By the time I reached Cambodia, I was no longer entirely sure which world I had arrived from...  Nearly two days of airports, airplanes, fluorescent corridors, unfamiliar languages, fragments of sleep, Korea, Vietnam, another border, another plane. Somewhere over the Pacific my body lost its coordinates. Time had stopped behaving normally. Morning and evening became administrative concepts announced by airports rather than something I could actually feel. I ate because food appeared, slept because exhaustion finally won, woke because another flight had to be caught. The ordinary structures by which I locate myself in the world had begun to disappear.

And that was exactly the right way to arrive. Because Cambodia was never meant to be a vacation for me. I was not a tourist there, I had a certain role to perform in this process... I had written before leaving that Angkor was already happening. At the time, I thought I understood what I meant. The journey had begun behaving strangely long before I stepped onto an airplane. My passport renewal became a small mystery of its own: tracking systems could not find what the passport office could see. An email appeared claiming that I owed money and then disappeared. Finding flights became absurd. Routes appeared and vanished, itineraries changed, payments failed. At one point an airline representative could see the same fare I was looking at and still could not book it.

None of these things, separately, were supernatural. Bureaucracies malfunction. Websites glitch. Airlines change schedules. Emails disappear into folders. Human beings are very good at constructing meaning after the fact, and I am increasingly interested in the difference between what happened and the story we place around what happened. 

Still, there was resistance. Enough of it that I began paying attention. Then, almost as strangely as the obstacles had appeared, the road opened. Delta called me after I had asked for help. A route emerged: Minneapolis to Seoul, Seoul to Hanoi, Hanoi to Siem Reap. The price was nearly half of what I had been finding before, and the itinerary gave me almost a full day in Vietnam on the way there and again on the way back.

Suddenly there was a path...... 

I bought the ticket.... I thought the initiation had already happened... I was wrong... and not wrong...  but! 

That was only the road to the gate.

There are places in the world that human beings have treated differently for thousands of years. We call them sacred, powerful, holy, forbidden, ceremonial. We build temples there, climb mountains to reach them, cross deserts for them, bathe in their rivers, bury our dead near them, make offerings to them, orient buildings toward the movement of the sun above them. Different cultures explain these places differently, but the human behavior around them is remarkably persistent: we sense that geography is not always neutral.

Angkor is one of those places.

You can, of course, simply visit it. Millions of people do. I saw them all and I only had one question inside: "don't you understand where you are?" Yes, you can buy a ticket, hire a guide, walk through the temples, admire the architecture, photograph roots growing through stone, watch sunrise over Angkor Wat and return to your hotel for breakfast. There is nothing lesser about that. A place can be historically extraordinary without requiring us to make it into anything else. It is wonderful to know and to touch all that history!  But that was not how our group was coming. We did read the history before hand, long before our trip. We were not traveling to Cambodia simply to see Angkor. 

We were going there to work with the space. 

Even writing that sentence requires some explanation, because it can sound grandiose very quickly. I don't mean that we believed ourselves to be arriving as some special group entitled to secret access to Cambodia. Quite the opposite. The orientation was one of listening. We were entering an ancient landscape with a particular intention, using movement, Sacred Dance, ritual, attention and the body as ways of encountering it. We were going to places that had held human prayer, power, death, devotion, kingship, war, water, sexuality, mythology and ceremony for centuries, and we were approaching them as something more than beautiful ruins.

To understand what I mean by that, you have to understand something about the architecture itself. Angkor was not designed merely as a collection of impressive buildings. Its temples were constructed within a sacred cosmology. The temple-mountain evokes Mount Meru, the axis and center of the Hindu universe; water, galleries, enclosures, elevation and direction participate in that cosmological order. Moving inward and upward through such a temple can therefore be understood as more than movement through physical space. The architecture itself creates a progression from the ordinary human world toward increasingly restricted and sacred space. UNESCO World Heritage Centre

The tradition in which we were working took this vertical movement even further. We were taught to encounter Angkor through three symbolic “chambers” or levels, somewhat analogous to the initiatory architecture we had studied in Egypt. The lowest corresponded to the material world, the realm of incarnation and ordinary human existence. The middle was approached as the heart, a place of sound and vibration, where experience was no longer primarily intellectual, but the place where "heaven and Earth" meet each other. The highest was associated with the king, with enthronement, ascent and the meeting of human authority with the Divine.

This matters because the ancient Khmer king was not simply a political administrator in the modern sense. Kingship existed inside a religious cosmos. Temples, royal authority and divinity were deeply intertwined; royal legitimacy could be expressed through sacred images, temple foundations and the relationship between the ruler and the gods. At East Mebon, for example, APSARA describes the central sanctuary as containing the sacred Devaraja linga, while images of the king's parents were embodied as deities. The architecture of Angkor cannot really be separated from this fusion of political and sacred order. Apsara Authority

And this is where the Apsaras became important to our work. They are everywhere in Angkor, these female figures carved into stone: bodies in movement, elaborate crowns, hands held in precise gestures, faces carrying that almost impossible Khmer stillness. Historically, we have to be careful about collapsing every female figure at Angkor into a single category or assigning them one known ritual function; even APSARA's own archaeological interpretation distinguishes some figures traditionally called apsaras from yoginis or other sacred female beings. But within the Mysteries we were entering, the Apsara was not treated simply as decoration or entertainment. She represented a feminine principle capable of transmitting something that words could not.

Our understanding was that these dancers were, in a sense, silent. They never spoke any language with their voices, but they used their bodies to bring "messages from God'. Their work did not depend on explanation. Through movement, gesture, rhythm and presence, they carried Shakti, the living feminine force, and what our tradition describes as divine codes. The dance became a language between worlds. And its destination was not merely an audience. It was the king.

In the symbolic structure we were working with, the king ascended through the levels of the temple toward a state in which he could receive the divine principle into himself. The Apsara participated in preparing and transmitting that encounter. The point was not that a man became important because he sat on a throne. The movement was almost the reverse: the throne demanded that the human being become capable of carrying something larger than his personal desires.

That distinction fascinates me. We tend to hear the word king now and think immediately of privilege: wealth, possession, domination, somebody above everyone else. But sacred kingship carried another ideal as well. The ruler was supposed to stand between the human and divine orders. His authority was meaningful only insofar as he could embody justice, wisdom, protection and responsibility for the people entrusted to him. The ideal king did not receive the divine so that he could take more for himself. He received power so that power could move through him in service to something larger than himself. And suddenly our Sacred Dance in Cambodia had a very different context. We were not simply women performing beautiful movements among ancient stones. We were entering a symbolic system in which the feminine, the masculine, the body, the ruler, the divine, the earth and the heavens had once been placed into relationship with one another. We were interested in what remained accessible when that architecture was approached through the body rather than only through historical explanation.

Could movement become a way of listening to a place? Could the body perceive something the analytical mind would walk straight past?

We did not know. That was precisely why we had come. Whether someone understands that spiritually, psychologically, symbolically, somatically, or simply as a radically different way of paying attention does not particularly concern me. I have become less interested in persuading people to adopt my interpretation of an experience. I am interested in what happens when we enter experience differently. 

A tourist primarily asks: What can I see here? A pilgrim eventually has to ask another question: What might this place show me?

And that difference changes your experience. In traditions built around pilgrimage, initiation and sacred geography, there is another idea that appears again and again: sometimes the place does not let you in. I don't necessarily mean that literally. Maybe the mountain has no opinion about you whatsoever. Maybe a temple does not care whether you arrive. Flights are cancelled because of weather. Bodies get sick because bodies get sick. Passports expire because someone forgot to check a date. Plans collapse because life is full of logistics.

But anyone who has approached an important threshold knows another kind of truth too. Sometimes getting somewhere becomes part of what the destination asks of you. You can want something deeply and still not reach it. You can prepare for months and be turned around at the last moment. You can believe you are ready and discover that the road itself exposes everything in you that wants certainty, control, comfort and guarantees.

And sometimes the question changes from “Will I get there?” to “Who will I be if I do?” That question was already traveling with me when I left Minneapolis.

The first long crossing took me to Seoul. Then came Hanoi. I had deliberately arranged the trip so that I would not rush through Vietnam pretending that seventeen or eighteen hours between flights was merely an inconvenience. I stayed near the airport. I had planned to sleep, eat, read, let my body catch up as much as it could, and then continue.

There is something strange about these intermediate places. You are technically somewhere, but psychologically you haven't arrived. Your suitcase is still packed for another country. Your attention is pointed toward the next departure board. You sleep in a bed that belongs to no chapter of the story except the crossing itself. I was between worlds in the most ordinary possible sense. And the body knows this before the mind gives it a name.

We often imagine thresholds as dramatic moments: a door opening, a vow spoken, a ritual beginning. In reality, many thresholds are terribly unglamorous. They look like immigration lines, plastic airport chairs, charging cables, a toothbrush pulled from a carry-on bag, trying to remember which currency you need, checking a boarding pass for the fifth time, waking in a hotel room and needing several seconds to remember which country you are in.

Maybe that is why travel can alter consciousness even when nothing mystical happens. It removes repetition. At home, thousands of invisible cues continuously tell us who we are. This is my bed. This is my coffee cup. This is the road I drive. This is the language I hear around me. This is the person who expects something from me. This is the problem waiting in my inbox. This is the version of myself that exists in this particular arrangement of people, obligations, rooms and routines.

Cross enough borders quickly enough and many of those cues disappear. For a little while, nobody around you knows your history. Nobody knows what you have succeeded at or failed at. Nobody knows whom you love. Nobody knows who loves you badly. Nobody knows your profession, your reputation, the mistakes you still replay, the identities you have worked so hard to construct. You become a woman carrying a passport and a bag through an airport. And you are NOBODY to them... There is something wonderfully humiliating about that.

And wonderfully freeing.

By the time I boarded the flight from Hanoi to Siem Reap, I was tired enough that much of the psychological furniture I normally drag around with me had become too heavy to carry. I had crossed the Pacific, crossed Korea, crossed Vietnam, and was now moving toward a place I had been thinking about for months. This was the part I had imagined so many times.

Cambodia... Angkor.... The temples.... The equinox... The group... The Mysteries....

And yet when the moment actually came, I did not feel triumphant. I felt quiet.... There is a particular kind of silence that appears when something imagined for a long time becomes physical. Before that moment, Cambodia could contain anything. It existed partly in photographs, books, plans, conversations, projections, fears and expectations. It could still be enormous because it was still imaginary. Then there comes a moment when imagination has to surrender the place back to reality. The plane descends. There is land below you. And whatever Cambodia actually is begins replacing the Cambodia you brought with you. 

I think this is one of the most important moments in any meaningful journey, and one we often miss because we are so eager for the experience we expected to have. 

The real place begins destroying the imagined one. I wanted that. In fact, I had come for that. The older I get, the less interested I am in experiences that merely confirm what I already believe. I don't need to fly halfway around the planet to have my worldview politely returned to me. If I enter an ancient place carrying a complete explanation of what it means, what its energy is, what will happen to me there and what I am supposed to discover, then perhaps I have never actually entered it at all. I have simply projected myself onto different scenery.

So I was trying to arrive with intention, but without demanding an outcome. Those are not the same thing. An intention says: I am willing to meet this. An expectation says: This is how the meeting should go.

Cambodia would teach me quite a lot about the difference. I only know it now AFTER this experience...  wow! 

Our itinerary itself was already unlike an ordinary sightseeing trip. We would begin with an opening ceremony. We would go to Phnom Kulen to seek blessings from local Hermit who lives in the cave and spend half a day with him, learning about Life and Death.... to the River of a Thousand Lingas, to the waterfall. We would work with Sacred Dance. We would enter Bayon, Ta Prohm and Angkor Wat. We would be at Angkor during the equinox. We would encounter Apsara not only carved into stone but through living dance. The landscape was not background for the work. The landscape was part of the work. That distinction matters! 

Ancient places carry an enormous accumulation of human meaning whether or not one believes they carry anything beyond it. Thousands upon thousands of people have approached the same stones with fear, devotion, ambition, grief, prayer, political power, desire for protection, desire for fertility, desire for victory, desire to understand death. Civilizations have risen around these places and fallen away from them. Religions have changed. Gods have been renamed. Armies have passed through. Forest has swallowed architecture and human hands have uncovered it again. We like to speak about “energy” because it gives us one word for something difficult to describe. But sometimes history itself is enough.

Stand somewhere where human beings have been asking ultimate questions for a thousand years and see whether you remain entirely untouched by it. 

Our group was coming with its own questions. And maybe that was why the resistance before the journey had caught my attention. When you travel with a request rather than an itinerary alone, obstacles feel different. They begin to ask whether you actually mean what you say.

• How badly do you want to know?
• How much uncertainty can you tolerate?
• What happens when the plan stops obeying you?
• Will you continue when the road becomes inconvenient?

And, more dangerously: what if you receive an answer you did not come for?

I did not know it yet, but that last question would become much more important than all the others. 

There is a tendency in spiritual travel to romanticize sacred places before we ever arrive. We expect revelation. Confirmation. Synchronicity. We imagine that the ancient world will somehow validate our modern longing. We want the temple to recognize us. We want the shaman to see something special. We want the sign. We want the moment when reality bends just enough that we can say: See? I knew there was more.

I understand this desire very well..... I also distrust it.... I will tell you why at one point...  the desire to receive a sign can make almost anything into one.... So I made a quiet agreement with myself before this journey: I would pay attention, but I would try not to manufacture meaning. I would allow strange things to be strange without immediately deciding what they meant. I would allow ordinary things to remain ordinary. I would notice what happened in my body. I would notice what happened between people. I would notice coincidence without automatically converting it into causation. I wanted to remain permeable without becoming gullible. That balance would be tested. More than once. But I didn't know that as the plane approached Siem Reap. At that point there was simply the enormous fact of arrival.

After all the passport problems, disappearing itineraries, failed bookings, changing routes, long flights, Korea, Vietnam, hotel rooms and departure gates, I had crossed the final border.

I was in Cambodia! And suddenly all the resistance that had preceded the journey became irrelevant. This is another thing thresholds teach us. Before crossing them, the obstacles seem enormous. Afterward, they become part of the road behind you. The question was no longer whether Cambodia would let me arrive.

I had arrived.

Now came the much more interesting question: would I actually allow myself to enter?

Because there is a difference. You can bring your body to a place while keeping your entire psychological structure intact. You can cross twelve time zones and never leave the worldview you departed with. You can stand inside a thousand-year-old temple and spend the entire time looking at yourself through your phone. You can perform a ritual while remaining occupied with how you appear performing it. You can travel to the other side of the planet and never encounter anything truly foreign.

Entering requires something else... It requires a temporary willingness to stop being the authority on what everything means. To listen before naming. To notice before interpreting. To allow the place, the people, the body and the events themselves to complicate the story.

This is what I had meant months earlier without fully understanding it when I wrote that Angkor was already happening. Angkor was not waiting for me at the end of a flight itinerary. The journey had begun the moment certainty started being taken away. First the logistical certainty: Will the passport arrive? Will the flight work? Which route will get me there? Then physical certainty: What day is it? When should I sleep? Where exactly am I? And eventually something deeper would be challenged too: the certainty that I understood what I was going there to do. That part of the story had not happened yet.

For now, there was simply Cambodia on the other side of the airport doors, a group gathering with a very unusual intention, and an ancient landscape we were preparing to approach. We had not come only to look at it. We had come to listen. We had come to move inside it. We had come with questions. We had come prepared to work with whatever “working with a place” would turn out to mean once it stopped being an idea and became an experience. And there is something else I understand now, after having crossed that distance. Powerful places do not need to decide whether to let us in. The road simply removes, one by one, the things that prevent us from entering. 

The schedule.... The certainty.... The familiar environment.... The illusion of control... The expectation that we already know what the experience is supposed to mean.... Until eventually there is less between us and what is actually there. 

Nearly two days after leaving home, I had finally reached Cambodia.

But reaching Cambodia and entering Cambodia, I would discover, were two entirely different things.

I had crossed the world.

The gate was only beginning to open.