What Changed My Life
Pure Hype Sesh this time
I want to take a minute today to appreciate some of the people and things that have changed my life over the past couple years. This is partly sparked by the fact that I’m finishing up another month of retreat with Rosa Lewis this week, so I’ll start there — then I also want to say a bit about my Ayurveda doctor, Jess Vellela, and my friend Nathan Vanderpool.
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.
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):
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.]
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.
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.