The Twin Peaks of the Human Experience
What retreats and festivals teach you about the art of living.
📍 Coordinates: Envision Festival, Costa Rica. 🌴
📖 Reading Time: ~5 minutes.
🧉 Vibecheck: (1) Back on the grounds of the great Envision Festival in Costa Rica, incredible to be back here. (2) The Hero100 is waiting for you. Take the leap, overcome the resistance, and move towards your own boldness. An absolutely wild adventure is waiting for you, waiting on that one fateful decision…
There are two things I view as the twin peaks of the human experience…
Retreats, and festivals.
Deep inner work and ecstatic celebration.
The yin and yang of the human heartbeat.
Something about these two beautifully epitomize the quintessence of how to be a living, breathing human.
Confront Reality, then Play with It.
Retreat.
The word says it all. The human spirit needs time to retreat. To pull back from the incessant flow of life. To take stock. To recenter and reconnect. To orient, observe, decide and act.
If we miss this, we run the risk of being dragged along unconsciously by life, swept wherever the winds of culture take us.
Retreats in all forms. Meditation retreats, authentic relating retreats, plant medicine retreats, yoga retreats, darkness retreats, isolation retreats.
Ritualistic, structured, sacred containers for individuals to come together and work through the reality of being human.
The agony and ecstasy of being finite. The direct confrontation of the reality of death. Healing the pain of trauma. Staring down the barrel of deep fears and core beliefs.
I have had the pleasure of attending many retreats in my life, and the distinct honour of leading many individuals on these experiences.
I am hard-pressed to identify more meaningful and sacred moments in my life than bearing witness to someone in a deep healing process.
They have made the deliberate and conscious decision to spend their time, life force, and hard-earned money to come to this sacred space.
To sit with themselves, wholly and completely.
Their body shakes, shedding years of accumulated trauma in convulsive spurts. Their sobs give voice to the primal sadness of the human condition, releasing the weight of existence they have carried with them for so long. Raw animalistic cries channel their rage against the injustices of the world. The delicate softness of their voice when they begin to share their experience. And the inevitable smile and sacred sigh that follow, the final punctuation that arrives only upon the deep realization that everything is okay.
They are okay.
Retreats are a long and difficult process. Time dilates to an incredible extent, hours stretching on for days, days melding into weeks, and weeks seem like a lifetime of work.
Retreats are a rite of passage. A death and rebirth process. The person who enters is not the same as the one who exits. It is a bold, brave, and beautiful decision.
It is a line in the sand, a declaration that you are done running. You stand strong, ground down, and face Reality in all of its rapturous force. No longer avoiding that which is uncomfortable. No place to hide. Standing naked in front of Existence, the fires of Transformation burning away all that does not serve you.
To recognize, definitely and clearly that this is it. Your life is happening. It will not happen again.
There is a sublime beauty in this process that is hard to articulate. Those who have walked through fire are never the same afterward. It is an opportunity to become deeply intimate with yourself. With all of you. To witness yourself in your strength, power, grace, and beauty.
Retreats reconcile everything in life. All the pain is shown to be the cost of admission into realms of wisdom and splendour.
And when you have gone through this initiatory process, when you have embraced the reality of death and the fragility of life, when you realize that everyone who has ever existed shares these same fears, wounds, dreams, and desires, and when you recognize that the time you have left is a sacred gift, there is truly only one thing to do:
Celebrate.
Festival.
“Hard times require furious dancing.” — Alice Walker
Ram Dass said it best when he said, “We are all just walking each other home.”
The reality of that statement must sink in.
We are all lost. Momentary flickerings in the cosmic night. But for now, we are here. We are together. The human family. The living biosphere.
We share our pain, and we will share our joy.
Festivals are the second of the twin peaks of human existence. Where we devote our time, energy, and attention to creating a celebration. Life is a gift. We honour it through celebration.
When life gets tough and we lose sight of this gift, that is exactly the time when we must celebrate most. Hard times require furious dancing.
We create a sacred container of celebration. We feast, we laugh, we dance. An alchemical mixture of light, sound, bodies, music, art, community, the elements, and celebration.
Festivals channel the most archaic and primal techniques of ecstasy and transcendence. Booming sound. Dancing bodies. Howling humans. The night sky in all it’s glory. Shared experiences, community, comraderie.
The experience becomes a living breathing organism itself. It is a container to lose yourself, to go beyond yourself, and to come into holy union with the fabric of reality and the gift of life.
If you’ve ever attended a retreat or a festival, I wonder if you feel the same way. There are innumerable beautiful moments to life, but for me, personally, these are the twin peaks of the human experience.
The pendulating extremes that make life worth living. Deep realization, and deep celebration.
I am currently summiting one peak, the festival. When we return, we will soon begin our ascent of the second peak, retreat. The Hero100 is an undertaking into yourself. A heroic quest to discover who you are, what you want, and take real massive action towards grounding that in reality.
We begin on April 1st. Overcome the resistance, lean into your excellence, and join us on this adventure together, united as one living being.
“Their body shakes, shedding years of accumulated trauma in convulsive spurts. Their sobs give voice to the primal sadness of the human condition, releasing the weight of existence they have carried with them for so long. Raw animalistic cries channel their rage against the injustices of the world. The delicate softness of their voice when they begin to share their experience.”
This part hit me like no other. It’s surfacing a huge desire to participate in retreat