By the fourth day in Cambodia, something peculiar had happened to my appetite. From the moment I arrived on this land, I had almost completely stopped wanting meat. There was no discipline involved, no decision to become more spiritual by changing what I ate. I simply did not want it. I didn't want alcohol either. My body seemed to be making its own choices without consulting the part of me that normally likes to have an explanation for everything. That morning we ate breakfast, took only water with us, and entered Angkor Wat. We would remain inside for seven hours.

By then I had already learned not to expect my body to behave normally in these temples. At Phnom Kulen I had gone through the waterfall, the wound, the strange night of shaking and feverish sensations. At Bayon my body had reacted so intensely that at times I could barely remain oriented. Main temple of Angkor Wat continued the pattern almost immediately. There were waves of heat and cold, trembling, pressure, strange shifts in perception, moments when I felt completely present and others when ordinary reality seemed very far away. I am not going to pretend that I know exactly what was happening physiologically or energetically. I only know that my body responded to these places long before my mind could decide what it thought about them.

At the entrance, our teacher told us that Angkor Wat had its own symbolic kora, a path around the main temple. Just like at Kailas, only a gentler one, but as powerful as Kailas... In the way she had been taught to work with it, the two directions represented two different paths. One was the path of the Master, the path of knowledge. The other was the path of pleasure, the enjoyment of life.

Before she had even finished explaining it, I noticed something very simple. My body wanted to go left. Our teacher said that the left side was pleasure and the right side was the path of the Master. And immediately my mind entered the conversation. 

Pleasure? What the hell do we need pleasure for? Let's become Masters. Let's learn something important. Let's achieve something. Let's sew another medal onto ourselves. Why waste time on these fucking pleasures when there is knowledge and mastery available?

I know this voice very well. It is the part of me that can turn almost anything into a project! Into the improvement! Give it spirituality and it will find a curriculum. Give it a mystery and it will look for certification. Give it a mountain and it will immediately wonder whether there is a more advanced mountain somewhere nearby. Even inner development can become another achievement system if I am not paying attention. I saw it... right in front of me... as a layer, now fully separate from me... I felt exhausted by these achievements...  my body kept pulling left...  So when our teacher finished speaking and everyone began choosing where to go, I decided to test myself for the final time in order to remove ANY confusion. I have to admit that voice is VERY strong and VERY powerful.... I stopped looking at the others. I stopped thinking about which direction I was supposed to choose. They all left and stopped talking... I stood in the middle, I turned around several times until I lost my orientation, stopped, opened my eyes and looked.

Left.... Fine! My mind was VERY disappointed! Apparently we were going to learn pleasure...  Except that almost immediately, the experience became anything but frivolous. I began walking along the wall and looking at the carvings.  Some of the great galleries of Angkor Wat are covered with enormous narrative bas-reliefs, but to me they did not feel like separate stories placed next to one another. Walking that kora felt like moving through an encoded account of how a manifested world I knew comes into being. There were entire codes of civilization in those walls: creation and destruction, the birth of duality, life and death, heaven and hell, gods and demons, order and chaos, love and violence, the forces that build worlds and the forces that tear them apart. Armies moved against one another, bodies were wounded and dismembered, strange beings fought, devoured, created and destroyed. Nothing was sanitized... Made me cry from horror, but from the pleasure of all the path before me... I realized that I was not possible without ALL of it before me... The walls seemed to contain the whole architecture of existence, including the parts of it that the human mind would prefer to call dark, wrong or monstrous. I felt tremendous gratitude... 

And behind the human story, I was seeing something much larger. I saw the ancient Draconian Gods, beings connected in my own spiritual language with the architecture of manifested reality. In one immense sequence, I saw them as they appeared in my own meditation weeks before... in that same image I was looking at - literally weaving the Milky Way, creating the structure within which civilizations could arise, divide, fight, die and begin again. I was not experiencing these carvings as mythology in the modern sense of a collection of old stories. I experienced them as codes: information preserved in stone about how consciousness enters matter, how unity becomes duality in order to become unity for a very brief second... how opposites generate experience, and how life continues moving through creation and destruction again and again... the wheel of karma... This was why the violence on the walls did not feel separate from the sacredness of the temple. Heaven was there, but so was hell. Creation was there, but it contained destruction. Gods were there, but so were monsters. They all worked TOGETHER! Birth already carried death inside it, and death seemed to become material for another beginning. The kora was not showing me a universe divided neatly into the divine on one side and the terrible on the other. It was showing me a world in which both belonged to the same act of creation.

I knew there were accepted historical and religious interpretations of these reliefs, but that was not how I was encountering them in that moment. I was not standing there academically decoding a wall. My body was responding before I could organize any of it intellectually. I would stop in front of certain stones and begin shaking. Tears came. Sometimes I touched the wall and found myself speaking to it through my body. It felt less like I was learning what these images meant and more like something in me was recognizing a language I had once known. Strangely, I was not horrified by it. I was fascinated! 

Milky Way.... Dragons, gods, Draconians, architects of something vastly larger than a single human civilization. Inside me, the recognition was immediate and powerful. It felt less like learning a story than remembering the structure of one. At some point I met N., who I believed had taken the other direction, the path of the Master. I was crying when I tried to explain what I was seeing. And suddenly I understood something that made the original choice between the two paths begin to look almost absurd.

Maybe this was pleasure! Not comfort... Not entertainment... Not the sanitized version of pleasure we often imagine when we use that word. I was looking at scenes of war, death, creation, destruction, heaven and hell, and what I felt underneath all of it was the staggering intensity of being alive inside a world of opposites. What if pleasure was not the opposite of difficulty? What if the pleasure of incarnation was the experience itself? To be here... To enter matter.... To love something.... To lose it... To build... To destroy... To become attached... To suffer the consequences... To fight! To make terrible mistakes! To have THIS body! To have it wounded... To experience beauty, terror, sex, grief, tenderness, hunger, ambition, greed, failure and death... To enter the density of a life in which things matter precisely because they can be lost? 

I remember telling N. with tears in my eyes and that sounded almost insane even as I said it: even if your head gets cut off in some terrible war, if this is the experience you came here to live, then even THAT belongs to the movement of life, the pleasure of it. The form ends... Experience continues into whatever comes next.

I wasn't celebrating violence. I was seeing something about duality. In one moment everything collapsed in me... A world containing only the experiences we approve of would no longer be this world. Light becomes perceptible because darkness exists... Creation has meaning because destruction is possible... Life becomes unbearably precious because bodies die... And there I was, supposedly walking the path of pleasure, receiving one of the densest teachings of the entire trip. When I eventually crossed to the other side, the side I believed was the path of knowledge, I expected something equally enormous. Instead, I was bored! It was perfectly interesting. Beautiful. Impressive. Fine. But I moved through it quickly. On the side I thought represented pleasure, I had stopped constantly, touched stones, cried, trembled and felt as though the walls were speaking in a language I somehow recognized. On the side I thought represented knowledge, my response was more or less: Yes. Very nice. What else?

I did not understand the joke yet. I would understand it that evening. But Angkor Wat was only beginning.

The little Buddha

On the first level, we came to what we were working with as the point of ether. There was a hall filled with 1000 Buddhas, and naturally everyone's attention was drawn toward the large Buddha. Mine wasn't. I kept looking at a much smaller figure. He was seated with a naga rising around and above him, protected within the great serpent's hood. Something about his scale compared with the enormous form surrounding him fascinated me. He looked completely unafraid. There was no struggle in him, no need to defeat what surrounded him, no need to become larger than it. He simply sat there. And a phrase came into me: Let me see my essence in yours. I repeated it again and again. Let me see my essence in your essence.

There is something very different about asking to become like a sacred figure and asking to recognize the same essence within yourself. The first can create another hierarchy. There is Buddha over there, enlightened and magnificent, and then there is me down here, trying to become worthy. The "prayer" that came to me contained something else. What if what I recognized in him was recognizable precisely because some version of it already existed in me? Nearby sat a living monk offering blessings. People approached him respectfully, dropped to their knees and bowed. And I had a problem... My knee was still badly injured...  The wound from the previous day had not disappeared simply because I had entered one of the world's great sacred places. If I dropped onto that knee, it would hurt terribly and could begin bleeding again. Immediately another little spiritual drama began inside me.

What if it looked disrespectful if I didn't kneel? What if people thought I did not understand the tradition? What if everyone else performed the ritual correctly and I was the white (and strange looking) woman standing there refusing to bow? 

And then I saw something in myself that made me almost laugh. Decorative spirituality! The desire to make the outside of reverence look correct. I could force my injured body into the proper shape so that my spirituality would be legible to everyone around me. I could injure myself to produce the visual evidence of humility. Or I could simply FEEL reverence. I did not need to bleed onto the floor to prove that I respected the monk.  This distinction was SO clear to me. Ritual can be beautiful! and they are needed for some... Form can carry meaning across centuries. Bowing can be a genuine physical expression of devotion. But the form and the thing itself are not identical. A person can place both knees perfectly on the ground while thinking about lunch or sex. Another person may be physically unable to kneel and still stand before another human being with profound respect, shaking from this reverence... 

My injured knee had become a surprisingly effective teacher! It would not allow me to PERFORM what my body could not honestly do.

The floor of sound

Then we climbed to the second level. This was the level we worked with through voice, sound and vibration, and the acoustics were extraordinary. Inside some of the stone chambers, you could simply stand in the right place and beat your chest with your hands, and the sound would suddenly become enormous. The entire chamber seemed to answer, amplifying a small physical movement until the stone itself appeared to vibrate around you. And if you began to sing from that same place, the effect was extraordinary. A mantra did not simply leave the mouth and disappear. The sound traveled through the chamber, returned from the walls, multiplied, and entered the body again. You were no longer simply producing a sound. You were standing inside it, feeling it move through your chest, your bones, and the stone surrounding you. Every cell of your body trembles... as if about to boil from the inside... I caught myself several times that I was not in my body on that level... My consciousness was somewhere else... It is a strange feeling... Very surreal.. and very powerful... 

We had to be careful. By then the guards knew us. Our local guide had already explained that information about our strange group seemed to be traveling between the temple guards. We were clearly not behaving like ordinary tourists. We stopped in particular places. We prayed in a strange way. We sang strange mantras, we did strange things with our hands. We worked with our bodies. We stayed too long. We did things that were difficult to categorize from the outside. And yet the same strange pattern that had followed us through the previous temples happened again. There would be monks, guards and visitors around us, and then a practice would begin and somehow a small pocket of space would open. People would move. Someone would disappear around a corner. For several minutes there would be enough privacy to do what we had come to do.  Then everyone would return. I still don't know why.

At one point I stood directly where several stones intersected beneath my feet. Something happened in my body almost immediately. My arms opened. My chest began vibrating violently. I felt as though my heart itself were being pulled open from the inside. My teacher was doing her own work nearby, and in our language we would have called some of what was happening an activation.

Several women experienced what they understood as recognition of names connected with another, multidimensional level of themselves. For me, the strongest memory of the second floor is not information. It is vibration... We would sound Om inside one of those stone spaces and the sound would move through my body so strongly that I felt almost unable to remain inside it. I remember walking, singing, stopping, shaking. But the sequence is fragmented... Even now, I cannot reconstruct that floor with the same narrative clarity as the first. My own description afterward was very simple: I wasn't really in my body there.

Whatever happened, sound had become physical enough to disrupt my ordinary sense of where I ended. And then we climbed higher. Where only Gods have access to... To Heavens... 

Leave your things downstairs

Before entering the third level, we had to leave our bags and belongings behind. Everything! The stairs were so steep. The ascent was high enough that carrying unnecessary things was neither practical nor safe. I love this detail because I don't need to turn it into a metaphor. Angkor Wat had already done that for me. To go higher, we had to leave our things downstairs. I left my shoes, umbrella, backpack with my passport and money and credit card (my whole life!). I simply left it on the second floor... I honestly did not care at that moment. I was so calm for some reason... 

The third level was what we understood within the Mystery as the Path of God, associated with the king's ascent and the sacred transformation of royal authority. There were four pools, and we worked with four points connected in our practice with the elements.

There were other tourists there. There were monks. There were guards watching us. I know this because I occasionally noticed them. But when I remember that level now, almost nobody else exists. I was so deeply inside my own process that ordinary social perception had become peripheral. Occasionally I registered a guard. Occasionally my mind would criticize me as an idiot leaving backpack behind.... Occasionally we were told to move or stop doing something. Occasionally I became aware that people were watching us... and filming us... by then all tourists were following us and filming us... Then I disappeared back into what was happening. And during one of our practices, something occurred that changed the atmosphere around us.

The bird

We completed an activation near one side of the central structure. And a hornbill landed on the central tower. Not somewhere in the trees beyond Angkor Wat. Not somewhere in the distance. On the tower! Where we finished our first main process on the third floor... It stayed where we were... It called loudly. It opened its wings. It turned its body and displayed its tail... to US! The guards noticed immediately. People began gathering to look. Our guide, who told us she had been bringing people to Angkor for fourteen years, was astonished. According to her, she had never witnessed this particular convergence: the bird arriving on the central tower, on the Equinox, at that time of Equinox, immediately after what our group had just been doing. This bird is sacred for Cambodia also... It is VERY rare to see this bird. It is unheard of to see the bird on the main tower of Angkor Wat, at the time of Equinox... 

I want to be careful with the sentence that comes next because Cambodia kept teaching me that I don't have to convert an extraordinary event into proof of my interpretation of it. A bird landed on a temple. That is a fact simple enough to say. The timing was extraordinary to us. That is also true. What it meant is another question entirely. But something happened in the human atmosphere around us. The guards who had been watching this strange group of foreign women suddenly seemed to be looking at us differently. I cannot know what they thought. I only know what I observed. Something had changed. They stopped being afraid of us... and they gave us room...  And we continued.

The sound of heels

Later we came before another Buddha. There was a monk nearby and two guards. We were wearing our white robes. We went down onto the ground and stayed there for a long time. This time I did kneel as much as my body allowed. And we prayed.... for a looooong time... There was nothing elegant about it. We cried... but we stayed on our knees... We prayed for ourselves, for our families, for other people, for human beings we would never know. We asked forgiveness for what people do to one another. We prayed for this land and our lands that had witnessed centuries of war, violence and death. Each woman prayed in whatever way she knew how. At some point I became aware of A. crying beside me. I moved toward her. “Сестрёнка моя, я с тобой.”  My little sister, I'm with you. She began crying even harder. I learned later that something about the moment had brought her own sister strongly into her awareness. She was actually crying for her sister as she told me later... Then, through all that crying and prayer, I heard something completely incongruous. Heels. Tok. Tok. Tok. Tok. Tok. I remember the sound because it was so absurdly specific. We were barefoot.... on our knees in white robes in one of the most sacred spaces of Angkor Wat, crying our hearts out, and someone was approaching in heels. I looked. A Cambodian woman had entered, beautifully dressed. And then she began to wail with us. We learned through our interpreter that she was a local spiritual practitioner, a woman regarded there as a shaman. To locals this figure if HIGHLY respected. She told us that earlier that morning her spirit had instructed her to dress in her best clothes and come to this place at this particular hour of the Equinox. She said she had come to meet us as she was instructed. She thanked us for coming. She thanked us for what, in her understanding, we had done for the land. She embraced the women. She blessed us individually. I could have spent the rest of the day trying to decide what category to place this event in. Coincidence? Synchronicity? Religious interpretation? Local spiritual tradition? Projection? Miracle.... By then I was becoming much less interested in categories. Because when she came to me, the interpreter was not there.

My sister

The woman spoke Khmer. I did not. I spoke Russian and English. She did not. So there was very little available to us in the usual way. She took my hands. Remember, my hands were burning throughout the whole trip... She blessed my hands... She gestured toward my hands, then toward herself, then toward me. I cannot give you a literal translation of her words because I did not understand the language, and I don't want to invent one now. But I understood the encounter. I experienced her gestures as saying: This is your healing. These hands. What I do and what you do belong to the same kind of work. She embraced me. Then she embraced me again. And I understood the words my sister. Maybe I misunderstood some part of the language. Maybe the gestures meant something more specific in her tradition. I cannot know.  What I know is what happened between two women who could not have a normal conversation. We understood enough... Women were women anywhere... doesn't matter where they live, we are the same kind.... standing there, I suddenly felt the absurdity of how much human beings depend on language to decide who belongs to us. This woman and I had grown up in different worlds. Different countries. Different histories. Different religions. Different languages. Different assumptions about reality. We probably would have disagreed about many things if someone had sat us at a table and given us enough time. None of that mattered for those few minutes. I saw a woman who had known suffering. I saw a woman who knew how to touch another human being. I saw strength. I saw tenderness. I saw a woman who understood that hands can do more than make, hold and work. They can soothe. They can bless. They can carry another body through pain. They can communicate when language fails.  And she seemed to see something in me too. 

Women are not the same everywhere. I don't want to flatten us into a sentimental idea of universal sisterhood. Culture matters. History matters. Religion matters. Power matters. Our lives are radically different. But underneath all those differences there are experiences that require very little translation. We know what it is to lose! We know what it is to protect! We know what it is to care for bodies. We know what it is to hold someone who is crying. We know what it is to be afraid. We know what it is to love. And sometimes one woman can look at another woman from an entirely different world and recognize something before either one has found the words for it. That was what happened to me in Angkor Wat.

And then the sky opened

We continued through the four elemental points. At the final one, we were working with water. We completed the practice. And the sky broke open. Rain came down hard. Thunder rolled above the temple. We stood there getting soaked. By then nobody seemed interested in stopping us. Other visitors gathered and began filming because whatever they were seeing apparently looked extraordinary from the outside: a group of women in white robes standing in the rain on the upper level of Angkor Wat while thunder moved through the sky. I stood slightly above some of the women and held what I experienced as the field around them. I was that waterfall again... I wasn't trying to make anything happen anymore. I was watching. That difference seems small when written down. It wasn't. Only days earlier I had been on the back of a motorcycle trying to supervise the man driving it because apparently being carried was acceptable only if I remained responsible for the carrying. At the waterfall I had encountered an element that could not be negotiated with. At Bayon my body had repeatedly done things my mind could not organize. And now I was standing in the rain at Angkor Wat watching something unfold that I could neither produce nor explain. The bird had come without being invited. The woman had come without being invited. The rain had come without being invited. Nobody had asked my mind for permission. And nothing needed my management. For once, I was simply there... Later, one women from Turkey asked me to join our group, because, apparently, "we were doing a lot more interesting things". 

The joke I didn't understand until dinner

There was still one final joke waiting for me. That evening, after we returned from Angkor Wat, we sat together and shared what had happened. Eventually someone began talking about the kora. And I learned that we had mixed up the directions. Left had not been the path of pleasure. Left was the path of the Master. I sat there stunned. And immediately my mind started shouting. Well, fuck. They screwed us again. We wanted pleasure and they gave us knowledge! I almost laughed out loud. Because I caught it. I caught my mind changing its argument in real time. That morning it had been furious at the idea of pleasure. Why would we waste our time on pleasure? Let's become a Master! Let's learn! Let's achieve something! My body had chosen left. I believed left was pleasure. So my mind complained. Then I discovered that left had actually been the path of the Master, exactly what my mind had demanded. And now the same mind was furious that it had not received pleasure. I remember answering it internally: Listen, there is literally no way to make you happy. And suddenly I saw the mechanism with extraordinary clarity. My mind had never needed the correct path. It needed a path about which it could have an opinion. and it was NEVER satisfied with its own opinion, apparently.

This is one of the more uncomfortable things I have learned about myself. The mind can create an ideal outcome and convince us that peace is waiting on the other side of obtaining it. Then life gives us exactly what we asked for, and the mind quietly relocates the problem. My mind devalues everything. We wanted freedom, but now freedom feels unstable. We wanted love, but now love is inconvenient. We wanted success, but now success carries responsibility. We wanted rest, but after two days we feel unproductive. We wanted knowledge, but suddenly pleasure looks more interesting. The promised satisfaction remains one turn ahead. And Angkor Wat had played the joke perfectly! I thought I had chosen pleasure! Instead I received knowledge! But I had experienced the knowledge as pleasure! 

The distinction had collapsed before I even knew the labels had been reversed. Maybe that was the real teaching of the kora for me.

The wrong question

I have spent a remarkable amount of my life trying to choose correctly. I am educated in fields that reward discernment, analysis and the ability to distinguish one thing from another. I have built a professional life around understanding requirements, assessing risk, identifying the correct course of action. Even in my inner life I have often carried the same architecture. Which path? Which interpretation? Which choice? What is the lesson? What am I supposed to learn? What is the more evolved response? Where is the mistake? There is intelligence in discernment. There is also a point at which discernment becomes an attempt to negotiate with life before agreeing to live it. That morning I believed I was being asked to choose between mastery and pleasure. Seven hours later, the distinction made much less sense to me. The deepest knowledge I received that day had come through pleasure: through fascination, tears, physical sensation, sound, beauty, absurdity, human connection and wonder. 

And pleasure itself had not been easy or shallow. It included looking at violence carved into stone. It included a wounded knee. It included crying on the floor. It included confronting death. It included being physically overwhelmed. Maybe pleasure is not the absence of difficulty? Maybe mastery is not the accumulation of knowledge? Maybe a Master is not the person who has successfully escaped the mess of human life, but someone who can enter it completely without needing every experience to confirm the story they have already constructed about themselves?

I don't know. But I know that by the end of those seven hours, I had become much less interested in choosing the right side.

The descent

Eventually we had to leave. And there was one practical problem remaining. I am afraid of heights. The third level of Angkor Wat is extremely high, and the stairs are steep. Nope, no OSHA there! Under ordinary circumstances, my nervous system would have had plenty to say about the descent...  It actually tried... But that afternoon I looked down and there was almost nothing. No familiar wave of fear. No mental rehearsal of falling. No gripping need to control every step before taking it. I simply descended... under the downpour, fully wet, without shoes... In fact the descent was closed because of the rain, but the guard looked at us and said: "you can go. I see that higher powers are protecting you"... 

I remember knowing, with a certainty I cannot rationally justify, that we were under some enormous protection. Protection by what? I don't know. The temple? The land? The gods? The accumulated prayers of centuries? The human beings around me? My own altered nervous system after all day without food? Something I do not yet have language for? I can offer explanations in several directions. None of them fully contains the experience. And after Cambodia, I am less troubled by that than I used to be. I had entered Angkor Wat believing there were two paths and that something important depended on choosing the correct one.

By the time I left, I had watched knowledge become pleasure and pleasure become knowledge. I had found devotion without performing the correct posture. I had experienced sound as something physical enough to destabilize my sense of body. I had left my belongings downstairs and climbed higher. I had watched a hornbill land on the central tower at the Equinox. I had prayed beside women who were crying for people they would never meet. I had heard heels approaching across ancient stone and been embraced by a Cambodian woman whose language I could not understand. I had stood under thunder and rain while strangers filmed us. And finally I had caught my own mind complaining that life had given it precisely what it had requested. Maybe the question was never about which path should I choose? Maybe the more interesting question was if I actually could inhabit the path I am on before my mind turns it into an argument about another one?

For much of my life, I have trusted the part of myself that knows how to choose, analyze, prepare, achieve and understand. Angkor Wat did not ask me to abandon that part. It simply showed me its limits. Some things that day could be studied. Some could be historically explained. Some could be psychologically interpreted. Some could be dismissed as coincidence. Some remain, for me, completely mysterious. And I no longer need all of them to belong to the same category. I can respect what I know and still leave room for what I don't. I can kneel when my body can kneel and remain standing when it cannot. I can receive knowledge without turning it into another medal. I can experience pleasure without making it frivolous. I can meet another woman without understanding her words. I can watch the bird land without demanding that it prove anything. I can stand in the rain without deciding who sent it. And maybe that was the most unexpected thing Angkor Wat gave me. I went there believing mastery meant knowing more. I left wondering whether mastery might sometimes mean needing to know less before allowing yourself to live.