Infinite Retreat Curriculum (Pt. 1)
I have apparently been on retreat for like 2 years now
Welcome to the retreat. This is going to take up the next few years of your life, so settle in. I’d ask whether you want to continue or not, but I hope you understand that this question is not relevant.
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?