Something happened to my body when I entered Bayon. I still don't know exactly what it was, and for once, I don't think I need to know. Almost immediately I began losing my usual sense of physical control. I would become intensely hot and then cold, my body would shake, and my consciousness seemed unable to remain within the familiar boundaries of myself. The closest description I have is that I kept flying out of my body. I couldn't gather myself or make myself return to normal, and even now my memory of those hours is strangely fragmented. and we spent about 6 hours there... I could give the experience a spiritual explanation and call it an activation, an energetic opening, or a response to the field of an ancient sacred place. I could move in the opposite direction and reduce it to heat, exhaustion, travel, dehydration, nervous-system overload, or suggestion. Both explanations would require me to claim something I don't actually know. What I know is much simpler: my body responded to Bayon in a way I had never experienced before. 

That day our work was organized around four elements: fire, air, earth and water. We moved through different places in the temple, working with each element separately, and this is where the experience becomes difficult to describe without sounding as though I am trying to convince someone of something. I am not. I can only tell the sequence as it happened. During the work with fire, the heat became almost unbearable. When we moved to air, a powerful wind came. During water, it began to rain. And during earth, earth physically fell on us from above! You can't make stuff up! These were not visions or sensations inside my body. They happened in the material world around us. Cambodia is hot, tropical weather changes quickly, wind and rain obviously happen, and old temples contain plenty of loose earth. I understand all of that. I also know what it was like to stand there while one element after another seemed to manifest physically around the practices we were doing. 

This distinction has become increasingly important to me because I no longer think coincidence has to become proof in order to have meaning. Too many "coincidences"! Something can remain unexplained without becoming supernatural fact, and something can have a perfectly ordinary explanation without becoming meaningless. We seem to have a peculiar need to force unusual experiences into one of two categories. Either the universe was responding to us, the temple was activating us, invisible forces were arranging the weather, and therefore we have proof of another reality, or it was simply heat, wind, rain and coincidence, and therefore nothing happened. I find both positions strangely limiting. I was there. I know the sequence... I know what happened around me, and I know what happened inside me. I can leave the question of causation open without throwing away the experience itself.

During the fire practice, I suddenly became intensely aware of my heartbeat. It was beating so hard that I could feel my whole body moving with it... Like a wave... My heart was not my heart anymore. I literally felt it separate form me. And it was beating on its own...  Then one woman came toward me...  with her huge eyes and a "crazy" look behind them... She is a small woman, and when she embraced me, her heart seemed to be somewhere near my belly. Something opened in me immediately and I began to cry. I looked at her and experienced the strangest and clearest sense of recognition: “I know you from the inside! I know you as my daughter.” I am deliberately not trying to explain that sentence. I don't know whether souls recognize one another, whether people carry relationships across lifetimes, or whether something in my nervous system, intuition, imagination, or another part of consciousness for which I have no language produced that experience. I only know that for those moments I did not experience her as a woman who I had recently met. I knew her... Not biographically, but from somewhere inside... My every cell recognized her... We both sobbed... all day we held hands, and chatted quietly on the benches talking about our lives and families. She felt so "dear". 

Later came the work with water, and this became one of the most important moments of the entire day for me. I was standing with my eyes closed, my palms were burning, and there was such an intense sensation moving through my body that I felt almost like a waterfall... Of course rain was coming at that moment too.  My hands were positioned as though they were holding the space around me, although I wasn't consciously trying to do anything, my eyes were closed. When I opened my eyes, I saw that another woman was going through a powerful process nearby. and my body felt her process long before I opened my eyes, subconsciously I was allowing the "flow" to pass through me with ease... When I opened my eyes and saw that her body was shaking, I realized how much I could feel! I also realized that Polina couldn't get through this process and her heart was at the limits.... While I was holding my hands over her as if I was that waterfall now, Natasha came over and held her. Normally a situation like this could immediately activate the part of me that wants to help, understand, intervene, carry, or make sure the other person is all right. This time I didn't move. I could feel Polina very strongly, but I didn't feel that I needed to interrupt what was happening to her. I simply remained where I was, with this extraordinary sensation moving through my hands and body, and felt that somehow my own steadiness was enough. 

And then I understood why the image of a waterfall had appeared so strongly. The day before, at Phnom Kulen, I had stood under the waterfall and experienced its enormous physical force.  I chose to interact with the force and force chose interact with me and my force. The water had entered me, and through the wound on my body my blood had entered the water. I was claimed by that land. That experience had completely changed my perception of giving and receiving because there was no longer a clear boundary between the two. Now, standing in Bayon and watching another woman move through something powerful, I suddenly experienced the same relationship from the other side. The waterfall had not tried to save me. It had not adjusted itself to me, interpreted my experience, decided what I needed, or taken responsibility for what happened when I stepped into it. It simply flowed, and because I entered its field, for a moment I became part of that movement... 

Standing there in Bayon, I felt that I could do the same for another human being. I didn't have to become Polina, absorb what she was feeling, stop her process, or decide what it meant. She had entered my field at a moment when I happened to be standing there, open and steady, and I could simply allow her to be there. This touched something very deep in me because I have spent much of my life confusing service with doing. If someone is suffering, help. If something is broken, fix it. If someone is overwhelmed, carry some of it. If someone enters your field, become responsible for what happens next. But maybe service is sometimes much quieter than that? Maybe it is the ability to remain sufficiently present and sufficiently yourself that another person can go through what belongs to them without you needing to stop it, fix it, explain it, or make it yours?

That realization gave me a completely different understanding of empathy. I can feel another person without merging with them. I can be affected without becoming responsible. I can remain available without taking over. There is a profound difference between presence and rescue, and I think I had spent years moving between the two without always noticing where one became the other. The image that came to me in Bayon was not a wall protecting me from another person's experience, but a riverbank. The riverbank does not stop the water and does not become the water. It gives the movement a place through which it can pass. For the first time, service began to feel less like something I had to perform and more like a quality of presence: I can feel you and remain myself.

By late afternoon the atmosphere in Bayon had changed. The temple was closing, visitors were leaving, and the light was becoming softer and darker. Earlier the guards had been watching us because we were obviously not behaving like an ordinary tourist group. We were VERY strange group! At different points they had asked us not to sing and "moan" so loudly, and we knew that our presence and practices were attracting attention. Yet throughout the day something peculiar kept happening. When we entered certain parts of our work, there would suddenly be a window in which the space around us emptied. The guards would move away, people would disappear, we would complete what we were doing, and afterward the ordinary activity of the temple would return. I don't know why. I don't need to turn it into a supernatural story. I only remember noticing the pattern. 

Eventually, after the temple had officially closed and most people were gone, we reached a sacred well where rainwater collected after running through the ancient stone structures, somehow the irrigation system was thought through to the point where the rain water would flow through all 54 Buddha heads and would be collected at this one place... But the temple was closed.... everyone left... except us... it was getting dark... and we all wanted to wash ourselves with this sacred water! We all said out loud: "we want water!" Our guide said that it was not possible because everyone left. We said again: "we want water!" Then... one of the guards appeared out of nowhere carrying a bucket. This was especially striking because these were the same guards who had spent part of the day monitoring us and limiting what we could do. Now, instead of telling us that it was time to leave, he came to help us. He told us that for a strange reason he needed to come back with the bucket... he drew water from the well for us, and blessed us. I remember the atmosphere of that moment more vividly than the words: the almost empty temple, the gray sky, the wet ancient stone, the enormous faces of Bayon surrounding us, the day disappearing, and this man who had previously represented the boundary of what we were allowed to do suddenly becoming the person who brought us water. 

There was something incredibly beautiful about the simplicity of it. No voice from heaven, no dramatic revelation, no supernatural spectacle. Just a man with a bucket appearing at the end of a day in which water had already become such a powerful language for me. I think we often ruin miracles by demanding that they prove themselves. We expect something impossible to happen so that we can finally say: “See, now I know.” But maybe the experiences that change us most deeply are often made of completely ordinary materials: rain, wind, another person's heartbeat, a stranger's kindness, a body suddenly reacting in a way we don't understand, a bucket lowered into an old well at sunset.

I have spent much of my adult life in professional environments where critical thinking is essential. Law, privacy, compliance and risk require the ability to distinguish evidence from assumption, fact from interpretation, correlation from causation. I value that part of myself enormously, and Cambodia did not take it away. If anything, it made me realize that critical thinking and openness to mystery do not have to destroy one another. There is another possibility between believing everything and dismissing everything: witnessing. I can say exactly what happened, admit what I don't know, pay attention to what it did to me, and resist the temptation to close the question simply because uncertainty makes the mind uncomfortable. After all, we had come to Angkor at the Equinox, and balance was at the very center of our work. Equal light and darkness, neither one eliminating the other. Maybe the balance I was being asked to find was not only between the elements we were working with, but between two ways I have learned to meet reality: the mind that questions, verifies and asks for evidence, and the part of me that can stand inside an experience I cannot explain and still recognize that something meaningful is happening. I didn't need to sacrifice discernment in order to enter mystery, and I didn't need to destroy mystery in order to remain discerning.

Maybe that is why Bayon affected me so strongly. My mind could not organize the experience fast enough. My body was already responding while I was still trying to understand what I was responding to. The elements seemed to be playing themselves out around us while another process was happening inside me. People appeared strangely familiar. My hands burned. Another woman's body shook while mine became unexpectedly steady. Guards who had been watching us disappeared and returned. A man arrived with a bucket of sacred water after the temple had closed. None of these things by itself proves anything, and together they still do not constitute proof. But proof was no longer what interested me... I didn't care how I looked to the outside world. 

Earlier, years before my trip, a friend of mine who is clairvoyant told me that something would profoundly change me in Asia and that afterward I would begin noticing, or as he put it, “hearing,” nines. I remembered those words in Cambodia because suddenly I was in Asia, standing inside Bayon, surrounded by a numerical structure in which nine seemed to appear everywhere I looked. In the traditional description of Bayon, the temple was conceived with 54 towers, each bearing four monumental faces: 54 reduces to 9, while 54 × 4 gives 216 faces, and 2 + 1 + 6 brings us back to 9. The causeways leading to the gates of Angkor Thom were lined with 54 devas on one side and 54 asuras on the other, 108 figures together, another number whose digits return to 9. Across the five gates, that symbolic scheme gives 540 figures, again 5 + 4 + 0 = 9. Even Angkor Thom itself was laid out as a vast square approximately three kilometers by three kilometers, an area of 9 square kilometers, with Bayon standing at its center. The central Buddha of Bayon, seated beneath the naga Muchalinda, was approximately 3.6 meters high: 3 + 6, once again, is 9. What makes the pattern even more interesting is that 108 itself is one of the important sacred numbers in Hindu and Buddhist traditions; 54 is half of 108, and 216 is twice 108. So the sequence I was encountering was not simply 9 appearing randomly everywhere, but 54 → 108 → 216, a repeating numerical architecture that kept circling back to the same number.

I want to be precise about what I am saying here. All if it was my observation, my symbolic reading of what I encountered there (too many precise numbers though). But this is exactly what made the experience so fascinating to me. Years earlier, someone had told me that Asia would change something in me and that I would begin to “hear and see” nines. I had not spent the intervening years searching for them, and I certainly had not traveled to Cambodia because of that prediction. Yet there I was, inside Bayon, already physically overwhelmed by the place, surrounded by 54, 108, 216 and 9, noticing the pattern almost as if an old sentence had suddenly become audible again. I still don't know what to make of it. And by that point in Bayon, I was beginning to understand that I didn't have to. I could notice the pattern without turning it into proof. I could allow it to be meaningful without pretending I knew what it meant. It became one more part of that extraordinary day, another invitation to pay attention before deciding what I thought I knew. You might enjoy the view here and here.

There was a time when I thought spiritual development meant acquiring more answers: understanding the pattern, recognizing the lesson, reading the sign correctly, learning how reality works beneath its visible surface. Bayon gave me almost the opposite experience. Maybe maturity is sometimes the ability to stand in front of something extraordinary without immediately possessing it through explanation. To remain curious without becoming gullible. To remain intelligent without using intelligence to flatten everything we cannot yet understand. To allow the rain to be meteorology and still experience it as sacred. To accept that a physical sensation may have a neurological explanation and still let it change the way we understand ourselves. To know that a guard may simply have been doing something kind for a group of strange foreign women and still receive the bucket of water he carried toward us as a blessing, right at the moment when we all said out loud: "we want the water!"

I don't know why the wind rose when it did. I don't know why the rain came during water practice. I don't know why the earth fell on us during earth practice. I don't know why the guards seemed to disappear at certain moments. I don't know why a woman I barely knew felt like my daughter. I don't know what was happening physiologically when my body shook and my consciousness seemed to leave it among those enormous stone faces. All of it happened to me within a few hours, and I no longer want to choose between inventing a supernatural explanation for everything and pretending that nothing unusual happened at all. 

Maybe wonder does not require certainty, and mystery does not require belief. Maybe there are experiences that ask for something much more difficult from us: enough humility to say I don't know, enough discernment not to invent an answer, and enough openness not to throw the experience away simply because we cannot explain it yet. Bayon did not give me proof of another world. It gave me something I value more now: permission to let this world remain larger, stranger and more alive than what I already know about it.