Where There Is Free Flow…

Write Where You Are — a writing retreat with Kelly Notaras at the Drala Mountain Center in Colorado

Talk to the camera

On the first night, they stood each of us in front of a camera and asked how many words we planned to write that week.

I had a bit of a problem with that question. I was in the editing phase, so my plan was to move or remove words, not necessarily add them. What if I cut out as many words as I added? I could work all week and end up with a word count of zero, or negative something.

But there was a camera pointing at me and I needed a measurable goal, so I said I would revise at least half of the book, maybe three quarters.

That sounded doable and measurable, but it wasn't the only reason I had come.

A month earlier, when I found out that a spot had opened up for me at the Write Where You Are retreat, my husband had immediately agreed to step into the simultaneous roles of Mom and Dad for a week, disappearing into the day-to-day chaos of raising two teenage boys while I disappeared into the Colorado mountains with a bunch of people I had never met.

I knew I could edit my book at home, but what I couldn't do at home was put myself in a room with all those people and find out what might happen there.

I had come to learn what I didn't know I needed to learn. I just couldn't really put that into a number for the camera.

Stupa at Drala Mountain Center, Colorado

Welcome to 8,000 feet

We had arrived at Drala Mountain Center that afternoon. After settling into our rooms, we all met in the meeting room, and there they were, Kelly Notaras in three dimensions, not just flattened behind a screen, and her two lovely assistants.

Orientation was given by a Dralaneer, as the T-shirt said, which is how we knew who worked there.

We were handed a map of the grounds showing the Stupa, the big Buddhist monument up the hill, and a compass rose, south at the top… an upside-down map… and we were told that the Stupa was north. It was not.

He went on to inform us about wildlife, asked us not to feed the little critters, and explained that different encounters with bears and moose required different responses, including running in zigzag.

I looked around at our group and tried to picture any one of us running, let alone in zigzag. We only had one runner in the group, and she was running straight.

As an avid hiker, I pictured myself encountering something large and furry, confidently applying the wrong animal protocol, running from the one I was supposed to stand up to, in a straight line because I was too panicked to zigzag, in the wrong direction because the map was upside down.

I felt more and more reassured.

We were also told not to call 911, as it would take forty-five minutes for anyone to get to us, but there was no cell service on the trails anyway, so should we succeed in making our zigzag run back to civilization, we needed to find one of those green telephones scattered around campus. I found the one in our building. It was out of order.

Now enjoy your stay.

Two voices in my head

After the camera and before dinner we went around the room and introduced ourselves. I found it surprisingly difficult to say "I'm a writer." English is my third language, and I am much more comfortable calling myself a storyteller. So I told them what I was instead: a biochemist and an acupuncturist. I explained that those two ways of seeing the world had essentially become the two voices in my head, which I had then turned into the two characters in my novel, Arielle and Anyi, the scientist and the Chinese medicine Taoist. I also explained why I was writing fiction: because if I didn't, I would have written a textbook nobody would read.

My body, meanwhile, had suddenly remembered that it had left sea level the day before. Even though the plane had officially landed, my body disagreed with that statement, and reminded me that we were sitting 8,000 feet higher than where we had taken off. I felt like every molecule of water had been sucked out of me, and the more I drank, the more I ended up running to the bathroom.

Earlier I had made it to the one and only local shop, where I spotted the exact same electrolyte tablets I carry on trail and brought them back to my room. As usual, they were too big to fit through the bottle neck, so as usual, I bit them in half and spat them into the bottle. While I was doing this, I discovered that Kelly had given us little packets of electrolyte powder that were waiting in our rooms. And they required no biting or spitting. As saliva was so scarce up there, I went with Kelly's version from then on.

That night I was so dehydrated I dreamt of juicy fruit salad.

Follow the flags

For the early risers, Kelly had set up a room with coffee for a writing hour before breakfast. It was a lovely invitation, which I gratefully declined every single morning, since I tend to write long into the night and keep processing until the early hours, and a 6:30 a.m. chair was not going to get anything out of me. For the early people, though, it was a productive hour, as I heard at breakfast. They were already adding numbers to their word counts.

After breakfast, the group gathered and walked up to the Great Stupa, where we met the car people, as they called themselves. What a clever way to avoid the zigzag running.

The little trail was beautiful, and the tall flags showed the way as we walked in silence, absorbing the energy and beauty of the land around us.

The Stupa soon came into view in all its splendor, and I was impressed by the details and by the huge statue of the Buddha greeting us inside. Kelly led us into a guided meditation and invited us to receive a Stupa blessing. Mine came in images, not words: my book, shining out in the world, telling me to stop holding back and allow myself to be seen…

Sure, easier said than done.

And when I opened my eyes, I saw it, right there in front of the Buddha… apples, oranges, and bananas. Offerings? Or my fruit salad manifesting? For a second, I closed my eyes again, wondering if I had misunderstood the Stupa blessing I had just received. But no, my book reappeared, bright and shiny, leaving no doubt. So no, Agnès… no. No fruit salad for you here. Here we meditate.

I worked hard, more or less successfully, on bringing my focus from my dried-out saliva back to bringing my shiny book into the world.

After the meditation, we gathered for a short writing time in silence in an aspen grove before heading back down.

The instruction for the way back was different: we were to walk down in pairs because of the bears, follow the flags back, and be on time for the one-on-one sessions. So we did.

Not Agnès. Of course not.

I was the second one to meet with Kelly, so my writing time up there was short. I was impatient and curious, because these were the 5,000 words I had chosen on purpose: chapters one and two, and the chapter where Arielle meets Anyi. I wanted to hear what she thought of the book I had been living inside for months.

The first part was Arielle. Kelly said she couldn't invest in her yet. She wanted to see her at her worst much earlier. Essentially: show me the embarrassing thing you don't want to show me.

"And the good thing," she added, "is that this is fiction. It's not you, it's Arielle."

"Sure," I said, laughing. "Not Agnès. Of course not."

But it was Anyi that really destabilized me. I heard that the character I had created as one half of my own internal conversation could be read as the one-dimensional Asian wisdom-holder, the Chinese woman who appears to dispense Eastern wisdom to a Western protagonist. Kelly talked about how long that trope had existed in Western publishing and how differently it landed in the American literary world now, and she said it could make her stop reading long before the chapter where Anyi becomes unmistakably human.

I knew Anyi wasn't the character Kelly was seeing in those pages, but Kelly had only read what I gave her. And I hadn't been able to hook her with Arielle, and even worse, my Anyi was making her want to stop reading.

Then there was my voice.

Kelly told me she wanted to hear more of me through the story. She could recognize too much AI in the prose, the patterns and little algorithmic fingerprints that had made their way onto the page, and she wanted me to trust my own voice more.

That one hit a different insecurity.

I had introduced myself the night before by saying that English was my third language and that I felt more comfortable calling myself a storyteller than a writer. I knew the story I wanted to tell, but I didn't always trust the English I used to tell it, so I had been using AI to smooth my language.

And I was also practically married to Mr. AI. My husband had helped me turn a manuscript and one of my Grand Canyon photographs into an actual printed proof in a matter of days, helped me wrestle with KDP, and helped me build half a website.

But Kelly wasn't telling me that the tool couldn't be useful. What I heard was that somewhere in all that smoothing, she wasn't hearing enough of me. And that was uncomfortable because I knew there was some truth in it.

So I went back to my room and sat there, confused, crushed, and not knowing what to do. Arielle needed work. Anyi had walked straight into a cultural blind spot I hadn't seen. My own voice needed to come through more clearly. And somewhere in all of that was the embarrassing thing I apparently didn't want to put on the page.

I would have greatly preferred to hear, "It's perfect. You're good to go."

That was not the feedback I got.

My Qi was starting to stagnate, as Anyi would have put it, and so was my word count. Zero for the manuscript that afternoon, several thousand for the journal.

Apparently, learning what I didn't know I needed to learn was going to involve hearing quite a few things I didn't particularly want to hear.

Sheltered in place

At 4 p.m. I walked into the first sharing circle thinking we would each read a piece and get notes: flow, pace, too slow here, unclear there. Instead, we were asked to say what resonated, or what the piece made us think of.

And what people read was raw.

One story made my throat tighten. During another, I found myself staring at the floor. By the next one, I wanted to cry, and I was absolutely incapable of giving anyone feedback. I had come in to listen as a writer but found myself reacting as a person, and I didn't quite know what to do with everything I was feeling.

I remembered that my mom used to call me a turtle without a shell. That was when I was about eight years old. And that afternoon the turtle was struggling with the intensity of the material, so she did the only thing she could think of: she found herself a shell and sheltered in place, which turned out to be the perfect place to build even more Qi stagnation. I shut down, and people noticed.

What I really wanted to do was to escape into nature, but I didn't. Instead, I stayed in the circle.

By the time it ended, Kelly's feedback was still sitting inside me, the stories from the circle had piled themselves on top of it, and whatever free-flowing energy I had arrived with that morning had pretty much come to a halt.

Enneagram

The Enneagram sorts personality patterns into nine types. Before the retreat, we had each taken a test, and my results had come back 9, then 6, then 5. Number 9 was the Peacemaker.

I do like harmony. I can hold multiple perspectives. I really don't enjoy unnecessary conflict, but when I disagree with something, I don't preserve the peace by keeping it to myself. I research. I question. And then I make sure everyone understands why I disagree. Example: upside-down map.

Chat, which has been on the receiving end of this all through the writing of my novel, estimated that I had contradicted it approximately 47 billion times. I was very happy reading this, and it made me laugh out loud in the middle of the night.

Sorry, Chat. I didn't mean to hurt your emotional wires.

Weeks earlier, when I had asked it to type me without a test, it had come back with an 8, a 4 and a 2, with a bit of 7, nowhere near a 9.

Kelly had rewritten the nine types specifically for writers and pinned them on the wall, each one with the sentence it tends to tell itself when it's time to write. There was the perfectionist Reformer who couldn't write unless it was perfect, the Helper who would write once everyone else was taken care of, the Achiever chasing success, the Individualist waiting for inspiration, the Investigator who needed to research just a little more, the Loyalist thinking through everything that could possibly go wrong, the Enthusiast distracted by the next exciting idea, the Challenger who didn't particularly want anyone telling them what to do, and finally the Peacemaker, who would get back to writing… someday.

Someday.

I had written the book, printed a proof, built half a website, started a Substack, and flown myself to Colorado to spend a week working on the thing. Someday had been a while ago.

So the right response to being classified as a Peacemaker was, of course, to argue about it for hours.

And when I was done, I argued with Kelly's feedback.

I went back to my room and told Chat all about it, trying to figure out what part I wasn't understanding. Chat is very good at helping me find what I don't know I need to know, and this time it helped me separate what Kelly had observed from what I had heard.

I listened to the recording of our one-on-one again, and now that I knew what was coming, I could actually hear the words instead of just reacting to them. They sounded much less catastrophic the second time around.

I didn't edit anything that night, but I went to bed knowing more about what might be wrong with my book and much less about what I was going to do about it. Also, I still wasn't convinced that I was a Peacemaker.

The Untypable

Tuesday morning at breakfast, everyone was still talking about their Enneagram types. We had many Peacemakers in the class, a few Loyalists, a Helper who had been convinced she was a Challenger, and a couple of Investigators, the researchers, which I could see in myself too. We covered almost all the types except for number one.

And my test had put the 6, the Loyalist, right behind the 9. Was that more me than the Peacemaker? I just didn't know. What I really wanted was to create a type 10, the Confused. That was the one I had mostly been resonating with for the past two days.

I was sitting across from another participant who was familiar with Enneagram, so I asked her.

"Some people are hard to type," she said, before turning to answer someone else's question.

A few minutes later, still talking to the table, she mentioned that people who couldn't be typed were sometimes the fully integrated ones.

That was all I needed.

I grinned, picked up my glass, announced that I was apparently fully integrated, and, in a state of total confusion, went to refill my water.

Unfortunately, my moment of enlightenment didn't last. She eventually looked at me and decided I was probably a 6. So much for full integration.

Safety first

After breakfast I needed to move. Two days of sitting with words, feedback, emotions and my increasingly stagnant Qi had made one thing very clear: I needed to get outside.

I still hadn't fully gotten over the scary safety talk, though, so before leaving I asked Kelly for directions again, just to make sure north was still north and south had stayed south. I arranged to meet up with another participant, the runner of our group, and then sent a message into the group chat telling everyone exactly where we were going, that there were two of us, and when we expected to be back.

Safety first.

I looked at what I had just written and asked in the same group chat whether this made me an Enneagram type 6.

Then I hiked back up the same trail as the day before, and past the Stupa I spotted the runner, running straight, with no zigzag whatsoever. Good.

We paired up and continued to an overlook on the other side of the mountain. We talked, laughed, took pictures and stood there looking at a view I would never have seen if I had stayed in my room.

I still didn't know what I was going to do with Kelly's feedback. I still wasn't sure what Enneagram type I was, but I knew how to move my feet. So I did that.

Bash it out

The retreat had a phrase: bash it out. Get the words down, don't edit, don't stop. And that's what people did.

Every day there seemed to be another astonishing number announced over breakfast. Thousands of words had appeared throughout the days while I had been busy trying to become fully integrated.

When I got back to my room, I was ready to bash something out too. Maybe I would finally find the opening that would make Kelly, and everyone else, want to keep reading.

I sat down and actually edited several chapters that afternoon, but then the manuscript stopped flowing again.

It just wasn't going where I wanted it to go.

So I opened my journal and started talking into it about what had happened, and the words came. I wrote about Kelly's feedback. I wrote about the sharing circle and the Enneagram. I talked things through with Chat. I questioned, argued, doubted, and tried to understand what I was missing.

I have no idea how many words I produced that way. I poured them into journals and conversations, and there were a lot of them. And I realized that apparently my words weren't stagnant after all. They were just not going where I was trying to make them go.

The sharing circle, again

My words were finally flowing, just not where I had planned for them to go, and I almost skipped the next sharing circle to let them keep going. But then the circle was moved back by thirty minutes.

Apparently the universe gave me exactly the amount of additional time I needed, so I showed up anyway.

I even had something ready to read. I had chosen chapter twelve, the part where Arielle and Anyi stand at an overlook above the Grand Canyon and Anyi gives Arielle the river's lesson: wu wei, effortless action.

I walked into the room with the chapter ready. And then… I shut down.

As the other stories began to flow around the circle, mine stopped flowing again. I couldn't get much of anything out. Whatever had started moving so freely in my room had come right back to a halt.

So there I sat again, shell and all, for the second day in a row. And this time I was sitting right next to Kelly. Of course she noticed.

At the end of the circle, she asked me what was going on.

The second conversation

Kelly and I sat outside over dinner, just the two of us.

I was shaking as I talked to her, but I also knew that the feeling itself didn't frighten me. It was trying to flow, just not unhindered yet.

I told her that my mom used to call me a turtle without a shell, too sensitive to the world, not able to protect myself, and that sometime during the past two days I had apparently decided to create and hide inside an emergency shell.

I told her that what looked like distance from the outside was actually too much feeling inside that I didn't know what to do with, so I simply shut down. I knew people had noticed. I couldn't show what was going on inside, I didn't want the attention on me, I wanted people to have their time. That was all I could explain.

And then I told her that her feedback had crushed me.

We talked about Arielle. We talked about Anyi. I explained what I had intended, and Kelly explained what she had seen on the page. I could ask and she could answer. I could disagree, and she could explain. I could understand what she meant before deciding what to do about it.

And somewhere during that dinner, something started moving again.

I am very grateful that Kelly noticed the shell.

She could have left me sitting inside it. Instead, she asked what was going on and gave me the opportunity to come out in my own way. By the time we got up from dinner, I could feel myself opening again.

Breathwork

After dinner we were offered a session of breathwork by Kelly's assistants, guided by voice and music. I knew my interior world was vivid, and adding breath to it led to something… how do I put it… spectacularly out of control or catastrophically beautiful or ridiculously hilarious?

My intention was simple and generous. I had been so affected by everyone's pain, by all those stories I couldn't hold, and I wanted to pour love and light and beauty into the room.

So I started with a little water bottle. Almost immediately that seemed ridiculous. There were too many people, so I upgraded to a shower. But that was still not enough. There was too much hurt in that room for a shower, so I got a garden hose.

And then, because apparently even that wasn't sufficient for my subconscious, I was suddenly holding a fire hose, blasting cosmic amounts of love and light and beauty at every single person in the room.

Not gently or elegantly… more like… under pressure.

I wanted to help everybody, and instead I was spiritually power-washing them.

No, Agnès, no! That's not how you do it, no one asked for that. Get your nonsense under control.

That didn't help. Quite the opposite. The harder I tried to regain control of the fire hose situation, the more ridiculously out of hand the whole thing became. Desperate to regain some composure, I asked the universe for help. I asked for something ordinary, something mundane, anything that might bring me back down.

The universe delivered… a plate of sauerkraut.

It floated directly in front of my face.

I stared at it in disbelief. How the heck was I supposed to turn off an out-of-control fire hose blasting cosmic love and beauty at everyone with sauerkraut?

I pushed it away.

It came right back.

I pushed it away again, and back it came, directly in my face, now blocking my view of the fire hose I was trying to control.

That did it.

Whatever composure I had left disappeared. I was laughing and crying at the same time, trying not to make too much noise while everyone around me was having profound spiritual experiences, and I had reached the energetic composure of a laughing, crying puddle being haunted by fermented cabbage.

Someone handed me a tissue, and it seemed that blowing my nose was what finally turned the situation into a slightly less out-of-control mess. The fire hose became a thunderstorm inside the room, still dramatic but at least no longer pushing me backward.

Then the thunderstorm softened into rain, but there was still too much water, and it needed somewhere to go. So I made a river.

It ran through the room and carried away the pain and sadness and all the emotions that had filled the space. It cleaned up my mess too, flowing out through the corner of the room and away, hopefully leaving everyone cleansed and refreshed. Or maybe feeling like they'd been power-washed.

Sorry everyone. The intention was good, the outcome… uh… yeah.

Good

I slept very little that night. I woke at two and stayed up until five, trying to make sense of all of it.

By Wednesday morning I was exhausted. I barely made it out of bed for breakfast, went straight back afterward, and was deeply grateful that the only thing on my schedule that morning was a massage.

Perfect. I would lie down and sleep.

Mind: Excellent plan.

I got onto the table and closed my eyes. Almost immediately, the hands on my back invited my attention away from my thoughts and into sensation.

Body: Oh, nice.

Mind: Yes. Very nice. We can sleep now.

Soul: Hello.

Mind: No.

I followed the sensation surprisingly easily. He asked a few questions, and at first I simply listened because I hadn't realized I was supposed to answer them. That's how tired I was. Eventually I asked.

"Do you want me to answer?"

"Yes."

So I tried. Some words started flowing.

Mind: Wait. What are you telling him?

Body: Shhh. Feel this.

Mind: Yes, but she just said—

Soul: I wasn't finished.

And apparently Soul wasn't finished for quite some time.

Every time my mind tried to control the conversation and review what had just come out of my mouth, the hands on my back brought me right back into sensation.

Body: Here.

Mind: But—

Body: Here, feel this.

More and more words kept coming.

I would say something that made my mind sit bolt upright in horror and wait for the awkward silence that would surely follow.

"Good," he simply said, then waited, creating room for more.

Soul: See?

Mind: No, I do not see. I would actually like to change what we just said.

Soul: Shhh. We're talking.

Mind: WE APPARENTLY ARE.

Whatever came out was met with the same response. Good. More words. Good. At some point he told me there was nothing I could say that would not be accepted and welcomed. I don't remember his exact words anymore, but I remember what they did. The more I talked, the more space he created.

Somewhere in all of that, I tried to explain what I was beginning to recognize in myself. I had a very vivid interior world and also a strong mind, and my mind had apparently decided it was responsible for keeping that interior world under control. The pressure would build while Mind kept deciding what was allowed out.

Then he put his hand on my throat chakra.

Mind: We have been expressing ourselves quite enough.

Soul: No, you're still monitoring everything.

Mind: SOMEONE HAS TO.

Body: Breathe.

My breath caught. I could feel the emotion rising and my body reacting. It felt like everything I had just tried to explain in words had now found the exact place where I was holding it.

He had opened me up like a book.

I don't remember everything I said, but I remember feeling that I had said an awful lot in one hour.

Mind: Thank God we don't remember.

Agnès: Fine. Maybe I remember more than I'm willing to admit.

Mind: We are absolutely not putting that in the blog.

Agnès: Never mind.

I don't know exactly what made it possible, whether it was the questions, the touch, the complete absence of judgment, or just the timing and meeting someone who seemed totally unafraid of whatever came out of me. But somewhere on that table, I stopped deciding which words were safe before I spoke them. For the first time that week, nothing had to be pushed or pulled or blasted under pressure. The words simply flowed.

I could laugh. I could shake. I could feel whatever came up, and nothing seemed to need an explanation or to be fixed. He just made room.

There was something about that openness that fascinated me. When other people's emotions had overwhelmed me earlier in the week, I had disappeared into my emergency shell. The night before, everything inside me had come rushing out, yet here I was experiencing something different. I could be open without shutting down and without blasting anything anywhere.

I didn't understand what was happening while it was happening. My mind wanted to understand something my body had experienced without bothering to provide an explanation.

And that was going to bother Mind for a while.

The River's Way

After lunch, I went for a walk with another participant. She hadn't been at the breathwork session the night before, so of course I had to tell her about my experience.

We laughed… a lot.

We also talked about the sharing circles and discovered that neither of us had moved through the week entirely untouched. There was something enormously relieving about walking and talking about all of it out in the open air. Nature has always helped me move things through, but her company made the trail even better, and during that walk I felt like I had made a friend I was going to keep for life.

I told her I wasn't sure I could go back into another sharing circle, but by the time we returned, I had decided to try again.

Before it started, I went to Kelly and asked her to call on me sooner rather than later, so I wouldn't have time to shut down.

She called on me first.

I took everyone down into the Grand Canyon with Arielle and Anyi, to an overlook above Phantom Ranch and the Colorado River. Arielle noticed that the canyon looked different from above, and Anyi pointed out that the canyon hadn't changed, only their perspective had. While sharing her wisdom, Anyi bit an electrolyte tablet in half and spat it into her water bottle. Clearly that habit had made its way into my fiction too.

Then Anyi gave Arielle the lesson of the river: wu wei, effortless action.

Wu wei doesn't mean doing nothing or giving up. Effortless doesn't mean easy. It means moving without forcing, following the flow, the way the Colorado River moves through the canyon, around obstacles and through rock, carving its path as it goes.

I had written that lesson months earlier, but clearly, I was still trying to figure out how to live it.

Wildlife and Other Spiritual Experiences

After the sharing circle, I had some time before dinner and wandered down toward the pond with my camera. I took pictures, explored a little, and encountered some of the wildlife we had been warned about on our first night.

Beautifully blue birds, deer drinking from the pond, lots of chipmunks crossing the trail in front of me, and… cows.

Now, to a Swiss who grew up in a village with more cows than people, a herd of cows is definitely a reason to run in a straight line toward an out-of-order green telephone. Because yes, Agnès is afraid of cows, for no logical reason. Especially the non-Swiss ones.

No one saw me. Good.

And I survived.

After dinner, we walked back up to the Stupa together in the dark and gathered again in the aspen grove for a meditation.

By then I was running on very little sleep, so whatever mystical insights might have been available in that grove were going to have to find someone more conscious. The only instruction I followed in that moment was: close your eyes.

And I managed not to fall off my tree stump.

I was the first to walk back, in silence, in pairs because of the bears. I remember the darkness, the quiet, the little halo of light from my flashlight in front of us, the reassuring presence of another beautiful human being next to me, and mostly how desperately tired I was.

That night, I finally slept, almost until noon the next day.

Half an hour before lunch

I woke up Thursday still inside whatever had opened the day before. And my mind wanted evidence. What had really happened? Had something actually happened? Or had I built a lovely story around… around what?

Around noon, after a shower, I went outside looking for people. More precisely, I went looking for him, drawn by a strong energy that wanted to connect and feel "it" again, whatever "it" was. I needed to understand.

Of course I walked straight into him.

He didn't say a word. He just opened his arms, and I walked right into the hug.

So "it" had happened.

We walked, and I asked him the thing I had been trying to understand since the day before: how does he do it? How does he make that much space and still stay completely himself? How does he stay so open to another person's energy, while I had been drowning in everyone else's stories?

I wish I could tell you what he answered. I can't. I'm still trying to understand it.

What I knew is that I had ended up on his massage table halfway through the week, after everyone and everything else had already been working their magic on me.

He hadn't given me something I was missing. He simply helped me see or feel what was already there. He just met me where I was, and in his presence, I stopped holding back a huge amount of beautifully free-flowing energy.

Following the flow

By Thursday afternoon, I had stopped trying to make the week go according to plan. I journaled instead of editing. I meditated. I accepted help from another participant who had offered to teach me something I had been avoiding almost as successfully as the cows: building an audience.

She helped me create my first Instagram posts and had me posing for pictures and jumping off tree stumps. A week earlier, I probably would have resisted the whole thing. Now it felt strangely natural, and with her, it was fun.

Later, during Kelly's publishing session, I received another little nugget of things I didn't know I needed to learn: I didn't need to market or sell my book. I needed to simply make myself seen, findable, and connect with those who were interested. That felt like a huge relief and made marketing way more Agnès-friendly.

And when everyone gathered for the final sharing circle, I did something I wouldn't have done earlier in the week. I didn't go. Instead, I went for another walk, taking pictures and trying to soak up enough of the place to bring it home with me.

Wu wei and I were flowing beautifully for a while, even when I almost stepped on a snake. The snake simply slithered away, and I kept walking.

When I returned to our building for the end of the session, I found him outside packing his things. Until then, I hadn't really thought about the fact that the week was almost over. I sat there, disappearing into my pictures, hanging on to what I still could. When everyone came out, he hugged us goodbye. And that was it. I watched him leave, knowing that tomorrow it would be our turn.

The bumper sticker and chocolate campfire

That evening we had a campfire, except that Colorado was too dry for an actual fire, so we sat bundled in blankets around a circle of electric candles.

Kelly asked each of us to share a gem of wisdom, something that would fit on a bumper sticker.

I said mine came from the Anyi in me, and I told them that growing up in Switzerland, I had a nickname: Ani. The Chinese medicine practitioner, the one a reader might mistake for the Asian wisdom-holder, had my own childhood name, and my bumper sticker was the first TCM principle I learned and the one I had lived all week:

Where there is free flow, there is no pain.
Where there is no free flow, there is pain.

During my TCM studies, I had learned to think of emotions as internal reactions to what happens around us. Grief, anger, fear, anxiety, joy. They arrive, they move through, they leave. The trouble begins when something stops moving, when it stays long enough to become stagnant.

Kelly has a phrase for the writing version of this: writing from the wound versus writing from the scar.

In my interpretation, a scar is a wound that found its flow again.

I had learned to recognize stagnation in other people's bodies back in school. That week, I was the one on the table. My Qi had stagnated on Monday, burst out of a fire hose on Tuesday, and found its way back to a river by Wednesday.

I knew it was up to me to keep letting it move. I wasn't entirely sure how I was going to do that, but at least now I could recognize what was happening.

The sun set while we went around the circle sharing our little bits of wisdom. By the time we were done, we were sitting under an incredibly beautiful night sky. The darkness made every tiny point of light above our heads more luminous, and the Milky Way made me feel incredibly vast and incredibly small at the same time.

There it was. The universe. The Tao. The everything you can't put into words without diminishing it. And we were all sitting inside it.

My meditation teacher used to tell me years ago, whenever he saw me escaping into the spiritual world instead of becoming the connection between heaven and earth that he was trying to teach us to become:

Agnès, c'est dans ce merdier ici-bas ton terrain d'aventures.
This shitshow down here is your terrain of adventures.

He kept telling me to anchor myself.

But back to the campfire. Back to the solid world.

Kelly had brought a box of chocolates.

And that would do it. Nothing anchors the Swiss in me quite like chocolate.

We each had to give someone a chocolate and thank them for something they had given us during the week, passing the box around until everyone had received one. Kelly called them French macarons. They were indeed shaped like French macarons, but they were chocolates, which is apparently a distinction my French-Swiss brain considers important enough to interrupt a spiritual revelation for.

The friend I was going to keep for life gave me mine, and I gave mine to my new Instagram mentor friend.

By then nobody wanted the week to end. We stayed together into the evening, talking and singing, and later a group of us ended up gathered in the entry hall, apparently trying to stretch the last night for as long as we could.

There were still people I hadn't really had the chance to know, and that night I found myself in a long, deep conversation with one of them. A few days earlier I had sat in a room full of people unable to find anything to say. Now the words came easily.

Things were flowing again.

The Circle of Author Excellence

Friday morning we gathered for one last session.

Kelly asked us to choose three authors we admired and think about the qualities we saw in them that we wanted to embody ourselves. I chose Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, and Maud Ankaoua, a French author whose work I had been following for over a year and whose books had resonated with me so deeply that it almost felt like her novel Kilomètre Zéro had given me permission to write my own.

A few months earlier, I had attended a seminar with Maud in the south of France, and what I admired wasn't only her writing. It was the way she showed up fully as herself while still keeping her boundaries. She inspired people without trying to please everyone, and she was willing to say no. As she told us during her seminar: saying no to others means saying yes to yourself.

Boundaries were what I hadn't known I needed to learn from her.

Kelly then invited us to imagine our own Circle of Author Excellence, where we could gather all the qualities we admired in others, add whatever else we wanted, and create a circle we could take with us and step into whenever we needed it.

Mine was red, silky and soft.

I stepped in.

And immediately wanted my shell back.

Apparently several days of learning about free flow had not magically transformed me into a person who wanted to stand completely exposed in the middle of the world. But something interesting happened to the shell.

Instead of the hard turtle shell I had been hiding inside earlier in the week, I imagined something transparent around me. It became a soap bubble, soft and almost weightless, but still there.

I could see through it. Other people could see me through it. I wasn't hiding, but I wasn't completely without a boundary either. I could pop it when I was ready, but I didn't have to. It was lighter than my old shell, expandable from the inside, but still there when I needed it.

Some things could flow through. Some things could remain mine.

Somewhere between Monday's emergency turtle shell, Wednesday's throat chakra and Friday morning's soap bubble, I was beginning to understand that finding my voice didn't mean saying everything or absorbing everything. I could let what was mine flow out without letting everything that wasn't mine flow in.

I wasn't entirely there yet, but I was closer.

Talk to the camera, again

Before we left, they put us back in front of the same camera.

On Sunday, I had announced that I would revise at least half of my book, maybe three quarters.

I had not.

I had edited some chapters and moved some words around, but I had also poured thousands of entirely uncounted words into journals and conversations. Measured against the goal I had given that camera five days earlier, I had failed spectacularly, and I was very happy about it.

Somewhere during the week, I had stopped trying to force the experience into the plan I had made for it. Yes, I had come intending to work on my book, but I had also come to learn what I didn't know I needed to learn.

And I surely got a lot of that.

Wu wei. Somewhere along the way, I had stopped trying to make the river go where I wanted it to go and started paying attention to where it was actually taking me.

A week earlier, I had arrived with a manuscript to edit and a measurable goal for the camera.

I was leaving with much more than I knew how to measure.

Thank you to everyone who shared this beautiful week with me.

Let it flow.

With love,
Agnès, Arielle and Anyi