My second time at Burning Man was an epic experience. It's somewhat remarkable, considering that I rated my first burn at a paltry 6.5/10.

The first time I went to Burning Man, I was expecting to be awed by the art, culture, and experiences that it had to offer - and left feeling like it was cool but unnecessary.

This time, I entered it with a completely different perspective: I wanted to use Burning Man as an opportunity to hold up a mirror to myself and see what I might discover within.

Summary

In one sentence, this was the most self-focused week of my life.

It was the first time I could disconnect from all things technology, turn my focus inwards, and consistently ask myself: What do I feel like doing? What feels alive right now? Where should I go?

I let go of the need to “find friends,” try to hang out with anyone, or make any commitments. I paused my daily photos and writings and have no proper recordings of anything that happened other than my fuzzy imperfect memory and hand-scribbled notes.

My goal headed in was to focus on a couple of things: play, transition, embodiment - and I accomplished all three!

To rid myself of FOMO, I decided that I was going to invest my time exclusively in three spaces: My camp, the Anahasana Village, and the Playa.

Almost every day, I focused on workshops - a combination of activities (improv contact dance, acro yoga, anything with movement and touch) - Tantra (workshops on boundaries, desires, self-love, shadow-work, emotional release) - with some sprinkles of spontaneous adventures (a visit to Costco, Windsurfing the playa, and Hunting for Snow Cones.

In the evenings, I’d go out mostly on Solo Adventures in the playa, leaning into discomfort, accepting the present, and going with the flow!

Highlights:

• Spontaneous Date from Temple. I was doing an evening solo bike adventure biking around, ended up at Temple, and sat there waiting to see if anything would come up. At some point, a cute girl sat next to me and had a little cry. I want to hug her, but it feels inappropriate, so I stand up, leave, and go for a walk around the outside perimeter of the temple. I spot her coming out, putting on a onesie. I ask her if she needs a hug, and she replies: Not really, but I’d love one anyways! I ask her what’s her intention for the night, and she replies: To go to the porta-potties. I ask if I can accompany her, and we waltz over. While walking, she asks me my intention - I say it’s to lean into discomfort. She tells me that she doesn’t have a bike with her, and I decide to ditch my bike too, and we spend the evening hopping from one art car to the next, finding miso soup, a tea house, and a variety of small art installations. The evening ends with me walking to her bike before walking to my own and getting back to camp around 4:30 AM. A simple, beautiful evening of magic and connection. (Minx, if you're reading this, reach out!)

• Latihan - a slow-motion (near)naked contact dancing while blindfolded. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was walking into - but it was beautiful. You wore clothes over the parts of you that you didn’t want to be touched while some 70 people wandered in a 25x10 foot area, blindfolded in slow motion. You had your arms outstretched, hoping to find a body, a spark of human connection. You touched mostly with the back of your palms, arms out-stretched hoping to bump into someone with whom you could experience a moment of connection. Every moment of touch was accompanied by a feeling of excitement. Sometimes, people would be “busy,” and the brief periods of contact would last just a couple of seconds before you wandered off... but a couple of times, you’d find a body that was equally drawn to yours, and you would find someone willing to explore curiously back. Without the eyes, judgment of the other on who they might be, what they look like, old, young, stylish or not... vanished. All that remained was the quality and reciprocity of human connection. By the end of the experience, we collectively opened our eyes and realized that we had no idea who we had spent our time with. It was a beautiful and pure experience of human connection.

• Playa Walking. One night, I planned to hitchhike across playa. Sadly, I was rejected by four different art cars - and eventually gave up on the plan. Rather than let myself wallow in disappointment, I chose instead to give myself a game: To play with anything I stumbled across (swings, rock climbing walls, slides…) and to say yes to anyone that invited me to do anything. Leaning into the discomfort of having a plan go awry and making the best of it was a fun practice. I got to see the four moons of Jupiter through a telescope, eat Pho on the top of a four-story home-made art installation, enter a cube of mirrors and get bounced around, rotate on a spherical geodesic dome, run down a 20-foot-tall balance beam with no railing… and so many more. It was a beautiful metaphor for my life - things rarely happen how I want them to, and even when they don’t, there’s so much beauty and joy to be found anyways if I lean into it.

Experiences / Activities / Insights:

• Breath-work + Ice Shower. I always learn something new every time I do any kind of holotropic breathing. This time, I had a realization that my core desire to find “alignment” in my life was inaccurate. How aligned I was in my breath and body was important, yes, but even more important was the experience of breathing in alignment with myself - while in community with others. In other words, the word that resonated more fully was that of Harmony. Aza Raskin then gave me a beautiful metaphor: Alignment is like tuning the strings of an instrument… while Harmony is the dance between the player and the receiver. Before the ice shower, we were invited to reframe our experience: We were not there to be cooled by water. We were there to heat the ice water up. Life isn’t happening to us. We’re happening to it. One final thought I was left with: If the universe sees the world through our eyes, what do we want it to see?

• Contact Improv Late-night dancing - I’ve never been much of a dancer or an improviser. I find both very challenging, but after learning the basics of contact improv (the relationship between my body, the floor, and maybe others), I realized how easy it is to be embodied while dancing with another. Contact improv dancing is essentially two bodies in constant contact, dancing, pushing, pulling, and flowing with one another. One evening, I taught a couple of lady friends how to dance. Within a couple of minutes, we were able to move in sync… and ended up flowing, dancing, and moving for hours… something I’ve rarely been able to do in partnership. Intentionally moving from head to body was a really beautiful experience.

• Tantra Speed Dating. Picture this: A room of 100 dusty people (65 guys, 55 girls) doing 20 or so embodied improv exercises (eye-gazing, massage, mirroring, throwing away, or calling in specific moments…) for well over an hour. While I didn’t match with anyone, I had the most FUN ever, playing with other adults. I realized how much of my dating is purely intellectual rather than energetic. It has made me much more curious to explore the energetic short-term compatibility and presence of two beings - rather than exclusively looking through the world exclusively for long-term intellectual entanglement.

• Going to Costco to find a Soulmate. There is a camp on playa called Costco that helps you find a soulmate. Together with Kimberly Han and Katie (reach out to me if you see this!), we filled out a 15-minute questionnaire, followed by a 15-minute interview - before being matched to someone we had to go and track down. I found my soulmate pretty easily, and she gave me a set of dice. One I could roll that would send me to some specific playa coordinates. My interviewer said I was her favorite candidate, which made me feel like all this practice of being present and embodied paid off. The icing on top: She was familiar with my work when I described it! I loved the format so much, and wish this kind of matchmaking existed in real life.

• Windsurfing the Playa during a raging whiteout was an amazing experience. Seeing people fade in and out of your vision while traveling at 20mph powered by the wind alone, was magical and surreal. While windsurfing, I invited myself to express my excitement by whooping and screaming in excitement - the way I had seen Marshall Hayes do in the past to invite excitement into a space. Embodying that excitement makes something exciting even better. I was particularly stoked to bike with Marshall Hayes later in the week in a total whiteout, and despite the shitty biking experience, was able to muster an equal amount of excitement, purely through the expression of voice and the intention of acknowledging and expressing that joy. Oddly enough, celebrating what feels like the end of the world just makes me come alive.

Workshop Takeaways:

• Learning about theErotic Blueprint helped me to realize both how little I know about my sexuality and how bad I am at articulating my desires. The five different ways people get turned on are Sensual, Energetic, Kinky, Fucking, and Shapeshifter. The chances that two people are an exact match are pretty low, which means that we must understand ourselves and express our desires. Once we understand each other, we can take turns giving and receiving. Somatically practicing with the folks we were partnered with by simply expressing how we wanted to be touched for three minutes was a surprisingly challenging exercise and something I definitely need to do more thinking & practicing.

• The Dark Power Workshop I did was unexpectedly cathartic. It involved unleashing your rage, pain, and anger at a person in front of you that embodied someone or something you hated. As someone who lives very much “in the light,” - I had never realized how much shame and fear are attached to my shadow. Fear, that if only others knew of the darkness within: Would they still accept me for who I am? It was such a relief to see all these other seemingly nice people around me holding that same anger and rage.

• Participated in a “ForgivenessWorkshop", where one person had to talk to another as if they were speaking to a person they hadn't forgiven. I was paired up with someone whose friend killed herself while making him listen. For 15 minutes, he recounted the story of how alienating of an experience it had been, how pained he was by the experience, and how much of a struggle it had been to move past it. By the end, I hugged him and apologized on behalf of her. The experience was unbelievably intimate and vulnerable. The entire room was in tears. When it was my turn to share, I didn't have anyone I needed to forgive... but realized that there were things that I hadn't forgiven myself for. It was a pretty raw session.

Regrets

• I didn’t take anyone’s contact info. I only gave mine out… which means I gave up agency to follow up with awesome humans post-event.

Guilt

Burning Man is such a paradox.

As an activist and environmentalist, it was clear how unsustainable I behaved, based on the number of items I purchased exclusively to survive in the oppressive 40°C+ dusty desert heat and to participate in the festivities.

While I did opt to stay in a tent without A/C or swamp coolers rather than a gas-guzzling RV, I still flew myself over from the other side of the world to shower in baby wipes, dress expressively, and participate in single-use art designed for ephemerality.

In many ways, burning man is a microcosm of what it means to be a modern human in a capitalist world. The most sustainable thing we can do is to opt out of anything but the bare necessities. Do we refuse to participate in anything outside of our core beliefs and values and never get to experience what we didn't know we didn't know? Or do we sample the range of human possibility and potential to upgrade ourselves to do better work in our everyday lives?

Does participating in something we know to be unsustainable make us a hypocrite, or does it just make us human?

I struggle with the paradox of living and participating in a system that I know to be deeply flawed every single day. Participating in the Burning Man experiment doesn't feel very different to participating in the experiment of living as a first-world, privileged human. We want to live and love fully, and we want to do so in a way that elevates everyone around us - but the systems in place only set us up for short-term success.

The only way forward, I can think of - is to ensure that we learn as much as possible from each and every moment that we chose to live. To constantly strive to do better, knowing full well that it will never be enough. And to hope that at the end of the day, the net impact we have on this world once we bite the dust, never to rise back up - is enough.

Burning Man is a paradox. I am also a paradox.

In Conclusion:

Overall, I left Burning Man feeling much more embodied than when I entered it.

I explored sensuality in a way I didn’t even know was possible, but never built enough of a container of trust to explore my sexuality.

I’m very happy with the ratio of pleasure/discomfort that I experienced - and feel like I used my time in a way that felt aligned with my intention.

My biggest challenge was a lack of harmony with the place I camped. It was too big, had too many people, so it never felt like returning home. It had too many private hang-out areas, which meant fewer opportunities for serendipitously building deeper connections. And its gift to the playa (party experiences) didn't particularly resonate with how I wanted to show up.

I think I did a pretty good job taking care of my body, balancing sleep, nutrition, and experiences... minus getting COVID for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic.

I didn’t make the connections I thought I would but deepened the ones that truly mattered.

I’m curious to continue integrating what happened over the next few weeks and see which are the stickiest parts I can hold on to.

I guess the summary is that this burn, for me, was 10/10. Even though some things didn’t play out how I wish they did, they played out beautifully nonetheless.

Action Items:

• Pick up Contact Improv Lessons in Montreal

• Plan to attend ISTA Level 1 Training Session

• Make a list of Selfish Desires

• Create/seek out routines for Harmony in everyday life

• Going to read The Embodied Man

• ~Attempt to track down Minx and Katie~

People

• Neal Ludevig and I kept running into each other - at camp, at workshops. Though we only met for the first time at Burning Man, his constant emergence felt

• Aza Raskin and I had some fantastic conversations about being more embodied. He also gave me a fantastic exercise to try out. The next time I entered a room and felt out of place, I should play a game with myself. Talk to the first person I make eye contact with. The minute there's a lull in the conversation, tell them: "I'll see you later," and walk to the next person you make eye contact with. Rinse and repeat for 30 minutes.

• Marshall Hayes

• Adrian Solgaard

• Kimberly Han

• I was able to show up for Joshua Kauffman in a moment of vulnerability, and it felt good to just be there, be available, and continuously bump into him. Interestingly, Josh is the person that turned me on to Anahasana, which radically reshaped my burn experience.

• Dan Lior & Crew randomly bumped into each other at Anahasana, and I loved how they just showed up in support of me. I still remember the moment when I was thanking them for looking after me, and Nicole said: “No. Thank you for your work.” How amazing that the work I do would be recognized and paid forward to someone I barely knew.

• Katie Gilmur and I had the opportunity to connect as we meandered our way through Costco.

• Minx

• Christopher Krohn

• Courtney Cardin and I shared a moment of connection as we waited for Jenny Stefanotti's wedding to start.

• Amy Pankenierseems convinced I'm a healer. Curious to explore that more.

• Oshan Anand and his tea setup reminded me of how a simple tea set could anchor a deep meaningful conversation.

• Harper Carroll shows up with the most beautiful energy. There's something to be said about

• Max Ventilla shared his HEART framework around healthy relationships.

  • Here: Being present

  • Expression: What you find unique and special about the other.

  • Aware: Of what’s going on

  • Routines and rituals: To help you stay connected

  • Turning to conflict instead of turning away.

References:

Context:

Tags: #index#WIP