#008. Three Immersive Experiences Everyone Should Check Off Their Bucket List
Hi friends, family, and extended internet family!
These past two weeks have been insane! I started taking an online writing course called “Write of Passage”. It’s teaching me how to be a citizen of the web and also giving me this awesome community of other online writers. I also started a seven-month leadership coaching program through Landmark Worldwide in order to become more effective in my career and life.
It’s a lot. But I am happy, and boy am I having fun!
Still, I’m committed to publishing weekly. So I need to apologize for my missed week! In order to get back on track, I created a system that will help me fulfill on my unreasonable stand to publish every week. But that means I’ll be publishing Thursday mornings!
In the meantime, here’s the article I wrote this week for Write of Passage. I chose to curate a piece called “Three Immersive Experiences Everyone Should Check Off Their Bucket List”. I hope you enjoy it!
I left Oakland, California as a young adult to immerse myself in the comforts of textbooks and more structured learning. After another eight years of school, I was ecstatic to graduate and to trade the predictability of those comforts to see the world.
I thought I would never come back.
Yet I distinctly remember the feeling I had coming home after that year of backpacking around the world. I was watching a Blue Heron wade around Lake Merritt with its sticky legs, catching whiffs of musk perfume and cannabis as Oaklanders walked by, listening to the synchronous beats of the weekend drumming circle, and moved just thinking to myself, “Wow, this is MY home”.
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” - T.S. Eliot
If there was a moral to the story of that year, it would be that one can learn all the '-ologies' of the world, but life is not just an intellectual game. It is a a full-spectrum immersion that needs to be experienced. You ARE your experiences and your experiences are your life.
Traveling does a wonderful job of providing that experience through exposure to foreign people, language, and ways of being. I think everyone should experience travel underneath the tourist bubble, but that isn’t the only way to have an experiences that will expand and transform who you know yourself to be.
I combed through my memory bank to create this list of three immersive experiences everyone should experience at least once. Each experience is two weeks or shorter, which is the typical amount of time people spend on a vacation. Here is why they made the cut:
Social Proof: When you experience something that positively shakes up your life, you just want to share it with anyone who will listen. The experiences on this list do not have any paid advertising, only word-of-mouth sharing. Through the scale of this person-to-person channel, the scope of their impact has numbered in the millions.
Inclusivity: It’s open to everyone regardless of age, color, disability, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or veteran status. Granted you need to be conscious, comprehend instructions, and be psychologically stable.
Time-tested: I’d like to think that meaningful things stick around. The organizations that deliver these experiences have been around for at least 30 years, enough time to refine and perfect their processes.
Transformational: I loved Coachella, but I didn’t really come out of it a better person. These experiences on the other hand, didn’t just change me, they completely transformed me and I continue to see lasting effects in my daily life. I will remember them on my deathbed.
The first art piece I saw at Burning Man - Big Bully 2013, inviting me to get weird.
ONE: BURNING MAN
Burning Man is a whirlwind nine days of community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance held at “The Playa”, a dried up ancient lakebed turned annual lit-up wonderland in the high deserts of Nevada. From nothing, tens of thousands of participants, who fondly refer to themselves as ‘Burners’, build a temporary city (Black Rock City) that shortly after seems like it was just a dream, with not a trace left behind.
My Biggest Takeaway
My first impression of the people who made up Camp Catmandu was how smart they were. These were engineers, doctors, business owners, DJs, rock climbers, and artists who taught me what it meant to be a multidimensional human, how to use power tools in the AM and dance until sunrise in the PM.
Our first year, we lugged materials 350 miles into the desert and built a giant cat tree. For fun. It was a testament to the magic that came out of a group of people with limited time, money, and energy, but unlimited imagination and dedication. They now form a community of some of my closest friends.
Siddharta Gautama, the Buddha, who rediscovered and shared the Vipassana technique as a way to end suffering.
TWO: VIPASSANA 10 DAY SILENT MEDITATION RETREAT
Vipassana, or “insight meditation”, is a meditation technique said to have been passed down by the Buddha 2500 years ago as a way to end all kinds of suffering. S.N. Goenka, lovingly referred to as “Goenkaji” by students, can be credited for bringing mindfulness to the West and creating this no fluff, no frills way of delivering Vipassana to the masses. Students get room and board in exchange for following a rigorous schedule of meditating from 6AM to 9PM. There’s no talking, no eye contact, no distracting activities. The food is simple and Vegetarian. This format ensured students would get a taste of the deep meditative insights one can experience in monastic life without withdrawing from the world.
My Biggest Takeaway
If Burning Man is one end of the experience spectrum, Vipassana is the complete opposite. This is the ultimate introvert’s getaway. I love turning my attention inward, free from distraction of the outside world, so that I can explore my rich inner world. At many points, the line that separates the experience of the body and the experience of the mind became blurred, but their influence on my life - the patterns of cravings and aversions become clear.
I can credit the ten day retreat and subsequent self-resourcing to having a better relationship with my father, the deep compassion I needed to forgive myself for having cancer, and stop the cycle of intergenerational trauma experienced by my family. So much so that I have been back seven times and counting!
THREE: THE LANDMARK FORUM
The Landmark Forum is 3 eleven hour days of in-person (or online) facilitated self-inquiry. Delivered in a forum format, a facilitator guides participants through a process to discover where and why things aren’t working in life. While it is marketed as one of the oldest personal and professional development offerings online, it is so much more than that! Marriages are saved, burned bridges are mended, businesses are started, and people get breakthroughs in areas of life that they didn’t even know matter to them.
People come out of the forum in shock, but also in relief and in control of their lives again.
My Biggest Takeaway
Before the forum, I was stuck in my career, in relationships, and in life. I just couldn’t understand why all the self-work I was doing from yoga, therapy, meditation, coaching, body-work were not causing a breakthrough. I was still unhappy.
On the second day of the forum, the facilitator took us through an exercise to identify the source of our fear. I realized how I was still stuck fearing of death. Every feeling of overwhelm, fatigue, pain triggered that fear. So I withdrew from the world.
I had imposed so many limitations on myself. I said no to everything - from birthday invitations to yummy foods and chose to keep to myself instead, under the guise of “self-care. I was playing it so safe that I didn’t even know who I was anymore.
All of that, I attributed to cancer. But looking deeper showed me that the fear had rooted much earlier, from the first time I grasped the concept of death and its emptiness as a ten year old.
This hit me like the first time Neo got unplugged from the Matrix. This fault in the coding had stopped me all this time.
That I now have a great open relationship with my parents, that I excitedly pack my schedule with social, professional, and personal things, that I can still experience myself as whole and complete when I “stray” from a healthy lifestyle - these are all benefits that came out of my landmark forum. In fact, even that I’m finally sharing myself through this newsletter after years of talk is because of those three very impactful days.
CONCLUSION
If you can, I recommend going through each as they are designed to be experienced - intentionally and completely. Confront your spec of human experience with a child-like curiosity.
When I think of change, I compare myself to another version in my head. But these experiences do not only change, they transform. True transformation is unrecognizable, like the metamorphosis from chrysalis to butterfly.
And in these moments of transformation, you remember that all along, you were whole and complete.
Thanks for hopping aboard my train of musings! Over and out.
Something pique your interest? Got a question? Feedback?
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I read all your responses.
Until next time - have a happy healthy journey,
Maymie