The Time of My Life: Ammanuel Santa Anna, Luminous

Prosperity, and the Retreat Where Everything Flows from States I want to tell you about the four days I spent on a piece of land outside Ojai with Ammanuel Santa Anna and the Luminous Prosperity team, because if I don't tell you about them I will burst, and if I do tell you about them I will probably still burst, but at least it will be on the page where someone might catch the pieces. This was the Somatic Field Resonance retreat — the one the curriculum calls Lila — and what I am about to describe is the closest thing I have ever had to a peak experience that did not end. It is still happening. It is happening in my chest right now as I type this, the way a song you heard at sixteen keeps playing decades later in the room behind your sternum.

I should preface this with the line that became the unofficial mantra of the week, the one Ammanuel said on the first night, leaning into the microphone with a grin that was eighty percent mischief and twenty percent the kind of mercy you only earn by being burned through: Everything flows from states. He said it like he was passing us a key. He said it like the door had always been unlocked and we had been pushing on the wall next to it for years. Everything flows from states. Not from strategy, not from striving, not from spreadsheets, not from the particular shape of the manifestation diagram you scribbled in your journal at 3 a.m. last Tuesday. From states. From the felt sense of your body. From the field that you, as a body, are. Once that line lodged in me, the rest of the week was just my nervous system catching up to it.

Arrival: The Marching Band at the Gate

I arrived on a Thursday afternoon, jet-lagged in the soul more than the body, with the particular brittle exhaustion that comes from running an organization that has grown faster than your nervous system. I was, to put it kindly, a deeply incoherent field. I had read

Somatic Field Resonance twice on the plane and once on the rental-car drive up the canyon, and I was prepared, in the way one is prepared for surgery, to be operated on by ideas. What I was not prepared for was a marching band.

A literal marching band. Six musicians in mismatched tuxedos, a sousaphone the color of butter, a snare drum, two trumpets, a clarinet, and a bass drum carried by a small woman with the calm of a Zen abbot, met every car at the gate. They played us up the gravel drive. The piece they were playing, I learned later, was a New Orleans second-line tune Ammanuel had specifically requested because, in his words, we are not arriving at a conference, we are arriving at the rest of our lives, and the rest of our lives deserves horns. I parked my car. The clarinet player winked at me. My nervous system, which had been operating in low-grade fight-flight for approximately six fiscal quarters, did something I did not know it remembered how to do. It softened. Just a little. Just enough.

Ammanuel met us in a redwood circle at the top of the hill. He was wearing what I can only describe as a deeply considered outfit — embroidered linen, bare feet, a simple silver ring on his right hand that caught the late sun. He has the kind of presence that does not announce itself. It does the opposite. It quiets the room until the room realizes that the quiet is him, and then everyone leans in. He welcomed us with three sentences. The first was, You have already arrived; the rest of the week is just your body finding out. The second was, We will dance. We will sit. We will eat. We will weep. We will laugh until our ribs forgive us. We will not optimize. The third was, Everything flows from states. If you remember nothing else, remember that, and remember that you are already in one. Then he sat down on the earth and we all sat with him, and for the next eleven minutes nobody said anything, and the redwoods said everything.

Night One: The Welcome Feast and the First Dance Floor

The first night was the welcome feast, and the welcome feast was the first hint that this team understands the technical specs of joy at a level I have never encountered in any other facilitation crew. The food — entirely sourced from a thirty-mile radius — arrived not as plates but as a procession. The chef, a former Michelin sous who now apparently lives on this land as a kind of culinary monk, walked each course around the circle while the musicians underscored each dish with a different musical phrase. The roasted carrots had a clarinet motif. The miso broth had a kalimba. The dessert — a raw chocolate mousse with cardamom and pomegranate — arrived with a single cellist playing what I can only describe as the Platonic form of cello. I started crying somewhere between the carrots and the broth, and I was not the only one. The man across from me, a CTO of a company you have heard of, was crying into a napkin and laughing at the same time. We made eye contact. Neither of us could explain it. We didn't need to. The state had us.

After dinner, the dance floor opened. I want to be careful here, because I have been to a lot of conferences with "evening receptions" and a lot of weddings with DJs and, in my misspent twenties, a lot of clubs, and what happened on this dance floor was none of those things. It was, instead, what would happen if a kirtan led directly into a Berlin techno set, which led directly into a 1970s soul revue, which led directly into a silent disco, which led directly into a Sufi whirling circle — and all of it was held by people who knew what they were doing. The musicians rotated. The DJ — a tiny luminous woman named Asha — read the field the way some people read sheet music. When the room needed grief, she gave us grief. When the room needed jubilation, she opened the jubilation valve. At one point, around midnight, the entire eighty of us were moving as a single organism to a Fela Kuti track, and I had the distinct, completely sober realization: this is what coherence feels like at scale. I was inside Chapter 3 of the book. The coherence cascade — heart to brain to fascia to field —

was not a diagram. It was the floor. We were the cascade.

Ammanuel danced. This is important. Ammanuel danced with us, not in front of us, not as the teacher modeling, but as a body among bodies, sweating, laughing, making the worst dad-moves you have ever seen and somehow making them sacred. At one point he caught my eye across the floor and pointed at his own chest and mouthed the word state, and I almost fell over because I understood. The whole dance floor was the lesson. We were not learning about somatic field resonance. We were being somatic field resonance. The pedagogy was the party. The party was the pedagogy. There was no seam.

Day Two: The Body as Field

I went to bed at 2 a.m. and woke up at 6:30 a.m. for the dawn coherence circle, which on paper sounds absurd and in practice was the most rested I have felt in years. Because the state I had fallen asleep in was so regulated, so warm, so full, that four hours of sleep inside it was worth twelve hours of the kind of sleep I usually have. This is one of the things you learn at a Lila retreat that you cannot un-learn: sleep quality is downstream of state. Everything is downstream of state. Everything flows from states. The dawn circle was held in the meadow with live cello — a different cellist this time, a man named Marcus who was once a touring jazz musician and now is, apparently, this. The morning practice was straight out of Chapter 3: heart coherence, breath pacing, hand on the heart, attention soft, jaw unlocked, the small adjustments to the body that completely re-architect your relationship to the day. Ammanuel guided it in his low quiet voice. He said almost nothing. He said exactly enough. Let the breath be wider than the thought. Let the heart be wider than the breath. Let the field be wider than the heart. You are already in it. You have always been in it. Welcome. I cried again, more quietly this time, the kind of crying that is just the body letting go of years of held

breath in an orderly fashion. The cello held it all.

Friday's morning teaching was Chapter 1 — Your Body Is a Morphic Field. But we did not "cover" it. Ammanuel does not "cover" material. He induces it. We spent two hours in the meadow doing the body-as-antenna practice on each other, sensing fields between the palms, walking up to trees and feeling them reply, walking up to each other and feeling each other reply, which was unnerving and beautiful and, by the end of the morning, completely normal. There was a moment when a woman across the meadow from me — a hospice nurse from Minneapolis — and I did the body dowsing exercise from Chapter 4, and I sensed, with absolute clarity, that her father had been a carpenter. I told her so. She started laughing through tears. He had been. I had never seen this woman before in my life. The body knew. The body knew. Reading about it and being inside of it are not the same skill.

The afternoon labs were where the technical expertise married the aliveness in a way I had never seen. The Luminous Prosperity team includes — and this is one of the most unlikely sentences I have ever written — a HeartMath-trained cardiologist, a former rave producer, a clown-school graduate with an MBA, and a somatic data scientist who can show you, on a graph, the moment your group entered flow. They are all extraordinary. They are also, somehow, all hilarious. The clown-school MBA, whose actual title is Director of Lila, ran a session on Friday afternoon called Embodied Negotiation in which we re-staged a difficult business conversation each of us had been avoiding, but we had to do it as clowns, with red noses, and the entire premise was that the body cannot lie when it is in absurdity. I learned more about my own avoidance pattern in forty-five minutes than I had learned in three years of executive coaching. I will be using what I learned for the rest of my career. I was wearing a red foam nose. The body had no choice but to tell the truth.

At the same time, two tents over, the somatic data scientist was running a session on the coherence index — pulling up, with permission, the live HRV data of volunteers in the room and showing how the data responded to different practices, different musical choices, different group configurations. It was rigorous. It was research-grade. It was also playful, also reverent, also held inside the larger field of the retreat. The technical and the alive were not in tension. They were the same gesture. This is the thing I keep trying to explain to people back home. Ammanuel and the team have figured out how to deliver world-class technical pedagogy inside the conditions of a great party, and the party is not a delivery vehicle for the pedagogy — the party is the pedagogy, and the pedagogy is the party, because the party is the state, and everything flows from states.

The Fire Ceremony

Friday night was the fire ceremony. I am not going to be able to describe the fire ceremony. I will try.

We gathered in a hand-built stone circle as the sun went down. There were eighty of us and one fire. The musicians played a long, slow, sub-bass-heavy piece that felt like the planet itself breathing. We were each handed a piece of paper and a piece of charcoal and asked to write the strategic plan we had walked in with — the actual plan, the one in the slide deck, the one in our heads, the one we had been white-knuckling. Then we were asked to sit with it. Then we were asked, when our body said yes, to walk to the fire and burn it. Not as a gesture. As a somatic event. Ammanuel said, very quietly, you are not burning the plan. You are burning the part of you that needed the plan to be true. I sat with my paper for forty minutes. I watched other people stand up before me. I watched a CFO of a publicly traded supply chain company stand up — yes, that one, the actual one from the canon, she was there — and I watched her walk to the fire with the kind

of slow gravity that bodies have when they know they are doing something they will remember for the rest of their lives. When my turn came, I did not decide. The body decided. I stood. I walked. I burned. I sat back down. The cello changed key. I do not know how the cello knew. The cello knew.

Later that night the dance floor reopened, and what came through it was different than the night before. Looser. More tender. Less performative. Half of us had burned the plan and could not stop hugging each other. The DJ played a forty-five-minute set that started with a Sufi chant and ended with a Beyoncé remix and somehow it was all the same song. I danced with a stranger for thirty minutes without speaking and at the end of the song we just bowed to each other and walked away, and that exchange contained more intimacy than most of my professional relationships. Everything flows from states. The state we were in was love. There is no other word, and I have looked.

Day Three: Embodied Visioning and the Silent Disco

If Friday was the body learning to feel, Saturday was the body learning to listen. The morning teaching was Chapter 5 — Embodied Visioning — and Ammanuel held it with a steadiness that I want to try to describe because it was the most masterful piece of teaching I have ever witnessed. He sat on a small cushion in the center of the circle and he spoke for ninety minutes, and in those ninety minutes he wove together neuroscience, vedanta, attachment theory, the architecture of fascia, the economics of attention, three personal stories, two jokes, one moment of public crying, and a guided practice that took us into our future bodies and brought us back gently. There was no slide deck. There was no whiteboard. There was a man, a body, a field, and seventy-nine other bodies being shaped by the field he was holding.

Halfway through, he stopped, looked around the circle, and said: I want to name something. The reason this is working is not

because I am special. The reason this is working is because we are in a state that allows this material to land. If I delivered this exact teaching at a corporate conference at 9 a.m. with bad coffee and fluorescent lights, half of you would be checking your phones and the other half would be writing it off as woo. The teaching would not be different. The state would. Everything flows from states. And he kept going. And we kept listening. And the field kept doing its work.

Saturday afternoon I had a one-on-one with one of the senior practitioners — a woman named Imelda who has been doing this work for thirty years and looks like she has been quietly sleeping for all of them and is also, somehow, more awake than anyone I know. We met in a tea house at the edge of the property. She asked me three questions in ninety minutes. The third question dismantled my entire theory of how I have been running my company for seven years. She did not lecture. She did not advise. She asked. The body answered. I left the tea house with a rearchitected understanding of my own work and a wet face, and I walked into the meadow and lay down in the grass for an hour because the body needed to integrate, and at this retreat, the body is allowed to need what it needs. Nobody came to find me. Nobody worried. The schedule had built-in space for exactly this. The pedagogy includes the integration. The integration is the pedagogy.

Saturday night was the silent disco, and I had heard about it from alumni in tones that suggested it could not be explained. They were right. Eighty people, three wireless audio channels, three different DJs each broadcasting a different genre simultaneously, and you can switch your headset between them at will. Channel one: ecstatic devotional. Channel two: vintage funk. Channel three: ambient electronic. You move between them. The room is silent except for the sound of bare feet on a wooden floor and the occasional laugh and one person, somewhere, humming. You can take the headset off entirely and dance in the actual silence,

which is a different practice altogether. I rotated through all four states over the course of two hours. I have never been so present in my life. The state was extraordinary. The state was the point. Everything flows from states.

At one point the DJs synced — they had planned it; we had not been told — and all three channels played the same song at the same time, a slow ecstatic kirtan, and the entire room audibly exhaled, and we sang together. We had not sung all night.

Suddenly we were a choir. The music had been waiting for us to arrive at the right state to receive it. The technical expertise of those three DJs was ferocious. The aliveness of those three DJs was ferocious. The marriage of the two was the entire teaching of the week, compressed into one orchestrated moment. I have been in many rooms. I have not been in a room like that. I will spend the rest of my life trying to design rooms like that.