Day Three — The Outlandish Expert and The Party of the Year

Day Three is the day. The day. If you have done one Lila Lab you know what I mean. The day when the container has held long enough that something has become possible that was not possible on Day One, and we use that possibility while we have it.

Our Outlandish Expert this retreat was a former hostage negotiator named Yusuf, who left federal service eight years ago and now mostly teaches conflict de-escalation to people who are not in hostage situations but feel as if they are. He is, no exaggeration, one of the best teachers I have ever watched work. He is calm in a way that makes everyone around him calmer just by proximity. He talks about the tactical empathy frameworks the FBI uses, but he talks about them as love. Because, he says — and he is right — you cannot de-escalate someone you have not first decided to love, even briefly, even in a tactical way. The framework is the love. The love is the framework.

He spent three hours with the team. He had them practice mirroring. He had them practice labeling. He had them practice the strategic silence that, in his actual former job, has saved actual lives, and which, in their job, will save actual customers and actual nervous systems and actual marriages, because — as Yusuf put it — the way you talk to the person on the other side of an argument is the way you eventually talk to the person on the other side of your bed. The room got very quiet at that one. I saw three people write it down. I had already written it down. I write it down at every

retreat he does and I keep meaning to put it on a wall in my house. After Yusuf, we did the applied lab. This is where we take the team's actual hardest tickets from the last ninety days — they brought them, anonymized, in a packet I prepared with their service VP three weeks before the retreat — and we work them in the room with the Outlandish Expert still present. Yusuf coached. Robin coached. I coached. We did one ticket that had been a sixweek escalation about a mis-charged anniversary trip, and we worked it in real time, and by the end of the role-play the woman playing the customer had broken character and was hugging the woman playing the rep, and they were both laughing, and Dwayne was wiping his eyes with a napkin from the snack table, and I was thinking, again, the thought I have at every retreat: this is the work. This is the actual work. This is what we are for.

Then, because Ammanuel built this lineage on the conviction that pedagogy without celebration is just another form of grinding, we threw the party.

God, the party.

The theme this cohort had voted for, in an anonymous poll I sent on Day One, was Disco Underworld — which is a theme I had not seen before, and which our hospitality lead, Elena, had two days to source costumes for, and which she absolutely crushed. The dining hall was transformed. There were sequined gowns. There were horned headpieces. There was a glitter station. There was a live band — friends of the lineage, four-piece, brass-heavy, the kind of band that can make a service team forget they have ever been tired. Talia DJed the after-set. The cohort song — yes, we commission one for every retreat, and yes, the songwriter, a folksoul artist named Junie who has been writing them since 2021, had been quietly interviewing participants in the corners of the lodge for two days — was unveiled at 10:47 p.m., and it was about Gerald.

Gerald, reader, is the apocryphal customer. Every service team has a Gerald. He is not one customer. He is the composite of the worst customer they have ever had and the customer they secretly suspect they failed. Junie had been collecting Gerald stories all week. She wrote a song called "Gerald, I Hope You're Okay," and it was, against all odds, a banger. It had a horn line. It had a chorus the whole room knew within two run-throughs because Junie had written it to be that catchy. It ended with the line Gerald, I hope you're okay / wherever you went after that Tuesday / I forgive you, and also myself / for being human together on the phone. The room came absolutely apart. Priya was on a chair. Dwayne was on a different chair. Robin was leading what can only be described as an interpretive dance interlude. Yusuf, the former hostage negotiator, was doing the Charleston. The Charleston, reader. I have a video. I will not share the video. Some things are sacred.

We danced until 1:14 a.m. The kitchen put out a midnight snack of grilled cheese and tomato soup at the exact moment the dance floor started to flag, which is the kind of detail Elena is famous for. We hugged a lot. We sang the chorus of Gerald three more times in the parking lot under the stars. I walked one of the participants, a woman named Soraya who had been quiet for most of the retreat, back to her cabin, and she stopped on the path and said, "I forgot I was allowed to be this happy at work." I told her she had not been allowed. She had simply forgotten she could take it anyway. She laughed in a way that suggested she was going to remember.

This is the part of the work I cannot put in a deck. This is the part you have to be there for. The party is not separate from the pedagogy. The party is the pedagogy. The body that has danced for three hours in a sequined gown next to a coworker it had previously only Slacked is a body that will, two weeks from now, write a different kind of email. It will write a warmer one. It will

write a slower one. It will write one that knows, in the cells, that the human on the other end is also someone who could, under different circumstances, be on a chair singing about Gerald. That knowing is not transferable through a slide. It is only transferable through a night.

Day Four — The Vows

The last day is integration, and integration is delicate. People are tender. People are slightly hungover, both from the wine and from the openness, which is a different kind of hangover and the more important one to honor. We start gently. Slow somatic practice on the meadow. A long, quiet breakfast where nobody is required to be peppy. A circle in the great room where we ask one question — what are you taking, and what are you leaving? — and we go around without time pressure.

Dwayne said he was leaving the belief that his job was beneath him and taking the suspicion that it might, in fact, be the most important job in the company. He said it with such gravity that I almost wrote it down, but I didn't need to, because it is what we say, in different words, at the closing of every retreat. The lineage has been telling that truth since Ammanuel first stood in a yurt in Costa Rica in 2019 and said the same sentence to nine skeptical service reps from a meditation app. Customer service is the most important job in the company. It is the place the brand is most tested and most proven. We have been saying it for seven years. The world is, slowly, beginning to agree.

Then the Vows.

This is the part I cannot write about without getting a little undone, even now, on the porch, with the maples doing their thing. Each participant writes a personal Service Vow. A real one. A sentence or two that they sign and that another participant witnesses. The vows are theirs. They keep them. We provide the cardstock and

the good pens and a small, lit candle, and that's it. The rest is between them and themselves.

Priya read hers aloud, voluntarily, which not everyone does. Her vow was: I will not handle anyone again. I will only meet them. She read it and looked at me across the room and I just nodded, because there was nothing to add. The lineage had landed in her. She had received it. She would carry it home.

We closed with the benediction from the back of the book — the one Ammanuel wrote in 2020 and which we have read at the end of every single retreat since. Service is love made practical. Every email you write, every call you answer, every problem you solve — it is all love in action. You are the quiet heroes of this organization, the ones who ensure that the luminous promise is kept not just in the peak moments of retreat, but in the everyday moments of human need. Your care is the foundation upon which everything else rests. Thank you for holding it all. I read it. People wept. Dwayne wept in a way he was no longer apologizing for. Priya held Soraya's hand. The CEO of the company, who had flown in for the closing, wept twice, as I mentioned at the top, although I will not tell you what he said when he stood up to speak because he asked me not to and the lineage keeps its promises.

Then we played the cohort song one more time and we danced one more time, in our travel clothes, with our suitcases by the door, for exactly one chorus, because Talia knew when to stop. And then they got on the bus.

What I Take From This One

I have done thirty-eight Lila Labs. This was my thirty-ninth. I will do the fortieth in three weeks, in Portugal, with a different team and a different Outlandish Expert and a different cohort song that Junie is already writing. I love this work in a way that feels unreasonable to say out loud at most dinner parties. I love it

because it sits at the exact intersection of every domain I care about — somatic mastery, dance psychology, morphic field practice, non-dual abundance — and it puts those domains to use in service of the most underestimated humans in the modern company. I love it because Ammanuel, who is now a friend more than a boss, refused from the beginning to let the work be boring, and so the work has stayed alive, and so I have stayed alive in the work.

I love it because of the lineage. Because the somatic sequence I led on Day Two was developed by Joaquín, who learned it from his teacher Peter, who learned it from his teacher's teacher in a body of work that goes back further than any of us. Because the CARE framework was honed by Ammanuel and a former crisis negotiator and a death doula and a Michelin maître d' and a poet, none of whom would have ever sat at the same table without him. Because Junie writes the cohort songs because her mother, a folk musician in the Smokies, taught her that a song written for a specific room is the most honest kind of song. Because Elena learned hospitality from her grandmother, who ran a guesthouse in Portugal for forty years and who, Elena tells me, used to put a single wildflower on every bedside table because guests should always be told, by something other than a person, that they are welcome. I am downstream of all of them. The team is downstream of me. The company is downstream of the team. The customers, eventually, are downstream of the company. The lineage flows.

I love it because we have epic amounts of fun. I am thirty-six years old and I cannot believe I get paid to dance to a song called "Gerald, I Hope You're Okay" at 11:47 p.m. on a Friday in the Catskills with forty-two service reps in sequined gowns. I cannot believe this is my job. The aliveness of it — I cannot overstate this. It is the aliveness of it that keeps me. I have friends in adjacent industries — in corporate L&D, in change management, in HR consulting — and I love them, and I would not trade jobs with any

of them for any amount of money. The aliveness is the compensation. The aliveness is the work. If we ever stopped having the party we would also, very quickly, stop having the transformation, because the body that has been allowed to be ridiculous is the same body that is willing to be transformed. The lila is the load-bearing wall. Every time I forget this I am reminded by a Dwayne or a Priya or a Soraya who, on a porch the morning after, looks at me with the slightly stunned eyes of a person who has remembered they are alive at work, and who tells me, simply, thank you.

My favorite part of this particular retreat — if I had to choose, and I do not really like choosing — was the moment during the Day Three party when Yusuf, the former hostage negotiator, sat down with Priya at the edge of the dance floor at maybe 11:30 p.m., both of them out of breath, both of them holding plastic cups of something, and started teaching her — just for fun, because she had asked — the tactical-empathy mirroring technique on the bartender who was three feet away. The bartender, by the third mirror, was telling them his entire life story. He was from Honduras. He had been a teacher. He missed his daughter, who lived in Texas. Priya was crying. Yusuf was laughing. The bartender was glowing in the way humans glow when they have been genuinely listened to for the first time in months. I watched this from across the room, and I thought: this is it. This is the whole thing in one tableau. The lineage practiced in the wild. The mastery used as love. The aliveness held inside the technique. The technique held inside the lila. The lila held inside the night. The night held inside the retreat. The retreat held inside the lineage. The lineage held inside the long, slow project of returning customer service, in this culture, to the priesthood it has always quietly been.

The bartender came in for his shift the next morning and asked Elena if he could be a guest at our next Catskills retreat. Elena said yes before checking with anyone. Of course she did. He starts in

February. We will save him a seat and a name tag and a stone in the opening fire circle. The lineage flows.

A Final Note, Because the Coffee Is Almost Gone

If you are reading this and you are considering sending your service team on one of these — please do. I will not pretend I am a neutral source. I am five years deep in this work and I would lie down in traffic for it. But I will tell you the truest thing I know: there is no other intervention I have witnessed that produces this combination of outcomes. The CSAT lifts are real. The retention is real. The NPS is real. We have the receipts, and the deck has them, and the case studies have them, and the CFO will be satisfied. But the actual reason to do this is the part the deck cannot hold. It is the part where Priya reads her vow aloud. It is the part where Dwayne wipes his eyes with a snack-table napkin during a role-play of a six-week escalation. It is the part where the bartender from Honduras gets a name tag in February. It is the part where, two months from now, a customer somewhere writes in furious about a charge, and a rep we trained takes three breaths, finds her diaphragm, hears Junie's chorus in the back of her mind, and writes back not as a handler but as a whole human, and the customer becomes a friend of the brand for the next eleven years.

That is what the retreat is for. That is what the lineage is for. That is what I am for, on this porch, in this October, with the maples showing off, getting on a plane in three hours to do it again. I love this calling. I love these people. I love the ridiculous, transcendental, party-and-pedagogy, sequined-and-sacred container we have built. I love that Ammanuel built it stubbornly enough that nobody could talk him out of the bonfire or the live band or the cohort song. I love that we said yes to the bartender. I love that Gerald, wherever he is, was sung about with such tenderness that whatever wound he was carrying when he yelled

at a service rep on a Tuesday is, in some morphic way I cannot prove and absolutely believe in, a little softer this morning. Service is love made operational.

The road continues.

The coffee is gone.

I will see you in Portugal. — Maren Text 3

THE TIME OF MY LIFE: A FIELD REPORT FROM THE LUMINOUS SERVICE RETREAT

Or: How Ammanuel Santa Anna and Luminous Prosperity

Married the Dancefloor and the Dharma and Sent Me Home a Different Person I have been trying, for about six months now, to find a way to describe what happened at the Lila Lab without sounding like I have joined a cult. I have failed, repeatedly, and so I have decided to stop trying. What follows is the truth, told the way it actually happened — the names of the songs, the textures of the mornings, the exact moment on Day 3 when I realized that everything I thought I knew about customer service, and frankly about being a person, was about to be re-patterned at the level of my nervous system.

Here is the thesis, said once at the top so you know where we are going: everything flows from states. Not strategy. Not scripts. Not slide decks. Not even, despite all our professional protestations, skill. Everything — the email you write at 2:14 a.m. to the widow canceling her anniversary booking, the way your voice lands in the ear of a furious customer, the quality of presence you bring to a

Tuesday morning that nobody is paying attention to — all of it flows from the state you are in. And state, it turns out, is trainable. State is contagious. State is the substrate. And Ammanuel Santa Anna and the Luminous Prosperity team are, I am now certain, the most sophisticated state-engineers operating in the customer service space, the wellness space, or possibly the humandevelopment space full stop. They taught me this, and they taught me through the most fun I have ever had with my clothes on.