Day One: The Arrival, and the Thing With the Hands

The day a retreat begins, I am awake before the sun. I walk the property. I check that the welcome letters are on the right pillows, that the chef has the dietary cards memorized, that the cellist (a different one each retreat — this time a young Catalan named Pau who studied at the Conservatori) has tuned to the room and not to

the concert hall in his head. I check the cliff. I check the sound system in the dome. I check the salt levels in the plunge pool because if a guest goes into a cold plunge with the wrong salinity their nervous system will read it as danger and we are not in the business of producing danger.

Then the guests start arriving, and the work begins.

Here is what almost no one outside this work understands: the first ninety minutes of a retreat are the entire retreat. If we get the arrival right, the next five days are a slow unfolding of something that has already happened. If we get it wrong, we are clawing back trust until day three. So we do not get it wrong. The Lila Stewards have been on 1:1 calls with each guest for the past month. We know the names of their kids, their partners, their dogs. We know the thing they are scared to say out loud. We know whether they are a hugger or a hand-on-the-heart or a respectful nod from across the gravel. When the cars roll up the drive, the right person is waiting for each guest. By name. With the right gesture. Holding the right glass of something — fresh tamarind for the one who told us she has been off alcohol for eleven months and is proud of it, a small mezcal for the founder who told us he wanted to feel like a human being again the moment he stepped out of the car.

I watched the CFO get out of her car on day one. She is famously unsentimental. Her last team-building event was, by her own description, "a sushi dinner in the conference room and a deck about psychological safety, which is, in retrospect, the funniest sentence I have ever spoken." She got out of the car, and Iyari was waiting for her — Iyari who is almost six feet tall and moves like water — and Iyari did the thing she does, which is to put both her hands palm-up about a foot apart at the level of the CFO's sternum and just hold them there, and wait. Not touching. Just offering. And the CFO — who I am sure has not been received that way by a stranger in the last twenty years of her professional life

— looked down at those two open hands, and her face did the thing faces do when the body remembers something the mind forgot. And she put her own hands, palms-down, lightly onto Iyari's. And they stood there for maybe seven seconds. Then Iyari said, welcome, friend, and the CFO laughed — a real laugh, from her belly, surprised — and said, well, that's a hell of an opener. Seven seconds. Twenty-eight first arrivals. I did not stop moving until 9 PM, when the welcome ensemble started in the courtyard. World-music sextet — oud, frame drum, ney flute, kora, two voices, one of them a Senegalese griot named Awa who I would walk through fire for. The leaders sat at the long table under the strung lights and ate slowly for the first time in months and did not check their phones because their phones were in a beautiful wooden box at the entrance with their names hand-lettered on cards. There is no other way I know to begin. The body has to be told, in a language older than language, that it is safe and beloved and somewhere worth being. Then we can do the work.

Day Two: The Sober Ecstatic, and What I Mean by Mastery

Day two we ran the somatic arc through the morning and into the dance lab in the afternoon, and then at 9:30 PM we opened the dome for the sober ecstatic dance. This is one of the parts of this work that I love so much I sometimes have trouble being professional about it.

A quick note on what this lineage means by mastery, since I was asked to talk about that. Mastery in our work is not about tricks. I have watched Ammanuel hold a room of four hundred at the Annual Convergence and do almost nothing — he just walks slowly, he breathes audibly, he names what is in the room with the precision of a sommelier naming what is in a glass — and the room re-organizes itself around his nervous system the way iron filings re-organize around a magnet. That is mastery. Mastery is not technique on top of a person; mastery is the person, refined

over decades, until the technique has disappeared into the bones. Iyari has it. Tomás has it. Beatriz has it in the music. The chef has it in the food — I am completely serious, our chef Roser is a master, and watching her plate a turbot is watching a person who has spent thirty years arriving at simplicity. You cannot fake any of this. You cannot certificate-mill your way to it. You sit at the feet of teachers, you do the practice every day for years, you let your own life break you open the requisite number of times, and one day you turn around and you have it, and the only people who can tell are the other masters and the bodies in the room.

So. Sober ecstatic dance, day two. The DJ that night was a friend of Beatriz's from Berlin — I will call her J because she would prefer I did not name her — and J came out of the booth with no introduction, no microphone, just a single drone tone that she let live in the room for almost three full minutes while people stood around looking at each other like oh, this is happening, isn't it, and then she dropped — and I mean dropped, the way you drop a stone into still water — into a forty-minute opening set that started at maybe eighty bpm and walked us, breath by breath, into a tempo we did not know our bodies could hold.

The CFO from the first paragraph — the one who got the sevensecond hand greeting — was on the floor by the second song. Shoes off. Hair down. Her general counsel was next to her, and the two of them, who have been in conference rooms together for nine years, were dancing like cousins at a wedding. I watched the head of engineering — a man whose body I had clocked on day one as someone who had not been in his pelvis since approximately 1997 — close his eyes and find something around minute eighteen. I cannot describe it any better than that. He found something. The way you find a key in a coat pocket you had forgotten you owned. His shoulders dropped about three inches. He started weeping a little, and laughing, and dancing, all at once, with no stopping in between any of those things, the way children do.

At some point — I think around minute thirty-five of J's set — Beatriz appeared at the back of the room with her cello. We had not planned this. We had planned a pure DJ set. But Beatriz had felt the room and gone to get her instrument, and she stood at the back, in the half-dark, and she started to bow a low drone into the bass that J was already laying down, and the two of them found each other across the room without ever making eye contact, and the room went somewhere that is hard to describe to people who were not there. I will try. It went to the place where the difference between an electronic dance party and a sacred ceremony stops being a meaningful difference. It went to the place where the music and the movement and the field are doing one thing, and the thing they are doing is something the body has been waiting its entire life to be allowed to do.

This is what I mean by epic amounts of fun. People who have not been to one of these can hear the words "sober ecstatic dance" and assume something earnest and slightly painful. It is not. It is the most fun I have on the planet. It is the most fun the guests have, by a margin so wide they cannot stop talking about it for years. The CFO, two days later, would tell me — voice low, a little embarrassed, very moved — that she had not danced like that since college. And I did not dance like that in college, she said. I'm telling you what I wish I had done.

Day Three: Ammanuel, the Olive Tree, and the Lineage

Ammanuel arrived on day three, late morning, and walked straight from the car to the four-hundred-year-old olive tree without speaking to any of us. He stood under it for maybe ten minutes with one hand on the trunk. This is also the work. This is what I mean by care and love for the lineage. He was greeting the tree. The tree, I am quite serious, is part of our lineage on this property. Our agreement with the estate is that the tree has a vote in what happens here. That sounds like a press release. It is not. There

have been retreats where I have made operational decisions because of what I felt under that tree at six in the morning, and those decisions have always, every single time, been the right ones.

Ammanuel led the field practice that afternoon, in the lemon grove, with the cohort sitting in a wide horseshoe. He did not lecture. He never does. He invited a question into the middle of the horseshoe — what is the question your body is holding for your company that your mind has not yet been allowed to ask — and he sat with the silence. That silence lasted, I am not exaggerating, almost six minutes. Six minutes is a very long time when twenty-eight executives are sitting in a horseshoe with nothing to do but be in their own ribcages.

At minute six, the head of product — a quiet woman, fortieish, who had said almost nothing the first two days — spoke. She said, the question my body is holding is whether the person we are about to hire as VP of growth is going to break what we have built, and I have known the answer for three months and I have not let myself say it. And the CEO, two seats away from her, started to cry. Not theatrically. Quietly. The way a person cries when they have just been told something true that they already knew. And Ammanuel did not say anything for a long time. And then he said, very softly, thank you. The body knew. The body always knew. Thank you for letting it speak. And the cohort sat with that for another long while. And then we got up, very slowly, and we walked, and the head of product walked beside the CEO and they talked the whole way back to the main house and by dinner that night they had killed the hire and saved themselves, by their own later estimate, somewhere between eight and twelve million dollars and an entire culture.

This is not a parlor trick. This is what happens when you take the body, the field, the music, the food, the lineage, the land, the time, the trust, the practice, and you weave them into one fabric, and

you let the fabric do its work. Most consulting interventions try to produce that decision through a pre-mortem deck. Pre-mortem decks are wonderful. I have been in good ones. They do not produce that decision. That decision is produced by an olive tree, six minutes of silence, a woman who has finally let her body speak, and a master who knows how to hold the room while it happens. I am thirty-seven years old and I have not seen anything else on this earth that does what this work does. That is the calling. That is why I do this. That is why I will keep doing this until my knees give out, and probably for a few years after that.

Day Four: The Big Night

The Big Night is the part of every retreat that I love most, and it is also the part that nearly kills me logistically, and I would not give up either half of that sentence for anything.

We had the string quartet — four players from the Palma symphony who Beatriz hires whenever we are in the Balearics, and who at this point feel like family. We had a producer flown in from Reykjavik whose name I am not allowed to say but whose music many of you have heard without knowing it. We had a surprise vocalist — a Mali-born singer who happened to be on the island for a festival and who Beatriz, with the kind of casual magic I have stopped being surprised by, had texted at noon and convinced to drive two hours to sing for us. The deal we make on these nights is that the music will deliver the strategy. That is not a metaphor. The lead facilitator and I had spent the afternoon distilling the cohort's strategic insights into a single sentence — in this case, we are not a fintech, we are a trust company that happens to use software, which had emerged in the strategy lab that afternoon and which had reorganized the CEO's understanding of his entire next three years — and Beatriz had taken that sentence and woven it into a sixty-minute musical arc with the quartet, the producer, and the vocalist.

The set started at 10:14 PM. I will remember the time forever because I had just looked at my watch in the wings.

The quartet opened with a slow movement that Beatriz had written that afternoon — yes, that afternoon, she works that way, she is a freak of nature — built around a four-note motif that the producer would later loop and stretch into the bass of the second half. The cohort was sitting on cushions on the dome floor, in a loose spiral, with candles, and the food still on the long table behind them, and the doors open to the cliff. The vocalist came in around minute fourteen. She sang in Bambara. She did not translate. She did not need to. By minute twenty-two, the producer had layered her voice into a slow building pulse, and the quartet had transposed up a fifth, and the cohort was on its feet without anyone having told them to stand. By minute thirty-eight we were all dancing. By minute fifty-one Beatriz had stepped out from behind the quartet with her cello, and she crossed the dome — slowly, eyes closed, playing — and she stopped in front of the CEO and she played the four-note motif directly into his chest at a distance of about eighteen inches for what must have been ninety seconds. I watched his face. He was not crying. He was past crying. He was in the place past crying, where the body has been told the truth so completely that there is nothing to do but receive it. When the motif resolved, he put his hand on her bow arm, very lightly, in thanks, and she nodded once and moved on.

This is the part I get asked about the most. How do you do that? people ask afterwards. How does the music know? The answer is: the music does not know. Beatriz knows. Because Beatriz has spent twenty-eight years studying her instrument, and another fifteen studying the human nervous system, and another six studying our specific work, and she has poured her entire life into being able to walk across a dome on a cliff in Mallorca at 11:05 PM on a Thursday and play four notes to a particular man in a way that re-organizes his next decade. That is mastery. That is lineage. That is a calling. You cannot hire that. You can only become it,

over a lifetime, with teachers, and a great deal of practice, and a willingness to keep showing up.

The set ended at 11:51 PM. Nobody clapped at first. They couldn't. Then the CEO clapped, once, slowly, and the rest of us followed, and then we kept clapping for what felt like a very long time, and then we ate cake and drank tea and went out to the cliff and lay on our backs and looked at the stars until almost three in the morning, and the head of engineering — the same one who had found the key in his coat pocket on dance night — sat next to me on a low wall and said, Sevi, I think I have been asleep for fifteen years, and I said, welcome back, and we did not say anything else for a while.

Day Five: The Closing, and What I Want You to Know

The closing morning is always quiet. Roser made a long breakfast. Pau the cellist played a single piece, very simply, while we ate. We went around the long table and each person spoke for sixty seconds about what they were carrying home. Iyari had handbound twenty-eight little books overnight — yes, overnight, she does this every retreat, with the photographer and a bookbinder we keep on retainer in Palma — containing photographs and quotes from the week, and she gave them out one by one. The CEO gave a short speech that I will not reproduce because it is his and it was holy. We blessed each other. We blessed the land. We blessed the olive tree, which by now you understand was a participant.

And then the cars came, and the guests went, and the team and I sat on the steps of the main house in the late-morning sun and did not speak for a long time, because there is a particular silence after a retreat that you have to honor or you will burn out within a year. I have seen colleagues burn out. I will not. I learned, year three, to let the silence be the silence. We sat there. The chef brought us coffee. Pau played one more thing, just for us, before

he packed up his cello. Beatriz fell asleep with her head on Tomás's shoulder. Ammanuel sat with his hand on the trunk of the olive tree and said gracias, vieja — thank you, old woman — and it was time to go.

The thing I want you to know — the thing I have been trying to say for these four-and-a-half thousand words — is that this is not a retreat. I keep using the word because we have to call it something, and it is the word the market understands. But this is not a retreat. A retreat is something you leave from and go back to. This is something you do not leave from. The five days are a hinge. The hinge swings open onto a different way of being a person in a body in a company in a world, and the hinge does not close behind you when you walk out, because the body remembers, and the field has been re-tuned, and the relationships are now permanent, and the music — the music we made together, the music Beatriz and the quartet and the producer and the vocalist made for that specific cohort, now pressed onto vinyl that will arrive at each leader's home in six weeks — the music will keep doing the work for years. We have research on this. We have follow-up data going back eight years. We know what happens. We know that on a random Tuesday in October, two years from now, the head of engineering is going to be in a difficult one-onone and his body is going to remember the dome on the cliff and the bow arm of a cellist in front of his CEO, and he is going to make a different choice than he would have made before, and he is going to make it more easily, and the company is going to be different because of it, and most of us will never know.

I love this work. I love it the way you love something you have given your entire adult life to and would give again, twice, with interest. I love the lineage I work inside — the somatics teachers and the dance therapists and the field thinkers and the abundance lineage holders, every single one of whom is on the line behind me when I step into a room with twenty-eight nervous systems, every single one of whom paid for what I now get to deliver. I love

my colleagues — Iyari, Tomás, Beatriz, Ammanuel, Roser, Pau, Awa, J, the photographer, the bookbinder, the medics, the Stewards, all of us, this strange mobile family that meets up four or five times a year on a cliff or in a redwood grove or in a desert and does the impossible together and then goes home and does the next impossible thing. I love the guests, who come to us as executives and leave as people. I love the body, which is the smartest part of all of us, and which gets so little credit in the boardrooms where so many of our guests spend so much of their lives. I love the field. I love the abundance. I love the dance. I love the four streams folded into one river, and I love that I get to be one of the people who keeps the river running.

My favorite part of this particular retreat? It is so hard to choose. It might be the seven seconds with the CFO and Iyari's open hands. It might be the head of engineering finding the key in the coat pocket. It might be the four-note motif played eighteen inches from the CEO's chest. It might be Ammanuel under the olive tree, or the head of product letting her body speak after six minutes of silence, or J and Beatriz finding each other across the dome with the drone. It might be Pau playing a single piece while we ate breakfast on the last morning. Honestly — and this is the truest thing I can tell you — my favorite part is the way all of those things are the same thing. The party and the prayer. The pedagogy and the dance floor. The strategy and the song. The transcendental and the transformational not as two flavors but as one inseparable taste, the way salt and sweet are inseparable in a Roser dessert, the way bow and string are inseparable in a Beatriz cello line, the way body and field and movement and abundance are inseparable in a Lila practice that has been done long enough by enough people that it can no longer be pulled apart without dying.

That is the calling. That is what I am writing this from the back of a sprinter van to tell you. I do not know what your calling is. I know what mine is. I know what the lineage gave me, and I know what I owe back, and I know that the universe is, against all reasonable

expectation, dancing itself into beauty through every cell of every body in every cohort I have ever served, and that I get to be one of the people whose job is to notice and to set the stage and to hand out the welcome cards and to walk the cliff at five in the morning and to make sure the cellist's rosin is where it needs to be when it needs to be there.

Lila means play. Lila means this. The beach is still in my shoe. The coffee is still warm. The next retreat is in eleven days, in the redwood compound in Mendocino, and I will be there before the sun, and I will check the welcome letters, and I will check the salt levels in the plunge pool, and I will check the field, and I will begin again.

I love this calling. I love it more than I can say. Come dance with us when you are ready. We will be here. The olive tree will be here. The river is still running.

— Sevi Cliff road, Mallorca, late April. With everything.

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