By morning, Cambodia looked different to me. Nothing about the country had changed overnight. I had... Only a few hours earlier, I had been walking around my hotel room shivering, with an injured knee, diarrhea, a pounding head, temperature, achy body and a mind enthusiastically preparing for infection, hospitalization, amputation, and possibly death in a country it had suddenly decided was a terrible place to be. The day before, I had cut my knee badly enough that I genuinely wondered whether I should go to a hospital. Then I had danced Sacred Dance in the rain under the waterfall, gone back to the hotel, bandaged my leg, and spent several hours in a state I still don't know how to explain. I was freezing and sweating at the same time. My body felt as if it were being twisted from the inside, and at moments I had the bizarre sensation of snakes crawling over my skin. My rational mind had a perfectly reasonable explanation: I had an open wound, I was in the tropics, my stomach was sick, and something could be seriously wrong. Another part of me experienced the night very differently, almost as if my body were continuing something that had begun with Kru and the waterfall. I still don't know what that night was. I only know how I woke up.

I had slept very little, yet I woke surprisingly clear and energetic. All symptoms were gone, fever was gone also... I went downstairs for breakfast and began looking at the people around me differently. I had come to Cambodia alone, and I had been afraid. This was not my language, not my culture, not a world I understood. Fear had made me notice everything that confirmed my foreignness: unfamiliar food, unfamiliar customs, extreme poverty, the possibility of getting sick, the fact that I was very far from everything I knew. That morning I began noticing something else. I saw kindness, attentiveness, dignity, generosity. I remember thinking how easily we confuse wealth with value and how often we fail to recognize nobility when it arrives without the packaging we have been taught to associate with status. These people had far less materially than many people I knew, yet something about them felt extraordinarily rich to me. They were beautiful people. Luxurious people, in a way that had nothing to do with luxury. And somewhere in that morning another thought appeared with surprising clarity: the land of the Khmer had accepted me.

Later that day, I would be lying in its red earth. Physically.... We first went to an old place deep in the jungle, rough and partially ruined, with almost no one around. This was where we danced, we danced in the sacred placed where antient Khmers were charging crystals and water etc. There was nothing polished or aesthetically arranged about what happened there. We "prayed" with our bodies, we rolled in the dirt... We growled... We screamed.... We moved our bodies hard and let the dance become much more primitive than beautiful. We were working with what in our practice we call Shakti, the living feminine force, and whatever we were doing became intensely physical...  The red earth was on our skin, our clothes, our hair. We were sweaty, muddy, dirty from head to toe. I honestly don't remember another time in my adult life when I stayed that dirty for that long, and at some point I simply stopped caring. I stopped wondering what I looked like, whether I smelled, whether my hair was a mess, whether there was dirt under my nails or streaked across my face. And something even stranger happened: the smells that my mind had immediately classified as “dirty” stopped bothering me. Sweat smelled like sweat. Wet skin smelled like wet skin. Earth smelled like earth. None of it needed to be corrected. I began accepting myself as another living body in this particular world, an animal body that sweats, smells, gets covered in mud, bleeds, gets tired, and belongs to nature without first becoming sanitized for it. I wasn't looking at myself from the outside anymore. I wasn't managing the woman other people were seeing. I was simply inside my body, inside the dance, inside the heat and sweat and red earth.

And when I stopped rejecting those things in myself, I began seeing the other women differently too. They were just as sweaty, muddy, disheveled and human as I was, and suddenly there was nothing repulsive about any of it. What happened next felt like the culmination of the whole experience. We began embracing one another, kissing one another, pressing these dirty, sweaty bodies against other dirty, sweaty bodies with an extraordinary tenderness. Nobody needed to smell good. Nobody needed to become clean first. There was no polished femininity left to perform, no carefully maintained distance between my body and yours. WE WERE REAL! I was REAL for the first time in my life! in I was seen... For a few minutes, we simply received one another exactly as we were. By then I had stopped observing Cambodia from a safe distance, but I had also stopped observing my own body from one. I was on the ground in this world, among other bodies that belonged to it, and for once none of us needed to be cleaned up before we could be loved.

That physical sequence matters to me now because of what happened next. After the dance, dirty and covered in earth, we went for an actual ritual washing. A Buddhist monk received us. We undressed, we were naked... we covered ourselves with small pieces of cloth, asked for his blessing, and one by one stood while he poured water with flowers over us from a large container. It was almost comically literal in its symbolism. We had gone into the earth, made noise, sweated, cried, growled, danced, and covered ourselves in dirt. Then someone washed us. I don't need to add an elaborate spiritual explanation to that. The body understood the sequence perfectly well: earth first, then water. Dirt, then washing. Something wild, then stillness. And only after that came the robes.

The ceremony of receiving our Cambodia Mystery robes was one of the most emotional moments of the trip for me. During it, my teacher spoke words to each of us that came to her in the moment. Each woman received her own message. When she came to me, she said that behind me stood my ancestors, the women and men of my lineage, a great and powerful line of people who had survived and prevailed. She told me that I was never alone, that my strength was already there, that I could take it and carry it. And then she said something extraordinarily simple: I am allowed. I can. I only have to take what is already mine. TAKE YOUR POWER!

She did not know that shortly before Cambodia I had been working with exactly this question in Leela. My request had been about my own power: how to stop being afraid of it, how to stop shrinking from my scale, how to take what I already sensed in myself without immediately becoming frightened by what it might require of me. I had spent years becoming competent, useful, responsible, educated, prepared. I knew how to earn authority. I knew how to collect qualifications and certifications. I knew how to prove that I could carry something. This question was different. What happens when there is nothing more to earn? What happens when the obstacle is no longer ability, but permission?

I don't know how my teacher arrived at those particular words that day. I don't need to decide. Their accuracy was enough... There are moments when another person says aloud the sentence you have already been circling privately for weeks, and something in you stops arguing. Standing there in Cambodia in a robe that had just been placed on my body, after having been covered in red earth and washed clean, I heard something I apparently still needed to hear from outside myself: you are allowed to take your strength. Yet even as I received it from her, I understood that she could never actually grant that permission. Nobody could... At some point the permission had to become mine.

Later we went to the temple connected in our Mystery with the apsaras, the sacred female figures and dancers whose images are everywhere in Angkor. I will write about them later.... but now... by then our group was already recognizable to the temple guards. Our local guide had explained that the guards communicated with one another and that after Bayon they knew we were not behaving like ordinary tourists. We prayed, sang unfamiliar mantras, moved differently, stopped in places for practices, and generally did enough strange things to attract attention. She also explained how seriously many Khmer people take the spirits of the land and the danger of offending them. These beliefs were not an exotic decorative detail for the people around us. They belonged to the living relationship many of them still had with the place. So the guards watched us, and as we continued visiting temples, they often watched us more closely... 

And yet a strange pattern kept repeating. We would know that we were being observed, and then, when we actually entered a practice, somehow there would be a window when no one was there! Sometimes it was brief. Sometimes it seemed to last exactly as long as we needed. Then the guards would appear again. I don't know why. There could be entirely ordinary explanations for every one of those moments. But from inside the experience, it felt as though the place itself occasionally opened a small pocket of privacy for us and said: now. I am increasingly interested in experiences like this precisely because I no longer feel compelled to turn them into evidence. I can tell you what happened. I can tell you how it felt. I don't have to turn the feeling into a fact.

My experience inside the temple was different from what I expected. Some of the other women were having powerful emotional or physical responses. I wasn't. I felt strangely calm. I walked through a place I had never visited before with the completely irrational sensation that I knew it. I seemed to know where I wanted to walk. Certain spaces felt familiar before I had any reason to experience them that way. At moments I had an image of myself having once lived there as an apsara. I am not presenting that as a recovered historical memory or asking anyone to believe that I had a past life in an Angkorian temple. I am describing the form the experience took inside me. It was a kind of recognition without evidence.  Several times I would ask our guide strangely specific questions. “Is this where they slept?” I would say, pointing to a particular place, and she would look at me with surprise before answering: “Yes.” At another point I walked toward a particular stone and touched it, almost without thinking. She watched me and said: “You are connected to this place. I sense that you were part of the builders.” And something inside me simply answered: Of course I was. I cannot prove it, and I am not interested in trying. I knew something about my connection to Cambodia already in March, when this country first entered my field. By the time I was standing there with my hands on those stones, it did not feel like discovering a new place. It felt like recognition. 

According to the accepted historical timeline, these temples were built roughly eight or nine hundred years ago, with Ta Prohm dating to the late twelfth century. I stood there looking at the enormous stones, the precision of the construction, the extraordinary carvings covering surface after surface, and I simply could not make the story fit comfortably inside my mind. The logistics alone are staggering. These blocks had to be quarried, transported, lifted, positioned and worked with extraordinary precision, all without the machinery we would consider necessary for construction on this scale today. Maybe there are explanations for every part of that process. I am simply saying that when I stood there physically touching the stones, the conventional explanation did not satisfy my own questions. The more I looked, the more questions I had. But deep inside - I already knew the answer on who built this place... Energies there are extra ordinary! 

And then there were the carvings. Among them is the famous image that looks astonishingly like a dinosaur, particularly a stegosaurus. According to the same conventional timeline, this carving existed centuries before modern science identified and described dinosaurs. The first dinosaur to be formally described scientifically was named only in the nineteenth century. So I stood there looking at an image carved into an ancient Cambodian temple and asking a very simple question: what exactly did the person/entity who carved this see? Where did that image come from? How did people living centuries before modern paleontology arrive at an animal that, to my eyes, looks so unmistakably familiar?

I know the modern explanations. I know there are people who say the carving represents another animal, that the shapes around its back are decorative foliage, that ancient people may have encountered fossils, and that none of this requires us to reconsider the accepted chronology. Maybe... But I also no longer feel obligated to accept an explanation simply because it is the explanation our current culture considers respectable. Standing in Angkor taught me to become much more comfortable with another sentence: I don't know. And I am not convinced that we know nearly as much as we think we do.

This was becoming one of the strangest gifts Cambodia was giving me. I had spent much of my life learning to respect evidence, expertise and established knowledge, and I still do. But respect for knowledge does not require surrendering my own perception. I can read what history says happened here and still stand in front of these stones and think, I don't buy the whole story. I can touch a carving that should fit neatly inside an accepted timeline and allow myself to ask why it doesn't feel neat at all. I can wonder whether some ancient cultures possessed knowledge, techniques or histories that have been lost, misunderstood or never recovered. I don't have to replace one certainty with another. I am allowed to look at what is in front of me and keep the question open.

What surprised me most was how undramatic it felt. I wasn't overwhelmed. I wasn't desperate to decode anything. At times I was almost bored, which is probably the least impressive past-life story anyone could tell. But that boredom is exactly why I remember the feeling so clearly. New places usually pull my attention outward. I want to look, understand, photograph, ask questions. Here there was an odd absence of novelty. I could simply walk. I felt warm and peaceful. I knew I had never been there, and yet my body seemed uninterested in that fact. 

It smelled like home. That feeling brought me back to something I had been thinking about since arriving in Cambodia. I had traveled here alone and afraid because everything was foreign. Somewhere during those first days I found myself thinking about ancient stories of beings who came from other worlds and eventually made this Earth their home, beings whom humans later called gods. I wasn't trying to decide whether those stories were literally true. I was caught by the image itself. What would it mean to arrive in a world that was completely foreign to you? To encounter an unfamiliar landscape, unfamiliar life, maybe even an unfamiliar body, and slowly begin to belong to it? Maybe, I thought, even the gods in our stories had once known the experience of being strangers.

There was something tender in that thought because Cambodia was doing exactly this to me on a very human scale. I had arrived measuring the country against what I knew. My language. My assumptions about safety. My standards of comfort and cleaninness. My ideas about what a trustworthy person looks like. My expectations of how a place should behave before I could relax inside it. Over only a few days, those measurements had begun to loosen. The motorcycle driver I had initially judged became the man whose return made me ridiculously happy. The people I had first seen through the visible signs of poverty began appearing to me through their dignity and generosity. The country my frightened mind had insulted in the middle of a difficult night began to feel strangely protective. And now I was walking through ancient stones with the sensation that the place already knew something about me that my mind did not.

This did not make me Khmer. It did not give me ownership of a culture that is not mine, and it did not make every spiritual impression I had historically true. I was still a visitor. In fact, the deeper my affection for Cambodia became, the more important that distinction felt. There is a difference between being welcomed by a place and claiming it. There is a difference between feeling recognition and declaring possession. Maybe belonging itself does not always require ownership. Maybe sometimes a place can receive you for a while, and your responsibility is simply to notice the gift. and accept it... 

When our work at the temple was finished, the rain came again. By then rain had become almost a character in the journey. Small boys appeared with raincoats at exactly the moment we needed them! Miracle? of course! We put them on and walked back toward the bus through another Cambodian downpour. Once again, I could have called it coincidence, timing, tropical weather, good local entrepreneurship, or another little piece of the strange choreography that seemed to follow us through Angkor. I was becoming less interested in choosing.

What stayed with me was the red earth. That morning I had felt that the land of the Khmer had accepted me. By the end of the day, that thought had become physical. I had danced on that land, rolled my body in it, covered my skin with it, been washed afterward, dressed in a new robe, and walked through an ancient place with the inexplicable sensation of returning rather than arriving. Somewhere in the middle of all of it I had also been told that I was allowed to take my own strength.

Maybe those two experiences belonged together more than I understood at the time. Taking one's place and belonging to a place are both difficult when some part of you is still waiting for permission. I had spent a great deal of my life learning how to justify the space I occupied through usefulness, achievement, knowledge, responsibility and care for other people. Cambodia was beginning to show me another possibility. The earth had not asked for my résumé. It had not asked whether I was impressive enough, spiritual enough, prepared enough, or certain enough. I had arrived frightened and foreign, and three days later I was lying in its red soil... as I was... 

I still did not speak the language. I still did not belong to the culture. I was still thousands of miles from the country I call home. Yet something inside me had stopped standing at the border.

The land was still foreign. I no longer felt foreign to the land.