On my first full day in Cambodia, I found myself attracted to a man who lives in a wet cave with bats, fell a little bit in love with a motorcycle driver I had initially decided was not good enough to carry me, sang a Russian song to him in a tropical downpour while he tried to sing back to me in Khmer, and eventually bled into a waterfall.

This was supposed to be our day of purification.

In retrospect, I think Cambodia had a rather specific idea of what needed to be purified.

The process had actually begun the night before, with something much less exotic than sacred rivers, jungle hermits or ancient temples.

I wanted everyone to like me.

We had just come together as a group of women who were about to share an intense experience, and belonging mattered to me. I wanted to contribute. I wanted to give. I wanted everyone to feel good around me.

And because it mattered so much, I began trying to help the outcome along. This is one of the things I have learned about manipulation: it doesn’t always look manipulative from the inside. Sometimes it looks like generosity. Sometimes it is helpful and attentive and gives a great deal. The hidden transaction can be almost invisible: If I give enough, maybe I can influence what comes back. Maybe I can make myself valuable enough to be wanted here.

I know this mechanism very well.

Being useful has been one of my ways of creating belonging for much of my life.

This time, I tried so hard that I damaged the very connection I was trying to create. Eventually there was nothing left to do except tell the truth. I admitted to the women what I had been doing. I called it manipulation. I stopped explaining my good intentions and showed them the considerably less flattering thing underneath: I had wanted their acceptance enough to try to manage it.

I expected the truth to cost me something. Instead, it gave me what all my effort had failed to produce. They loved me. The amount of warmth I received after telling the truth was almost shocking. I had tried to earn belonging through giving, and then discovered that I could receive far more when I stopped managing how I was seen. I sobbed in front of strangers… and they all loved me. 

That should probably have been enough of a lesson for one evening. Cambodia apparently disagreed.

The wrong man

The next morning we went to Phnom Kulen for the first stage of our Mystery, Purification and Return to the Source. We were going to the mountain associated with the beginning of the Khmer Empire, to the River of a Thousand Lingas, into the jungle to meet a hermit called Kru, and later to the waterfall. Sacred Dance was part of the work we had come there to do.

At some point the road required motorcycles. Local men would take us through the jungle. And then I saw the man who was going to take me. My response was immediate.

No!!!!!  I didn’t want him! I looked at the other drivers and decided that somehow I had received the wrong one. Mine didn’t fit whatever unconscious image I had of the man I wanted to trust with my body on the back of a motorcycle in the Cambodian jungle. I have never rode a bike… without helmet…. In the jungle?! 

I judged him before he had taken me anywhere. He was not good enough. Not the one I would have chosen. And because life has a sense of humor, he was mine.

I got on. I had to! There was no other way!  Then phase two began. He was driving wrong. Now that I had failed to replace the man, apparently I was going to improve him.

I became frightened and irritated. I watched what he was doing. “Could you please hold your both hands on the wheel? And stop adjusting your fucking hat? Like this hat is more important than me?” I wanted him to drive differently. - carefully without those bumps! Yeah, in the fucking jungle… without a road, on top of the mountain…  I was trying to anticipate the road and control a journey through terrain I did not know, on a motorcycle I wasn’t driving, behind a man who knew this jungle and this road infinitely better than I did. There is video of my face at the beginning. Posted on my Instagram.  I look terrified.

And then, only a few minutes later, there is another face of mine! Pure happiness. Why? Because at one point my body was exhausted and tired and I had to let go of my grip and move a bit behind! Oh! It is better that way! My body moves with every bump! It’s flexible! I see! 

Nothing about the external arrangement had changed. Same man. Same motorcycle. Same jungle. Same road. I had stopped fighting the ride.

There was something almost embarrassingly precise about the situation. I say that I want to trust. I say that I want to receive. I say that I don’t always want to be the one carrying everything.

And then someone carries me. Immediately I have notes. Maybe this is one of my deeper difficulties with receiving. I don’t necessarily refuse what life gives me. I just want editorial control.

I want love, but I have ideas about how love should behave. I want support, but I want to approve the source. I want to be carried, but I would like some influence over the route. I want life to surprise me, provided the surprise passes quality control.

I want to receive. I just want to choose how.

That morning, somewhere in the Cambodian jungle, I began to see the absurdity of it. And my supposedly wrong man was perfect! He also tried to be the fastest one and the first one! I knew we were the same inside!!! Fighters! Runners!!! We were the best! In front of everyone! And this “wrong” man carried me exactly where I needed to go.  To Kru. The man in the cave

We spent half the day with him.

Kru had lived for decades in a cave deep in the jungle. Before the trip we had been told that even seeing him was not guaranteed; his whereabouts were known through his students, and our opportunity for personal interaction would depend on whether he was there and on the circumstances of the day.

He was there…. 

He meditated with us. He sang mantras. He talked about his life, his practice and what he understood his mission to be.

He also told us an extraordinary story about having died for three days and returned to his body because his work of serving people was not finished. I cannot verify what happened to him during those three days, and I don’t need to.

What interested me was the man sitting in front of me and the way he understood death because of what he said he had experienced.

For him, death was not the annihilation we are so frightened of. There was something in the way he spoke about continuing to serve that touched something already very alive in me. I have spent years thinking about death, accompanying it, studying the thresholds around it, trying to understand what changes when we stop treating death as an error in the system. So I asked him a question. I wanted to know about karma.

More specifically, I wanted to know how we can discover our karma so that we can live through it faster.

Even writing that now makes me smile. Of course I asked that. How else I can control the outcomes?! 

Apparently I wanted a performance-improvement plan for karma. Lol Tell me what the assignment is. Show me the pattern. Let me understand it. Then I can work on it consciously, move through it efficiently and presumably graduate to whatever comes next.

Kru warned me against exactly that. Don’t try to know it, he told me. Live your life. What is happening IS your karma. Live it fully. That is all? My mind was confused! What?! Nothing to do??? 

There is nowhere else you are supposed to be. Trying to escape what life has brought you, resisting it, attempting to somehow outrun it only creates more suffering.

Everything is already right. Apparently! Even writing this now my mind is fighting me- can’t be!!! 

I sat there listening to him and realized how perfectly his answer collided with the way I often approach life. I want to understand the pattern so I can get ahead of it. I want consciousness to give me leverage.

If I can see the mechanism, maybe I can avoid unnecessary pain. If I can identify the lesson, maybe I can finish it faster. If I understand why something is happening, maybe I can choose the correct response and move on. There is intelligence in self-awareness.

But there can also be an extraordinary amount of control hiding inside it. Even spiritual development can become an attempt to escape the life we are actually living.

Kru was saying something much simpler. Live it. The life itself is the path.

And then he showed us where he lived. It was a cave. An actual cave. Wet. Damp. Bats. He sleeps on the floor. He prays at an altar he made himself. There was almost nothing there.

I stood looking at this man’s life and felt the collision between two completely different definitions of enough. So much of modern life is organized around acquisition. More comfort, more security, more property, more recognition, more options. We work extraordinarily hard to create lives in which discomfort can be controlled.

And here was a man who had almost none of it. He lived in a cave. And somewhere during all of this, my body contributed another piece of information that my mind found completely unacceptable.

I was sexually attracted to him. That was funny. Because apparently even my desire has an approved vendor list. My conscious preferences are quite clear. Tall. Blond preferred but could be flexible. A certain physical type. Not a small Khmer hermit living with bats!!!  My mind immediately objected.

Excuse me? Him?!!! 

I could almost hear the internal protest. This was not who I was supposed to want. Except my body had apparently not read the policy.

It was drawn to him! 

And I noticed something important precisely because the attraction made no logical sense to me: my body was responding to something before my mind could categorize it.

I didn’t need to do anything with that attraction. Desire is information, not instruction. But I could listen. And once again the same theme appeared.

Could I receive what was actually happening before correcting it?

Could I allow my body to say this without immediately telling it, No, you mean that?

Maybe there are more ways of arguing with life than I had realized.

My man came back for me

When it was time to leave Kru, the motorcycle drivers returned. Mine came first! And who doubted? 

I saw him arriving and something in me lit up. The man I had initially wanted to exchange for somebody better was now the man I wanted.

He came for me like my Cambodian knight on a white horse, except the horse was a motorcycle. And he called out to me:

“Mine!”

I don’t know what exactly he intended by that word or how much English we actually shared between us.

It didn’t matter. I knew exactly what he meant. I was his passenger. And this time I climbed onto his bike gladly. No quality control. No request for an upgrade. My man had come back. And we flew down the mountain. Then the sky opened. Rain in Cambodia does not always negotiate gently. It came down around us as we rode, soaking everything, and something about the absurdity and beauty of the moment made me start singing.

A Russian song by Igor Talkov: Летний дождь омоет мои раны The summer rain will wash my wounds. This is the song that came to me at that moment! Now I look back and understand how symbolic it was! 

My Cambodian motorcycle driver understood absolutely none of the words. So naturally he began singing too in my notes but in Khmer.

There we were, two people who could barely speak to one another, racing through Cambodia in pouring rain, each singing a song in a language the other could not understand. And somehow there was nothing missing from the conversation. I had wanted him to drive correctly. Now I was singing behind him in the rain. When the ride ended, I got off the motorcycle and looked into his eyes. And I saw such tenderness. Such warmth. Such love for me, for the moment, for whatever this strange little experience between two strangers had become. I started crying thanking him, he cried back….  

Maybe he saw something entirely different when he looked at me. I cannot know another person’s interior world. I can only feel. I can only tell you what I experienced. I felt adored. I felt beautiful. I felt like a goddess.

And the man I had initially judged as unworthy of carrying me had given me one of the most unforgettable experiences of the entire journey. He had changed nothing about himself. I had.

Then came the water

Only after all of this did we go to the waterfall. By then I had already been shown several versions of the same question.

Could I receive love without manufacturing it?

Could I receive a man without redesigning him?

Could I receive my own desire without correcting it?

Could I receive my life without trying to discover the secret instructions that would allow me to complete it faster?

And then there was water. We danced. Sacred Dance was not decoration in this journey. It was one of the central ways we had come to encounter these places through the body rather than only through explanation. Phnom Kulen itself was part of that intended work.

And after all the words, all the insights, all the resistance and all the laughter, my body entered the waterfall.

A large waterfall does not care what you have understood. Its force is physical. The sound takes over the space. Water hits skin with weight. The body has to respond before thought can produce an interpretation. I went into it. I was so scared. The force was so powerful I couldn’t breathe. I could barely hold on…  but my body was walking towards this force closer and closer… the physical force shook my body with vibration all over… I yelled… I cried…. 

And something happened that remains difficult for me to describe because the words immediately make it sound more mystical than the experience felt.

The waterfall entered me. That is how I experienced it. Until then, even when speaking about “working with a place,” I had subtly imagined myself as the active participant. I would enter Cambodia. I would dance. I would listen. I would encounter the temples. I would work with the space. Under that water, the direction reversed. The space was entering me. And then there was the wound. The force pushed me down the stones and I cut my knee.. badly… really badly…. 

I was bleeding. My blood went into the waterfall. And waterfall went into my body…. Suddenly something that could have remained symbolic became completely physical. The water entered me. My blood entered the water.

I had been thinking all day about giving and receiving as two different movements. Someone gives; someone else receives. One acts; the other opens.

The waterfall destroyed that distinction. I received its force, temperature, weight and movement. At the same time, something that had been inside my body left it and disappeared into the enormous body of water around me. I could no longer retrieve it. I could no longer point to where I ended and where that tiny part of me had gone.

There was simply exchange.

And maybe that was what I had been trying to understand since the night before. I had confused receiving with passivity and giving with agency. But relationship is neither. Real relationship changes both sides. Love does. Sex does. Friendship does. Nature does. A journey does. Even a conversation with a stranger can. You enter something and it enters you. You affect and are affected. You give and discover that you have received. You open to receive and discover that something has already left you in return.

Maybe this is also why control eventually makes relationship impossible. Control wants influence to travel in one direction. I will enter the experience, but the experience should not alter me beyond what I have approved. I will love you, but preferably you will respond according to my understanding of love. I will trust you, provided you behave in ways that continuously justify my trust. I will follow life, once life tells me where we are going. I will live my karma, once someone explains what it is.

Kru’s answer returned to me. Just live your life. What is happening is your life. Stop trying to get ahead of it. I had gone halfway around the world searching for Mystery, and on my first full day Cambodia gave me almost nothing I could control.

Women whose love I could not manufacture. A man I had not chosen. A hermit whose answer refused to give me the map I requested. Desire directed toward a body my mind insisted was the wrong one. A motorcycle ride through a tropical downpour. A conversation made of two unrelated songs. Water stronger than me. An open wound. Blood. And maybe this was purification after all.

Not purification from something dirty or wrong inside me.

Something much more ordinary was being washed away: my insistence that I should know in advance what the right experience, the right person, the right desire, the right answer and the right road are supposed to look like.

The night before, I had tried to make myself lovable. By the end of the following day, I had been loved by women after admitting the thing I was ashamed of, carried through the jungle by the man I had rejected, attracted to the man my mind would never have selected, refused the karmic shortcut I had requested, sung to in a language I did not understand, and taken apart by water.

And standing there, bleeding into the waterfall, something became very simple. Maybe I did not need to figure out how to live my life correctly. Maybe Kru was right. Maybe the life arriving in front of me was already the life I was supposed to live. My work was not to outrun it. My work was to be here enough to let it happen to me.

And, when it was my turn, to happen to it in return.

i was standing in this waterfall… bleeding… from the wound that probably needed stitches… shaking from all that conditioning of my mind… my hearts was bursting with love to this life! I “saw” how pure my heart is… and how pure hearts of others are! Divine providence !