’m trying to figure out how to steward the various parts of my work in a way that expresses love for their unfolding.

It’s an edge for me, the way that this seems to mean asking others to join me in stewardship of what we’re holding together.

This has also been showing up in my 1 on 1 work. It’s been feeling more intimate lately, more weighty. When someone comes to me with a pull towards clarity or transformation in their heart, that’s not a small thing. It’s not casual. I want to do right by it.

And at the same time, it’s extremely limited on my side, as to what I can actually do to steward their unfolding — aside from taking it seriously and giving them the best opportunity to take it seriously too.

I tried generosity-based pricing for awhile, as a step in this direction. But what I’ve found is that this often doesn’t actually serve me, or them, or the situation that’s trying to unfold.

Now I’m trying an experiment where the meeting logistics are all aimed at commitment to the process.

My only question for stewardship-based pricing is this: What can you spend here that will help you feel deeply committed to showing up fully for the change you want?

My question for stewardship-based scheduling is this: What cadence can we meet at that will keep you in this process without losing the thread or falling out of it between meetings?

My question for stewardship-based relating is this: Are there any ground rules that would help you show up for this process in a way you’re proud of, without avoidance or bullshitting or distortion?

There are a lot of edges here, both for me and for clients. One of the edges I’m working is my reticence to push. I know that in a process like this, there can be a tendency for people to low-ball their answers; to get a price that feels more like a deal than a commitment. And in my head and heart, I know that if I sense this is happening, they’re actually best served by me pushing them a little. But it’s messy and weird and I’m aware that the incentives on my side add their own complications.

(Which, to be fair, I’m coming to realize that there’s another stewardship involved here: my health. I have an autoimmune disease, and I’m starting to realize the resources it’s going to take to manage this for the rest of my life. So there’s some way that dissolving some of my own shame around wanting to make a good living is woven in here too.)

It’s a clumsy experiment. It probably will be for awhile.

But it also feels like the right clumsiness for the moment.

Stewarding my work and stewarding stewardship itself aren’t automatic reflexes. No one ever taught me this stuff. If I want to be good at it in 5 or 10 years, I’m just going to have to accept being clumsy at it for 2 or 3 years now.

Stewarding Life

I have some drafts of other articles saved at the moment. I’m unsure if I’ll publish many of them. But if I do, you’re going to notice a fierce tone running through a couple of them.

This too, I can’t tell how much it’s a clumsy bug or a nascent feature.

To put it simply: by being born into this world, we have all been asked to steward it well. And as someone who has wandered this world and seen a lot of it, I have to say: we have mostly been doing a poor job of it.

I won’t list every type of pollution and toxicity and crisis and shortcoming (I vented more of that in the drafts) — but I will say that there’s a strong, fierce, and growing urge to start shaking some shoulders about it. And to do so from a wholehearted place: being in ferocity without stepping out of compassion; being in compassion without stepping out of ferocity. Not the usual panicked outcry and litany of problems that you’re already numb to — but a true expression of the grief and confusion and clarity that spring up when I see what we’ve made here, and the consequences of it all.

For now, I’ll leave things here, with an invitation to discussion. This topic keeps becoming more important to me, and I’d love to hear any thoughts or feelings you might have around it. I’m trying here — and it would feel nice to try together.

If you want to keep pulling this thread, I wrote more along these lines a few months ago here:

If you want to try 1 on 1 work with me, and are ready to be pushed a bit on your commitment to unfolding, check out my page here.

I can say what I need to say quite plainly, really. Essay-crafting isn’t about communication, it’s about hypnosis. And essay-reading is mostly about self-hypnosis.

I find it so… something, just now. Tedious, maybe. Ingrown. Not quite manipulative, but.

You want to be hypnotized into a worldview, and I want to hypnotize you into a worldview. So we do our little dance.

What’s it like to write from a place that needs nothing from you?

Can I write from a place of simply stewarding words, ideas, and feelings well?

Or something like that. Maybe I can at least edit from that place.

Think of your emotional system as a series of canals, grooves dug inside of you by the force and drag of habit. Whatever you pour into those canals flows through the same basic shapes — whether it’s your relationship with your mother, your boss, a single all-seeing sky-father, a pantheon of deities, or a shamanic world of animistic presences.

If you’re regularly trapped in drama triangle dynamics, your relationship with divinity will be too. You’ll feel like a victim needing god to rescue you — or a victim of the gods, needing someone else to save you.

If you seek out parent figures to solve your problems, you’ll spend a lot of time in petitionary prayer and vague skyward hopes.

Anxious attachment? You’ll bring that to how you relate to the sacred. Avoidant? Same. Constantly ending up with people who cycle hot and cold? You’ll likely feel the divine cycling between intimacy and impossible absence.

This dynamic opens up a lot (I mean a lot) of ground to examine, but there’s just two points I want to gesture at for now:

1. The divine seems to want better ways of relating from us. This could easily be its own series of articles, but the short version is that it seems like the divine has a habit of pressing against our relational patterns. It seems to want either to break them, or to draw our awareness to their shortcomings. Especially their shortcomings as a way to relate to the divine fabric of Being itself — if some of these patterns are unbecoming ways to relate to your siblings, they’re almost startlingly inappropriate as ways to relate to God.
   
   For example, someone who had trouble setting boundaries kept relating to the divine in a way that violated his boundaries over and over again. This kept happening, to the point where it got ridiculous and he had to recognize that if he was going to fix his relationship with God, he was going to have to figure out his boundaries with the people around him. He had to stop letting other people cross his borders and decide life for him. When he did that, the divine also felt less invasive and peremptory.
   

2. We can’t leave relational work out of sacred practice. Me and Rosa wrote some about this last week, but it bears repeating: so much of awakening happens in relationship. This is true for any of a dozen reasons, but one of them is what we’re talking about here — that if you want to relate cleanly, wholeheartedly, and naturally with the divine, then you need to have those relational channels open in your life. Which means having those patterns available with the people around you.

A final note on all of this — people (and religious traditions) have a tendency to mistake their experience of the divine for features of reality.

In other words: if you aren’t careful, you’ll enshrine your own unconscious relational patterns as laws of the universe. This is a great way to get stuck, both in practice and in your relationships.

If a guru is only really capable of transactional relationships, they’ll gather students and tell them with total certainty that if you want the gifts of the gods, you have to pay for them in such-and-such ritual methods.

If a teacher has a hard time stepping out of the drama triangle, the entire religious worldview they espouse will center on a never ending litany of victims, villains, and saviors.

These beliefs may be based on very deep personal mystical experience. But that doesn’t mean that they’re features of reality. It simply shows the lens being used to look at reality.

All of which is to say — whatever your experience of the divine is, keep aware that it’s very often more about you than about the divine. The ways you show up in that relationship, and the way that relationship shows up to you, are largely mirrors of your own habits, patterns, and development.

This doesn’t need to be disappointing or diminishing. It’s a really deep mode of experience, and brings you closer to God to begin to recognize what’s the divine, and what’s your own stuff — and where you could clean up or develop your own stuff to experience the divine in a new way. Hopefully in a way with fewer and fewer distortions, over time.

If that’s true, the retreats Rosa Lewis runs aren’t good retreats, they’re something beyond Great ones. From August to October, I attended two retreats with Rosa, and I didn’t just get a peek at my next developmental edge, I got to inhabit a way of being that feels at least 2 or 3 edges past my current one.

In one of the final practices of the 2-week retreat, each person was taking turns expressing the journey they’d been on since it began. Where they’d started, what felt relevant or transformative, how they were feeling now — and maybe how they saw the trajectory after leaving the retreat.

The reflection that hit me most deeply came from my own paired partner, Rosa. When it was her turn to reflect, one of the things she said was “these past two retreats feel like a proof of concept. This approach works — it’s not about communicating ideas that people understand conceptually, it’s about embodying a new way of being, that reaches people through relationship, through the practices, through connection, and through their own immediate experience.”

This all rang deeply true for me — I’d experienced other retreats, and any number of books, talks, and recorded practices. In my head there was forming a spectrum of the spiritual interventions that had moved the needle for me. The spectrum ran from the relatively ineffective (TED talks on mindfulness, meditation apps, 10-day Goenka retreats…) to things that were genuinely quite moving (watching bodies burn in Varanasi, a few months of focused Somatic Descent practice from Reggie Ray…), to the quite transformative (dream journeying practice…) — and then a big gap before the clear first place spot: these retreats.

I’ve written some fragments below about what I love in these retreats, the unique experiences of being there. I hope you’ll read them and find something inspiring, or at least useful. To be up front about a couple things:

1. We’re looking for funding. I’ve started what I’m calling the Renga Fund (I’ll get to reasons for the name below). If there are people who are aligned with the values we are embodying here and willing to provide some funding, it makes sure they can continue to happen in a way that isn’t constrained by transactional economic concerns. Money should never be the bottleneck to wholeness, depth, or awakening.

2. This isn’t an advertisement for these retreats. For now, we are expanding the network slowly, by personal invites only. As you read some of the fragments below, (as well as Rosa’s reflection above), it should become clear why it works that way for now.

These events have been some of the most life-changing periods I’ve gone through. I walked out of each one with different futures than I walked in with. I hope I can communicate some amount of their importance to me, the vision for how this could benefit more people, and my hope for them to continue.

A New Paradigm

by Rosa Lewis

The purpose of my teaching is to invite people into a new paradigm where it is possible for people to be wholeheartedly present in alignment with true nature. For this to become possible requires defining a base-level of reality that is different from most other spaces. It couldn’t be yet another place limited to a rationalist paradigm where people are just individuals who need to process their trauma, or a place where people check out into the spiritual side of experience.

The underlying vibe is one where the cosmic and the personal weave together through all experience. From uncovering the deepest personal shadows to accessing the most expansive transpersonal states, everything is recognised as an expression of Buddha Nature.

For this to land in people’s systems, it requires everyone to come with a commitment to presence, a sincere desire for thriving for yourself and others, and a faithfulness to aligning with truth. These clear intentions allow us to drop into the depths in a faster, safer, cleaner way, where there’s still space for difficult truths to be presenced.

The invitation is to be in the depths of truth, one where interconnection, resonance, and mystical experience can be met with high capacity and discernment. Importantly, this is not about creating a codependent group vibe but a space that is expansive enough to support people being in their own sovereign truth and finding resonance from there.

The aim was for people to show up in radical fullness — including in the rational, the mystical, the practical, and the emotional aspects of experience — and to be able to feel at home in that. Not in a way that is always comfortable, but in a way that is rich, rewarding and aligned with truth.

There’s an entire ecosystem of being that contributes to this becoming possible. The space is designed to reduce distortion, hold disintegration and reintegration, increase safety, amplify sensitivity, uphold truth, allow new experiences to surface, and support deep opening. An important element of this is creating a place of relational depth, but not forced vulnerability.

Awakening, in this context, is not solely about insight but is also directly related to the body’s capacity to stay with reality without collapsing into protection. Reality is vast, intense, confronting, delicate, overwhelming, nuanced, and subtle. It’s embodied and also goes far beyond the embodied realm; it takes a lot to be present with it.

This approach to collective awakening is not just about accessing nice sounding transpersonal states, but about embodying precision truth, mystical mastery, and clean relating. These skills were brought into the practices that spanned a full range of experience, from focused personal shadow work, to accessing the non-dual, to artistic expression.

It is rare to find a space that values both whole-heartedness and technical mastery, which is what we wanted to create. A place where we could include expansive cosmic perspectives with practical grounded action. A place where we could recognise the underlying interdependence of all life, while also inviting people into their unique sovereignty.

If you want to hear more, we recorded a couple talks about these retreats — what they’re like, how (and why) they work, and what happened on these first ones. You can start following that conversation here (there’s also a Part 2):

You can also get a flavour of Rosa’s work by reading her new book, The Depths of Being, or by coming to her upcoming workshop, a guided journey through the book. The proceeds from the workshop will go to the Renga Fund, to make more gatherings like this possible.

You’re Allowed to See

One bit of feedback came up over and over again, one lens on the power of these retreats. “It’s an enormous gift to be allowed to see what we see.”

The world is often quite rough on mystically sensitive folks. A lot of social realities operate via everyone’s tacit agreement to not see what they see, or at least to not — god forbid — say what they see. All of us have to agree to stop seeing (or at least stop saying) just to get by, both as children and as adults.

One way we might describe mystics is that they are people who have a harder time than most with ignoring the truth. There are endless examples I could give, a lot of them tipping over into what’s generally considered woo, but many of them fit firmly in the mainstream paradigm.

For example: take a day (or even a single conversation) and pay close attention to the people you’re talking to. Look at their faces, feel their vibe, note the emotions you sense in their eyes, their voices, their posture and words. Really allow yourself to unashamedly pay attention, to be with them and their experience and to see what you see there.

This might require a little practice, but in general, you may walk away from the conversation feeling a bit like you’ve just looked at someone naked without their permission. We all, all of us, exude so much information when we interact with other people. Our emotions, our thoughts, our relational patterns and traumas and griefs. But we all, almost all of us, agree to ignore that information in each other. We allow ourselves to be drifty, distracted — we don’t really look at each others faces, we don’t let ourselves listen to their voice, only their words.

It feels somehow rude to actually pay attention to someone, and to notice their sadness, their anger; their mixed feelings about their family, the way they relish small moments of control over colleagues. If you let yourself pay deep, close attention, you’ll realize that none of these are hidden. We just all agree not to look at each other very closely.

Expand that dynamic to many other parts of reality, and imagine that you’re someone for whom ignoring what’s present and burying truth is actively painful. That is a significant part of the mystic experience.

And at these retreats, some of us experience, maybe for the first time in our lives, a place where we can all just see what we see. Where we don’t have to ignore most of reality out of politeness or protection. It is safe to feel, welcome, embody, express, and navigate the full richness of what is present, as well as get access to parts of experience that we didn’t even know were there.

In all of this there is also an underlying dedication to poetic or loving awareness. There’s a level of artistic attunement to reality and relationships, to cultivating realness in the group. A commitment to seeing what’s here and honouring it from a place of heart.

What Others Say

At each retreat, everyone gave feedback, describing what things had been like for them. Here are a few of the impacts.

But What Do We Do?

In one way, describing what we concretely do on these retreats can feel a bit anticlimactic, or besides the point. It’s analogous to the way that some people find meditation retreats transformative, and when you ask what they did, the answer is “we sat in a room and breathed together, then occasionally listened to the teacher give a speech.”

At the core, what we do on retreat is practice being more wholeheartedly present and awake with the full range of experience — and to do this not only within ourselves, or on a meditation cushion, but to stay with it in connection, in relationship, in movement, in Presence.

A lot of the purpose of the different exercises was about clearing out distortions, aligning with the subtle truths of the present moment, and practicing expression from that Presence.

You could run the same exercises outside of the retreat setting and they would not reach the same depth, because the whole experience is a co-created trust exercise in opening to deeper layers of reality together. The openings emerge from people sharing the depths of realisation that they embody — and that isn’t about conceptual ideas, it’s an embodied reality.

From the outside, practices often look like sitting around, sometimes talking, sometimes moving, sometimes silently sitting together, or breaking off into pairs to do something.

From the inside they look like people meeting the deepest aspects of themselves and reality, parts that they often weren’t aware were even there, and coming into wholehearted relationship with them.

I’ll briefly describe a couple of the scheduled activities I liked — and then maybe hint at some of the off-the-schedule moments that affected me strongly.

Seeing & Being Seen

Echoing the above sense that we’re allowed to see what we see, one of the activities involved spending a lot of time face to face with your partner, looking at them without dropping into habitual looking. The point isn’t to just see the person you expect to see, but to really zoom in and out, take different vantage points.

We focused on the physical details of the person we were with. The worry in their forehead, the way light flickers through their hair; the mischief in the lines around their nose. We then switched to a more receptive mode where we allowed moods, energy, and imaginal information to come in. The way their eye movements evoke a subtle imaginal sense of a small mammal; the sense of a piercing infinite void behind them; a warm glow of yellow energy emanating from their heart.

For this exercise, we sat with our partners, looked clearly, received openly, and saw what we saw — and after a while, each partner switched to drawing. It was less about providing a skilled portrayal of our partner than about expressing what we saw when we looked at them. Many of these drawings layered the metaphorical, imaginal and impressionistic, with the physical and material.

Energetic Transmission/Attunement

There are different realms/frequencies/layers of experience that you can attune to, but that are often not foregrounded. In the same way that doing Brahmavihara practice can drop you into a heart realm, or practicing jhanas or subtle body meditation can connect you to the energetic realm, these practices open up new layers of experience and allow us to sync up there.

In general, one person is prominent in the circle, and they attune themselves to a particular embodied way of being. They share that way of being, transmitting it like a beacon through their energy, posture, voice, and descriptions. The rest of us either surrender into that expression, or try to “find” it ourselves, depending on the exercise.

For example, one person shared a system of seven different energy layers, linked to the Reichian character structures. The purpose of the system is to support people in finding wholeness. Each of the seven layers of experience had different qualities and different names, each name poetically evocative of how it felt to be in that layer.

As part of the exercise the person leading might for example embody “tree” energy, describing how it felt and inviting people to connect to it. “Uprightness. Strength. Steady. Time is slower here. Love feels like support, holding.”

As other people in the circle “found” that energy and attuned to it themselves, they started adding their own descriptions, helping the whole circle attune to it together. “I feel very grounded here. Rooted.” “Tough. Immovable. Integrity.” “It’s more flexible than I was expecting. I can move with the world’s force without losing my own strength and footing.”

If people couldn’t sync up with it and were having a totally opposite or different experience to the rest of the group in some way, they were also welcome to share that, which happened a lot. This multidimensionality kept things interesting, stopped group-think becoming too strong. It felt like a healthy sign that people weren’t giving up their sovereignty, but landing in it more fully.

As the group builds a vocabulary of transmissions and energetic stances, a lot of cool things become possible. Different modes of being and relating open up where you can access a fuller range of yourself and experience, and are able to express it with the people around you.

Speaking From/Being From

This is another whole class of exercises. In some ways it is similar to the transmission and attunement ones described above, but with much more of a focus on expressing an energetic stance, rather than simply feeling it. In exercises like this, we invite and speak from different modes of being (or act from it, move from it, relate to others from it…).

For example, in one exercise we had time to find and speak from different qualities, like life force, and presence. In small groups, we took some moments to drop into an embodied sense of what the chosen quality means in us, and then leaned fully into that in our interactions and speech. It got fairly intense. While my small group was expressing from life force, someone energetically killed me during that exercise. Stared me down and energetically shredded me. And I enjoyed it, grinning, gleeful. My belly felt lit up with dense orange flame, and my mouth took on different shapes than it usually does to form words. A couple people were shocked how my voice sounded from there.

These exercises are just a matter of finding the energetic stance you’re exploring, letting it move through your body, heart, voice, and personality, and allowing it to express itself through you — and allowing yourself to be seen and met in that.

It is a speedrun for creating more permission space to express every part of yourself, to increase your range of movement towards more fullness. It’s an opportunity to speak and move from different modes of being, and be met in that space, outside of habit pathways and personality structures.

The Margins

Those were some of the types of events that were on the schedule. Off the schedule, a lot of other things happened. Much of it extremely transformative, or at least deeply clarifying. I listened to my friends play their songs over and over again. I had long talks with people who see me clearly. We were in deep enough states that we were able to be extremely real with each other, and access things about ourselves we couldn’t usually see. I went out into the woods and had visions. I went out into the woods and facilitated visions for others. I performed impromptu rituals in a darkened room. I had conversations where some of my relational patterns I’d never noticed before were laid bare. I lit up a grill and did a little fire ritual to the full moon. I laid in a field and watched the Milky Way roll by overhead.

Each of these did as much or more than any of the official practice slots — and the overall composition of the retreats wouldn’t have been the same without all the little things happening in the margins. I know this is true for me, and from some of the conversations and feedback, it seems to be true for the others as well.

Rosa

(This part is written only by me, River.)

The big thing at the center of why these retreats work is Rosa herself. I’ve known Rosa for years, but for whatever reason it’s only in the past year that I’ve really started getting a sense of what her capacity and capability are really like. It’s kind of incredible. And also weirdly hard to point at.

Watching Rosa work reminds me sometimes of this show, Scavengers Reign. The show features some alien ecosystems, and shows some fascinatingly intricate pathways in that ecosystem. Pathways where effects that seem non-linear become obvious once you know how the flora and fauna work. Ecosystems where, I don’t know, you brush the leaves of a bush, and that causes a fruit to drop from a nearby tree which attracts a certain bird that you can then kill and eat.

Watching Rosa work, I get that feeling sometimes, of some psychospiritual version of that. She’ll ask a question, or nod in silence, or tell you to feel a specific area of your body, and then somehow things just start moving. She brushes a leaf in your mind, which causes a shift in your energy, which draws in a particular insight.

This whole dynamic sometimes makes it hard to point at what exactly is so special about Rosa’s leadership. One thing that is easier to point at is her capacity. On both retreats, this felt notable, the way that she can hold incredibly intense experiences for groups and individuals, and do this over and over again, seemingly all day. She led me through a very intense process, one that I needed a few hours to recover from, with the help of a friend who stayed with me after the process. — Rosa, on the other hand, went right from finishing my process to starting another one with someone else, maybe 5 minutes later.

Her capacity isn’t endless, but it’s more than I’ve seen from just about anyone else. The way she’s able to bring out clarity and depth in other people day after day is maybe the most significant piece of what makes these retreats work.

Renga

These retreats and the values behind them are what I am starting the Renga fund for. I’ll describe a little more about what I mean by renga.

A year before these two retreats, I’d gone to my first retreat with Rosa. There were 9 of us at a farmhouse in France, a group of mystics and friends who’d come together to share space, share reality, and share practice with each other.

In one of the final discussions of that retreat, someone used the term “lineage of friends.” That’s been on my mind ever since. A lineage of people who love and care about each others’ development; a lineage that doesn’t reject hierarchies, but that doesn’t primarily operate as a hierarchy.

A renga is a form of collaborative poetry. It’s a fascinating subject, and I recommend reading up on it, but just to give the most relevant basics in a quick form:

At a renga party, poets would gather to collaborate on a poem. There would be an appointed “renga master”, who not only decided the flow of what order everyone would write in — but who would also be the arbiter of which verses were good enough to add to the poem, and which ones needed to be rewritten. There were all sorts of structural and poetic affordances to the writing process, things like sticking to the season the poem was set in, or further developing images that poets had put in previous verses. There was space for everyone’s style, flair, and ability, but there was also a standard to uphold and a coherence that the poem itself demanded.

At our retreats, Rosa Lewis is the renga master. Her teachings, her presence, her artistry set the tone and direction. Within that, most or all of the participants tend to lead (or collaborate on) events or practices. At the first retreat, each person led their own spotlight session, in which we shared a practice with the group. At the other retreats, there was a less strict structure, but still a flow where everyone brought something in, some practice or event or framework for the group. Shared effort went into arranging the practices, deciding the theme of each week, or the flow of which practices might be best placed before or after others, which days could bear multiple heavy practices, and which ones needed a lighter touch. The beauty and potency of each practice was placed within the coherent composition of the retreat as a whole.

Renga parties had a tendency, in the descriptions I’ve read, to get a bit boisterous. The poets would drink and enjoy each other’s company. While it’s true that the creation of a poem was the occasion (excuse?) for each meeting, I also get the feeling that much of what was gorgeous about a renga party took place in the margins, outside of the official composition. Friendships were built and tended to. Jokes and experiments were tried on. Even in rejected verses, new poetic techniques and styles might be shared. I imagine drunken poets sharing verse after verse that are entirely too weird, jokey, or non sequitur to be included, simply for the glee and play of it, while the renga master laughs along and rejects them one by one.

Like I mentioned above, at our retreats a lot of the best stuff happened in the margins. In between “official” practice periods, people would break off into pairs or trios. We might take a walk, or cook up a snack, or play around with another meditative practice in the backyard. Life-changing discussions took place on plastic chairs. We pulled blankets out onto the deck to do some energy work after dinner. We dragged yoga mats into the forest to do some imaginal journeying together.

The retreats aren’t just about the practices or the composition of the schedule — they’re about all the juicy richness that can take place when the depths of reality is collaboratively honoured.

Why This Matters

We enjoy these retreats. They clearly benefit the people who go on them.

Why does this matter to you? Because the world needs people who can move from a deeper place of integrity in themselves and meet others from there. These retreats are an answer to that need, a method of developing our capacity to be in wholehearted presence, both as people and as leaders. Each retreat is also an exploration in how we could share all this with the world more fully.

More people are getting interested in awakening and psychedelics, and there need to be trusted places where people can access some of the deepest ways of being in alignment with truth. This takes time, energy, and an enormous commitment to do well, or in a way that has a chance of scaling.

This isn’t well-paid work that fits neatly into a paradigm where you can focus on making money as a primary goal. And while we are happy to make it work financially between us, it is a lot easier when we have support from people who see the value of what we are doing. It means we can focus more on doing the work and less on a lot of practical logistics around making the work possible.

If you feel inspired to donate to the Renga Fund:

E-mail River

Donate

Other Stuff

To see some of the art, photos, and people’s descriptions of the retreat you can check out Retreat Vibes at Rosa’s site.

If you’re curious for more about these retreats, you can check out other articles I wrote that came out of my experiences there:

Poetic Will & Choosing the Impossible

The Next Shaman Will Be Shambhala

Money & Wisdom

You can also listen to conversations that were either about the retreat, or emerged from them:

Mystic Retreats Pt 1. (Me & Rosa)

Your Experience is Already Imaginal (Rosa & Adam)

Money & Wholeheartedness (Me & Rosa)

Mystic Retreats Pt. 2 (Me & Rosa)

You can get some flavor of Rosa’s teaching by reading her new book, The Depths of Being, or by coming to her upcoming workshop, a guided journey through the book. The proceeds from the workshop will go to the Renga Fund, to make more gatherings like this possible.

In poetry, words awaken what is beyond words.

In painting, the visual awakens what is beyond the visual.

In music, sound awakens what is beyond sound.

When I investigate will inside myself, I find that the medium of will is choice. To will something is to choose, to decide on it with your whole being.

In poetic will, choice awakens what is beyond choice.

There are many things you can't just choose. Sleep, for example. Enlightenment, for another. Love. Kundalini awakening. The Perfect September Afternoon.

They can't be planned or engineered, you can't flip a switch and attain them. It's not a matter of arranging things correctly or just putting in the legwork.

There's a degree of grace, of surrender.

There's a dynamic where the universe lets you have everything you want, but only after you no longer crave it.

There are many ways for a thing to be beyond choice.

There's choosing and there's choosing.

I'm used to choosing meaning that something is available, and it's up to me to say yes to it. At which point, it is of course mine.

Then there's choosing, the choice of poetic will. A choice that is completely yours. It has nothing to do with whether the thing you choose becomes yours or not. You can simply choose it. You can choose it once and for all, and keep choosing it every day, and you can stay entirely free of any expectation that anything will ever happen. That it will ever come to you. That you could ever reach out and get it.

You can just choose, with your whole being.

You can let that choice do its work on your whole being.

The choosing is not quite its own reward — reward is the wrong frame entirely. But the choice is something alive. It is a way of being immanently, defiantly Present in your self and your life.

What else is there?

I'm a big fan of doing the impossible. I keep meeting impossible people, watching them do impossible things. I keep absorbing their casual fulfilment of the impossible, and throwing my own impossibilities back at them.

It's a trip, I love it.

I choose the impossible, again and again. What else is there?

The word want invokes a lack. To be wanting of something is to not have it.

There's something graspy about wanting; a vacuum, a hole to be filled. Wanting is for children — children lack so much and it must be given to them. Their lot is to want and want and want.

Until they can choose.

Choosing is for grown-ups.

Choosing has no lack. Choosing from poetic will expects nothing, nothing beyond the solidity of being one who chooses.

Poetic will is an acknowledgment of what wants to be present, rather than of the feeling that something is absent.

To choose is to take responsibility.

You can want and want and want, forever and ever, and hope someone will bring you what you want. In wanting, you don't have to think about the consequences. You can want a gallon of ice cream and not think about how sick it will make you.

But when you choose a gallon of ice cream — before the words have left you, you already realize what you're saying. What you're taking on. What will happen if you complete this choice.

Maybe you just choose not to choose stuff like that.

When you choose, the world gets clearer. You sort out your wants and realize how many of them you can drop.

And the ones you don't drop — they stop being hooks and become simple realities in the back of your chest. They are simply choices you've made. You may or may not ever have the fruit of that choice, but no one can take the choice itself from you. The choice lives in you and drives you.

Poetic will bends reality.

I'm sorry if that doesn't fit your world model, but you should get a better world model.

Choosing bends reality. You open a portal. You tap a future on the shoulder and watch it turn towards you.

I choose trust. I choose stewardship. I choose liberation. I choose poetry and peach-pink glow and Home. I choose metis. I choose worship. I choose prayer. I choose trust. I choose Kali and I choose Shiva and I choose magic and I choose Aion. I choose Shoshi. I choose ambition. I choose the cathedral between Time. I choose wyrlding and gravity. I choose (oh god don't say it don't say it don't be cringe) love. I choose love.

I choose the mammal and the serpent. I choose eros. I choose the vast riches all around me, all around you. I choose impossibly good mentors and teachers. I choose peerless peers and friends. I choose collective awakening and awakened collectives. I choose writing and art and transmission. I choose terma. I choose intimacy with Reality, intimacy with intelligent energies, intimacy with my own being, my own rasa.

I choose to wake the gods.

I choose to make whole the goddess.

I choose to renew the sacred.

I choose resonance.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

Wake up, wake up — don't waste a moment.

We’re putting together funding for my primary teacher, Rosa Lewis, to run more retreats. Retreats with her have been some of the most impactful events on my life and path — if you resonate with the path I’m on, and/or with Rosa’s work, please consider giving a gift to this fund.