Sat Nam Costa Rica

Craziest trip I've ever done / Gateway to middle age yogis

“Be careful when you tell people about this because it comes off as culty and weird,” says Tommy. “The hallelujah thing, the sat nam thing.”

The room laughs. Three of the walls are glass. It’s the top floor of a Hindu castle where jungle mountains hit the Pacific Ocean in Costa Rica. I’m in the back, grinning, pleased by the self awareness and honesty. I’ve been here for a week, doing various group activities that are hard to describe.

We learned and chanted the Mahamrityunjaya Mantra

Om

Tryambakam Yajamahe

Sugandhim Pushtivardhanam

Urvarukamiva Bandhanan

Mrityor Mukshiya Maamritat

I didn’t know what I was signing up for, and frankly I still don’t know. I got an invite, and I like the leader, Tommy. The website looked like a yoga retreat. In some ways it was, and in many other ways it was not.

For me, the experience was opposite land.

In my regular home life, I wake up alone at 8 or 9, stare at the sun, eat some food. Do some stretching, push-ups, whatever I feel like. I eat most of my meals alone, and work mostly alone. I pretty much do whatever I want. On average, I talk to five or six people face-to-face per day. And I eat meat every day.

This week was 6am morning exercises. Sadhana, they call it. Followed by a group therapy meeting that I walked out of multiple times. Followed by vegetarian breakfast. Followed by three hours of lectures and physical exercises. With roughly 69 people at all times, for 7 days.

After a vegetarian lunch is a few hours of free time to nap, shower, or walk down to the beach. Programming starts again at 4. More lectures, workouts and meditations. Followed by a vegetarian dinner, and more activity from 7-9; music and dancing, my favorite part.

One evening was free. My mom and I walked a mile down the beach to the town where we met friends from New England, who were also in Costa Rica for Thanksgiving. It felt good to be at a relatively smaller table, with people in their thirties, talking about anything other than yoga, spirituality, and health recovery.

I was the youngest person at the “immersion” by four years, and 20 years younger than the average age.

Someone thought I was 37.

I learned many things. I learned there are way more kinds of pants than I had ever imagined. I learned Tommy Rosen's wife is hot.

I re-learned how much I dislike workout classes, especially yoga classes. And how much I love music. And hugs. I love hugs.

If you want hugs, this is the place to be. It’s called Gateway to Gratitude.

I’m grateful for food, god, and not dying in a riptide.

I’m grateful that I’m not a talk therapist and never will be.

I’m grateful I got to meet unbelievably beautiful people.

---

I sat with Kia Miller at lunch, one of the co-hosts. I wrote about her in Experience of Anxiety.

Like almost everyone else, she asked, “How’s it going? How’s it been for you?”

“Frankly, this is the craziest thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve done a lot of crazy things.” Her facial expression morphed three times. “In the best way,” I add.

She smiles, as she does all the time. I love it.

“I understand,” she says, in her British accent. “Take what works and leave the rest.”

I like that.

There’s a lot I’m leaving, and just as much I’m taking. Both intellectually and somatically. In my body, heart, lungs, stomach. And sore arms.

Friends, too.

I talked to many of the people on the trip. It was an incredible group. Tommy attracted people from all over who experienced crazy and hard stuff and still somehow have the money and sobriety to be here. A few don’t, but made it anyway. Thank god.

At the final breakfast, I was feeling pretty happy, for many reasons, one being that I get to leave soon.

I sat by myself, eating and thinking.

10 minutes earlier, I told a story to the entire group. It went pretty well.

Bella, a farmer from northern Canada, actually the most beautiful woman you’ve ever met, pulls me over to a big table of women who comment on my share.

“Thank you for sharing”

“That was the best”

“That was perfect”

“That should be in a book”

Little do they know.

“Where are you going after this?” I ask Bella. I see God tattoo’d on her wrist.

“Liberia,” she says. “A friend is asking me for farming advice. But I’ve only been doing it for five years. I’m no expert, and I don’t know what Costa Rican chickens need.”

“Are you going to do anything in Liberia?”

“I don’t have a lot of money left,” she says. “Well, I guess I have my Visa, so I have unlimited money,” she smiles.

“Yes, that’s how it works,” I say, laughing.

Inside, I’m feeling holy shit. I’ve never been to zero or negative money. Can’t even imagine.

That problem is now fixed, I decide. At least in the short term.

“I’m gonna run,” she says. “Do you want me to take one of your plates?”

I could rationalize well why it makes sense to give a cash gift to a “random” Canadian farmer who I met five days ago.

I’ll skip that and just send it.

---

That was yesterday. Today I’m writing by the pool at The Gilded Iguana, a badass hotel for people even richer than I am. I stayed at a shithole hotel last night, for free, because it was so bad. It used to be nice. I invested a small amount into the company that built it. They went bankrupt. So it goes.

I came to Iguana in the morning and now my phone is about to die. Thank god.

One thing I say in the writing coach role is, Let fear be thy compass and laughter thy guide.

I give advice and then take it.

Here’s what I said at the final group meeting

In the circle with fifty people

Carlos speaks, hands me the mic, and plays his wooden flute for the group.

When he’s done, I say to the audience, “Wow, I gotta get a flute.”

They like that.

“The microphone finally found me,” I say.

I haven't shared anything with the group. Everyone is paying attention now, curious to hear what the only 20-something has to say.

Something easy, something funny, something meaningful.

“Hi I’m Chris.”

Hi Chris, they say.

“Today was a big win, I got from my cabin to here without getting lost.”

The level of laughter was appropriate for the mid level joke.

“I don’t use alarms,” I plow ahead.

I see a smiling Kia, a beautiful sight.

“God wakes me up when God wakes me up.”

I’ve been “late” to every 5:55 “morning practice”.

“I awoke this morning and was almost certain it was 5:55. I checked my watch, it was 5:53. Just enough time to get here.”

I take a breath and think of something to say.

“Last night, in this room, during the thunder and lightning, I was thinking… How low, how unimaginably, how…”

I say a prayer in my head. In the name of the father, of the son, and the holy spirit

“The odds of me being here are so unimaginably low.”

People nod. It was the feeling of gratitude.

“I’ll try to tell a story,” I say. “A few days ago, I went down to the beach and into the water. You have to go far out to get to deep water.”

I look around and see faces know what I’m talking about.

“I was walking out and heard,

Trust the process

I was swimming in the big waves, and when I looked back, I saw I was further from the beach than I wanted to be. I started swimming back, but when I looked up, I wasn’t making any progress.

I flashed back to an experience last year of being swept out to sea in a riptide.

I could see a few people on the beach, and I thought, Should I call to them?

Then I thought, Can I stand here?”

I see my friend Chrissy smiling.

“Then I stood up.”

The crowd loves it. I’m totally in the moment.

“And that made sense.

Then I dropped to my knees and started laughing. And I remembered…”

I choke up for a second.

“I remembered, it’s all gravy.

And that made sense, because it was Thanksgiving.”

“It’s very special, to even know that this is a thing that exists.”

Epilogue

“That doesn’t sound that crazy. That sounds like Austin,” my friend Paul said.

Crazy is subjective. It was crazy to me because it was so radically different from my daily life, anything I’ve ever done before, anything I’ve ever seen, or what I expected.

It’s bizarre, really, to be in a hot and sweaty glass room above the jungle canopy with 69 people chanting in Sanskrit - all Caucasian.

Like plucking a kid from Ghana and putting him into an MIT physics lecture. Or putting me in Ghana.

It’s crazy.

I’m not a yogi, never attended an AA meeting, not a 6am person, and definitely not a vegetarian. Early in the week, I exited the compound and walked a mile down a highway to get a piece of chicken.

For most of the attendees, though, this experience was not crazy at all. They were surrounded by their tribe and enjoyed every minute of 6am workouts, visualization, chanting, breath-work, and listening to people share their traumas.

I did not. And that’s okay.

I loved the people I met, the conversations, dancing, the beach, pool, and smoothie bar. I loved seeing how the experience affected people. My conviction is stronger than ever that creating retreat experiences is a valuable service.

But I’m not going to host one in Costa Rica. I understand why they do it there. It’s world-class. But there are equally, or more, powerful experiences to be had in America.

I want to create an event of this caliber, with my own vernacular, no 6am meetings, less people, younger demographic, and steaks for dinner.

I’m hosting True Wealth Weekend in New Hampshire next spring. Join the waitlist here.

Thanks for reading. Have a great day.

Walking to get chicken

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