VII. The Vow
Day Five morning. Silent breakfast. The cellist — Anya, who has been with us for five years and who plays with the precision of a heart surgeon and the warmth of a grandmother — was on the cliff at sunrise. The light was coming up over the eastern ridge in that particular October way where everything is gold for about eleven minutes and then it stops.
Each guest had a small piece of cream-colored paper and a pen. They were asked to write one sentence. One vow. One sentence they would carry home. We do not coach the vow. We do not workshop the vow. The vow comes from the body that has been re-resourced for four days, and it is whatever it is.
The vows that morning were extraordinary. I will not share most of
them — they are private — but the founder, Oslo, gave me permission to share his. He wrote: 'I will exhale before I make a decision worth more than ten million dollars.' He read it aloud in the closing circle by candlelight. The room held its breath the way the room always holds its breath when something true has been spoken. Then the cellist played, and we all wept, and we ate one last meal, and we sent them home.
The banker hugged me for almost a full minute at the gate. He said, 'I am going to tell my wife everything. I have not told her anything in eight years. I am going home to tell her everything.' He got into the van. He did not look back. I watched the van go down the gravel road and I sat down on the cedar bench by the gate and I cried for ten minutes, the way I always cry at the end of a Lila, and Ammanuel came and sat next to me and did not say anything, the way he always does.
And then Tomás came out with mango.
VIII. Why I Do This
I want to tell you why I do this work, because if you are reading this you might be considering joining us, or sending your team to us, or trying to figure out whether what we do is real, and I want to be honest with you.
I do this work because I was a corporate lawyer for nine years and my body was dying. Not metaphorically. My hands had started shaking in 2017 and a neurologist told me there was nothing wrong, which is what neurologists say when the wrongness is not in the nerves but in the life. I came to a Lila in 2018 as a guest, paid for by a friend who had attended the year before, and I left changed in the way the brochures promise you will be changed but you do not believe until it happens to you. I went home, I quit the firm, I trained with Ammanuel for two years, and I have been on the road with this team ever since.
My hands stopped shaking inside of six months. I did not write that sentence to be poetic. It is just the literal sequence of events. I do this work because my body was returned to me by this lineage and the only honest response to that gift is to spend the rest of my life returning bodies to other people. I do this work because the world is full of dysregulated power and dysregulated power is the source of almost every avoidable suffering, and our small, deliberate intervention in the global epidemic of frozen diaphragms is, I genuinely believe, one of the more useful things a person can spend a career on.
I do this work because Ammanuel is the only person I have ever met who can hold a fully rigorous polyvagal map and a fully alive party in the same body in the same breath, and watching him do it for seven years has rearranged my understanding of what leadership is. I do this work because Folake taught us that joy is the pedagogy and Pandit Ravi taught us that the body is the awakening and David taught us that titration is the love and Ammanuel's grandmother taught us that hospitality is the prayer and all four of those streams are alive in every cup of hibiscus tea we hand a guest at the gate.
I do this work because last October a four-star general looked at me from across a cedar amphitheater and mouthed thank you, and I will spend the rest of my life trying to be worthy of that.
IX. The Favorite Part
My favorite part of this particular retreat — and people always ask me to name a favorite part, and I usually deflect, but I will tell you this time — was the moment on Day Three when the Lila Feast was halfway through and the jazz trio was playing Coltrane's Naima very quietly and the pediatric oncologist turned to the recovering hedge fund person and said, completely out of
nowhere, 'I think I have been performing my own life for nineteen years.' And Jess looked at her, didn't flinch, didn't fix, didn't comfort, just took her hand across the table, and said, 'Welcome home.' Two strangers. Day Three. A jazz trio. Cedar floors. Candlelight. Mango on someone's wrist. Welcome home.
That is the work. That is what we are doing here. That is why the cellist plays at sunrise and the gravel is two miles long and the band is ten pieces and the band is never Spotify and the food is wild and local and slow and the welcome notes are hand-written and the small stone is on the pillow and the question at the gate is what can you put down and the vow is one sentence and the lineage is four streams and the transmission is the product and the body is the curriculum and the joy is the proof.
That is why we do this. That is why I am still on the road, seven years in, with no plans to come off it. That is why, on the last morning of every retreat, when I sit down on the cedar bench by the gate and cry for ten minutes after the vans pull away, Ammanuel sits next to me and does not say anything and Tomás comes out with mango and we eat it with our hands.
The mango, as Ammanuel will tell anyone who asks, is also Shiva. The door is open. The cellist is tuning. The tea is hot.
Come in.
— Maren, on the road, somewhere between the last retreat and the next one Text 3
The Time of My Life: Seven Days at the Luminous Prosperity
Retreat with Ammanuel Santa Anna — Where the Dancefloor
Married the Dharma and My Body Finally Believed in Enough
A first-person account of the wildest, wisest, most beautifully orchestrated week I have ever lived through, written in the tender afterglow of return. --I have been to a lot of retreats. I have sat on a lot of cushions. I have gripped a lot of paper cups of lukewarm chamomile while a well-meaning facilitator told me to feel my feet. I have done the silent ones, the loud ones, the expensive ones, the suspiciously cheap ones, the ones where someone played a crystal bowl too long, and the ones where the food was so virtuous it tasted like punishment. I say this not to brag and not to complain, but to tell you exactly the kind of skeptic I was when I walked through the gates of the Luminous Prosperity Retreat — barefoot within an hour of arrival, weeping by sundown, dancing by midnight, and changed by morning. I was a tough customer. They did not flinch. They handed me a cup of cold hibiscus tea, looked me in the eye, and asked, what can you put down? And the seven days that followed rearranged my interior architecture so completely that I still, months later, find myself smiling at strangers on the subway like a person who has been let in on a secret.
This is a love letter and a field report. It is the time of my life, and it is also a curriculum. Because the genius of Ammanuel Santa Anna and the Luminous Prosperity lineage is that they refuse to choose between celebration and rigor, between the dancefloor and the dharma, between the wild party and the profound pedagogy. They understand, at the cellular level, what almost no one else seems to understand: everything flows from states. Not from strategy. Not from mindset. Not from goals. From states. From the felt, breathing, pulsing, sweating, laughing, crying, undefended state of the nervous system you are actually inhabiting in this exact body in this exact moment. Change the state, and the world
rearranges itself around you. Stay stuck in the state, and no plan on earth will save you. They taught this not as a slogan but as a lived experience, hour after hour, until my body finally believed it.
Day One: The Arrival That Was Not An Arrival, But A Surrender
The gate is unmarked. That is on purpose. You drive down a long cypress-lined road that smells like rain on warm stone, and you wonder if you have the wrong address, and right when you start to doubt yourself, a barefoot host steps out from under a fig tree with a tray of cold hibiscus tea and a quiet question. No clipboard. No name tags. No "please proceed to registration." Just tea, and a question, and the suggestion that perhaps your phone might enjoy a vacation in a small cedar box for the week. I gave mine up like a man relieved to surrender a heavy suitcase he had been carrying for years.
The property itself is a cathedral disguised as a country estate: open-air pavilions, wood floors that have been oiled by candlelight for decades, wide cliffs that drop into surf, a kitchen garden that looks like it was painted by someone who loved tomatoes, and a great hall with acoustics so generous that even my untrained voice sounded forgivable. A string quartet was playing as our luggage was carried away by people who insisted on carrying it. I tried to apologize for the weight of my bag, and the woman carrying it laughed and said, honey, this is the only thing you don't have to do this week. I almost cried right there.
Dinner that first night was slow in the way that slow used to mean before the word was colonized by branding. Long tables.
Candlelight so honest it made everyone look ten years younger. Wild greens dressed at the table. Bread torn by hand. Wine poured without ceremony. Ammanuel did not give an opening lecture. He simply walked the room, sat with each table for a few minutes, asked one question — what did your body know before you got here? — and let the silences be longer than any teacher I
had ever met would tolerate. By the time the cellist began her sunset improvisation, I had already exhaled deeper than I had in two years. That was the lesson. That was the welcome. That was Day One.
The principle of the day, whispered around the fire later: arrival is a state, not an event. You do not arrive when you put down your bag. You arrive when your nervous system agrees to be here.
They give you the conditions, and your body does the rest in its own time.
Day Two: The Body of Fullness, and the Cliffs at Sunrise
The gong rang at five forty-five. Not aggressively. More like a polite cousin tapping on the doorframe. By six fifteen, sixty of us were standing on the cliffs as the sun made its slow announcement over the ridge, and Ammanuel was teaching us — without notes, without a slide, without a single stitch of corporate vocabulary — what he calls the Body of Fullness.
He asked us to feel the back of our bodies. Just that. Not the front, where we live like over-eager dogs leaning into the future, but the back, where we are quietly held by the floor and the chair and the planet and the air. He said, most of you are exhausted because you've been holding yourself up. The earth has been doing it the whole time. You can let go now. Two grown men beside me were openly weeping within thirty seconds. The cellist was already there, of course. There was always a cellist. I started to suspect they had cloned her.
We spent the morning in the language of the lineage: ventral, mobilized, collapsed, blended. Polyvagal precision married to Kashmir Shaivite reverence married to Dzogchen luminosity, all delivered in the warm, mischievous voice of a man who has clearly done his own homework and refuses to use a single word he does not actually mean. He said, your spreadsheets are
downstream of your nervous system, and a venture capitalist I had ridden in with the day before laughed so hard he sat down on the grass.
In the afternoon we did The Money Body. Each of us brought one financial decision we had been avoiding — a price we hadn't raised, a check we hadn't deposited, a partnership we hadn't ended, a number we hadn't looked at in months. We did not approach it with a spreadsheet. We approached it with the diaphragm. We tracked the contraction. We named the protector. We let the body finish a sentence the mind had been interrupting for years. By four o'clock I had written, on a small piece of cedar paper, the actual number I was worth charging, and my hands were not shaking. My hands had been shaking around that number for a decade.
And then — because this lineage refuses the false separation between depth and delight — we threw a party. Not a metaphor. An actual party. A ten-piece live band on a cedar dance floor under string lights, a fire pit at the edge of the cliff, a chef who set up an outdoor pasta station and rolled the dough in front of us, and a barefoot crowd of accountants, founders, therapists, monks, and one former central bank economist who turned out to be the best dancer in the building. Ammanuel danced. The cellist danced. The kitchen staff danced. A retired surgeon next to me, who had not danced since 1994, danced. He told me later, with tears in his eyes, I forgot the body could do this without anyone getting hurt.
This was the first peak experience. The first one I will carry to my grave. Not because the party was wild — though it was, gloriously, joyfully wild, the kind of wild that has nothing to prove — but because the wildness was held inside a container of such profound pedagogy that the dancing was the teaching. We were practicing what we had learned all day: that joy can be metabolized, that pleasure can be tolerated, that the upper limit
can be met with skill, and that the body, given safety and a good bass line, will remember things it has not remembered since childhood. The dancefloor was the dharma. The dharma was the dancefloor. There was no seam between them. I have never seen another teacher hold both with such steady, mischievous hands.
Day Three: The Team As A Living System, and The Forest That
Asked Two Questions Day three was when the alchemy got specific. We worked in pods of six. Ammanuel taught us three rituals we would carry home like household tools: Arrival, Repair, and Completion. He said they were the three sacred bookends of every human encounter, and that most teams were broken because they had skipped all three. We practiced them on each other. We practiced Arrival before a difficult conversation. We practiced Repair after a real rupture from our actual lives. We practiced Completion at the end of a project nobody had ever properly finished.
A woman in my pod, a chief of staff at a hospital network, used Repair to apologize to her younger brother in absentia for something that had happened thirty-one years ago. She did it out loud, with her hand on her chest, while the rest of us held a slow drum rhythm with our palms on our thighs. When she finished, she looked up and said, I have been carrying that in my left shoulder since I was eleven. And she rolled her left shoulder, and you could see — physically see — the tissue change. We all felt it. The cellist, somewhere in another pavilion, must have felt it too, because three minutes later a low note came drifting through the courtyard like a benediction.
In the afternoon they sent us into the forest in pairs, walking slowly, holding two questions and nothing else. What have I been overgiving? What have I been underreceiving? My walking partner was a woman who builds satellites for a living. She is one of the most rigorous minds I have ever encountered. By the third hour of
slow walking, she stopped under a redwood and said, very quietly, I have been overgiving certainty. I have been underreceiving tenderness. I almost dropped to my knees. Because I realized I had been doing the same thing in a different language for fifteen years. The forest is a good teacher. The forest had been waiting. That evening was the Lila Feast. Six courses, each paired with a different musical genre, each paired with a somatic prompt. By dessert — a fig-and-honey-and-something-I-still-cannot-identify — we were arguing tenderly about pricing strategy while a jazz trio played Coltrane and a woman across the table cried and laughed at the same time and said, I think I have been pricing my work like a person who does not want to be seen. Three of us nodded. Two of us said, me too. The trio shifted into a ballad. The chef sent out one extra bowl of figs because she had read the room. This is what they do. This is the level of attention. This is why everything here works.