Angkor Wat, February 2027: The First Retreat
Some news I have been sitting on, and not very patiently.
Alongside the research and the writing, I am opening a new chapter of my work: retreats and trainings in the world’s great sacred places, taught alongside some of the most extraordinary teachers alive. Not retreats about these places. Retreats inside them, with the people who understand them most deeply.
This one did not begin as a business plan. It began with me, on my own, wandering the temples of Angkor. I went to Cambodia to explore the place for myself, and what happened there is difficult to describe without sounding like every brochure ever printed. It was not a thought, and it was not a mood. It was cellular. The place got into my body before my mind had a chance to form an opinion about it.
Andrew Harvey is a dear friend, and when I came home I urged him to go. He did, and he came back describing exactly the same thing: the same cellular reaction, the same sense of being quietly rearranged by the place. When two people who have spent their lives around the technologies of transformation both walk out of a temple complex feeling that it has done something to them, you pay attention. So I rallied the teachers I most admire, and together we have been creating something beautiful around it.
From the 14th to the 21st of February 2027 we will be there: myself and Andrew, with Jim Garrison of Ubiquity University. A full week of practice, teaching and ceremony inside a temple complex built as a map of the cosmos in stone.
And we are going to create something incredible around what this place actually was. The Khmer Empire did not build Angkor as decoration. It built it as the living heaven on earth: an entire civilisation arranged around the conviction that the sacred could be given a geography, that heaven was not somewhere you waited for but somewhere you could walk into. That is the field we will be working in, and that is the story this journey will tell from the inside.
If you have read anything on this blog, you will know why this matters to me. My doctoral research asks whether the ancient technologies of transformation actually do what the texts claim. This is the other half of that question: going to the place where those technologies were built into the very stones, with teachers who can open them, and finding out from the inside.
Numbers will be genuinely small, and details, pricing and booking are coming very soon. If you would like first refusal when registration opens, or you simply want to know more, get in touch through the contact page and tell me you want Angkor Wat. I will make sure you hear before anyone else.
More journeys will follow. This is just the first gate.