12/02/2025
The retreat will become a haze of shifting recollections; fragments of self, stripped bare and rearranged. The first morning, the body resists. Stiff joints, a restless mind, the static hum of life left behind. The skin prickles under the foreign touch of stillness. The air, thick with the scent of tropics and incense, carries the sound of something ancient, something forgotten.
The days will stretch and shrink in ways that defy logic. Breath will become the metronome, the slow turning of time. Sweat will drip from the curve of your spine as your muscles tremble in morning poses that feel unnatural until, suddenly, they don’t. The hunger for distraction will rise like a tide, then recede. The mind, accustomed to the noise, will panic at first in the quiet. You will count things. The woven strands of the mat beneath you. The veins in a papaya leaf. The sound of your heartbeat.
Memories will surface unbidden, like faces breaking the surface of water. Things you forgot you knew. Things you never wanted to remember. The way your mother’s hands moved when she folded laundry. The sound of your own voice, too sharp, saying something you wish you could take back. The shape of the silence that followed.
There will be a moment, not marked by anything obvious, where the resistance softens. It will not be enlightenment or revelation, but something quieter. A dissolving of edges. A realization that the weight you have been carrying is not actually yours. The breath will move differently in your chest. The sky will seem bluer, the ground more solid beneath your feet.
On the last morning, you will stand at the edge of the rice fields, the mist curling around volcanos in the distance, and feel a presence you cannot name. It will not be peace, not quite, but an understanding. A remembering. The moment will suspend itself in time, a single frame held between the before and after. You will leave the retreat changed in ways too subtle to name but impossible to ignore. The life that waits for you beyond this place will fit differently now. And you will understand, in a way that can never be undone, that you are both the same and entirely new.
