The Life-Changing Power of Immersive Experiences
Compounding and the Magic of Immersive Experiences
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My first immersive experience was a meditation retreat at the Kadampa meditation center in Glen Spey, NY in September of 2017.
It was a magical weekend. In part because I went alone, not knowing another soul who would be there.
For me, the magic of immersive experiences starts as soon I start my voyage to the retreat destination. This was certainly true for me that weekend, as a sort of nervous excitement and wonder descended as I boarded the bus to Glen spey, continued when I got a taxi from the bus stop, and burst into its first crescendo when I arrived to the center early to a small group of attendees and facilitators gathered on the lawn. I immediately experienced a sense of nostalgia. The image of a group of strangers gathered on a lawn reminded me of school, except this time, everyone was excited to be there and meet each other.
The weekend was deeply moving for me. I learned a lot about mindfulness, myself, formed deep relationships in record time, and went on some of the more memorable spontaneous adventures of my life.
I still remember a group of us wandering to and finding a waterfall which we had only heard whispers of from the onsite staff, as well as spontaneously driving to a nearby dam at midnight to take in the stars in what felt like a pitch black abyss while hollering out to the nearby cliffs, taking in our own sounds as they reflected back at us.
I’ve been a proponent for immersive experiences ever since. I’ve done men’s work and plant medicine in the hills of Costa Rica, immersive coaches training in the wilderness of Michigan, and hosted my own immersive retreat in the Adirondack Mountains in NY last summer.
There are a myriad of ways to do self-development, and I’ve found that immersive experiences are an essential and often overlooked piece. In this post, I want to make the case for why immersive experiences are so powerful, and how to use them as rocket fuel for your growth.
The Many Approaches to Self-Development
There are so many ways to do self-development. Many of us start as lone explorers, charting a course with the aid of books, videos, and podcasts.
Some of us eventually find our way to guides in the form of therapists, coaches, and facilitators. These guides serve to help us personalize our path, moving from generic advice for everyone to tools and practices specialized for our unique background and location on the path.
Some of us even make our way to immersive experiences. Some of you may have found that a one-off invitation to an immersive experience kicked off your journey!
While immersive experiences are some of the most transformational activities that I know of, I’ve found that they are easily the most overlooked of the three.
Most of us engage in lone exploration, and while there is friction, I’ve found the tide is generally turning in favor of therapy and coaching.
But immersive experiences tend to lag. They’re the exception rather than the rule. It can take lightning to strike for people to engage: they need a strong recommendation, a clear upcoming opportunity, and usually someone else they know to be attending, too. And that’s to go once!
In my experience, self-guided work is not a substitute for working with a guide which is not a substitute for immersive experiences. Each has their own profound profile of strengths for how they contribute to self-development, and in my experience the most developmental path involves all three, with regularity.
Why Immersive Experiences Work
If you’re here, I assume you already value regular self-exploration, and you probably see the value in working with a guide, even if you’re not working with one right now (that’s for another essay).
Today, I want to make the case why all of the above is not a substitute for immersive experiences.
If you’ve worked with a good therapist or coach, you know how powerful those relationships can be. For one hour, usually two to four times a month, you step outside of normal life to step into a new type of relational space, one in which you reflect on yourself, your patterns, the way you see and move through the world, and cultivate a deeper understanding of the way you are, how you got there, and build the capacity to create new patterns.
All in a few hour long sessions per month!
Which begs the question… what happens if we stay in that space for longer?
What would happen if you stayed in that space for not one hour, but two? Three? Four? What if you stayed in it for a day? A week?!
This is the magic of immersive experiences. While the power of coaching and therapy is in it’s regularity—it’s akin to building a muscle and the superpower of those relationships is consistent integration—the power of immersion is how long you stay in that space, and the simultaneous width and depth of awareness that can be achieved.
If you think of yourself as an iceberg and therapy and coaching allows you to start seeing parts of what’s under the surface, a good immersive experience provides you the time and space to see the entire thing, all in one go. It’s powerful stuff!
Seeing the Water You Swim In
In his famous speech This is Water, David Foster Wallace tells a story: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods at them and says ‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a while, and eventually one of them looks over at the other and says—what the hell is water?”
This is a profound analogy for human experience.
It’s incredibly difficult to see the water you’re swimming in while you’re swimming in it.
Have you ever noticed how after a week of vacation you return to your life and see things differently? That everything feels different, lighter, more manageable? That’s because you took a week away in different water and, coming back, are able to see that water you’re swimming in much more clearly.
Transformational containers are so magical because they not only remove you from the water that you’re swimming in, but take you into fresh water with the intention of inspecting the water which you came from. Even more profoundly, they provide a means of seeing the water that you bring with you everywhere you go.
This is thanks to singular focus of the events. Immersive experiences invite you to turn off, tune in, and drop out for a short period of time for explosive growth. You drop all of the other demands, all of the distractions, and take several days to focus on you: your behavior, patterns, psychology, and who you’re being in the world.
Removing yourself from all of the anchors and associations of your current life and dropping into a completely novel setting and relationships is a hell of a drug. It’s downright psychedelic, though no psychedelics are needed.
This, as the foundational setting of immersive experiences, is the ground from which life-changing transformation comes from.
Other Participants as Mirrors
Immersive experiences often involve doing the work in a group. A ton of magic comes from this group dynamic. While it’s hard to see the water you’re swimming in, it can be trivial to the see the water that others are swimming in.
In immersive group work, you act as a pointer for others and others act as a pointer for you. You are able to show each other places which you are blind to on your own. An ever-present tension that you’ve merged with will be evident to a more relaxed participant, and that relaxed participant’s apathy will be clear to you. Your differences allow you to see things which the other is blind to. You can see each other’s water, despite being blind to your own.
Additionally, participants act as mirrors for each other. Once you start to see yourself in the participants around you, you can use their breakthroughs to facilitate your own. Every increase in awareness that another participant has shines a light on new places for you to look. Every time someone learns something new about their water, everyone else gets to learn too. When I learn about my ever present tension, you get to explore how tension lives in you. When you learn about your apathy, everyone learns about their own. This causes an accelerating awareness that spreads across a group like wildfire, allowing you to make leaps to places which would be impossible on your own.
Immersion allows for Awareness to Compound
I’ve found that the process of awareness is a compounding process. The longer that you turn off, tune into something very specific (how you’re being as a leader, leadership team, or in relationship), and drop out from everything else, the more life-changing the results.
By staying in a space of radical self-inquiry, you are able to make an increasing number of connections at an accelerating rate. It’s akin to network effects—as awareness turn more nodes on, those nodes are able to connect to each pre-existing node and every node that comes after it. The number of connections explode over time.
Additionally, with fellow participants acting as mirrors, their pointing and insights can help you identify brand new places in the network, turning on entire swaths of node at once.
My experience participating in and facilitating transformational retreats and offsites is that, by the tail end, the insights that drop in and the shifts that start to occur seem a lot like magic. But it’s not magic. It’s the result of a process of compounding awareness that leads to exponential leaps which seem like magic—much like the seemingly magical gains that an investment portfolio makes decades into compounding. It defies logic while being perfectly logical.
This acceleration is, in my experience, not available through any other means, including lone exploration or even with a talented guide.
Regular Immersion
My belief is that it’s essential for growth-invested leaders and teams to step out of the water they’re swimming in regularly, with the explicit intention of becoming more aware of the day-to-day water they’re swimming in.
Is the water, your relational patterns and way of being and leading, what you want it to be? What are you bringing to, no matter where you go or who you’re with? And how would you like it to be different?
You can, of course, ask all of these questions while swimming in the water, but I’ve found it to be 10-100x more effective to step out of your water so you can see it more clearly.
In my experience, stepping out and getting immersed 2-4x/year is best. Any more than that and you might be escaping the life you’re in. Any less and you’re almost definitely missing out on growth.
So book the leadership offsite. Take time to reflect as a team. Bring in talented facilitator who can take you to new places ad teach you something about yourself. As an individual, take vacation time for that yoga, meditation, or transformational retreat.
Make immersion a regular part of your developmental cadence.
An Immersive Experience for You
Last August, I ran my first transformational retreat. It was a blast, and I was blown away by the transformation that participants reported. People told us things like:
“I made more inner progress in 4 days than 2 years prior of hacking away at inner work, even with the help of coaches and therapists.”
“This retreat was life changing for me, a phrase which is often thrown around, but I truly feel as though the space, introspection and focus of the retreat has led to a fundamental shift in the direction of my life. I've come away with a new sense of what the next 5+ years of my life will look like thanks to this retreat.”
“Justin and Jeremy are magicians: in the course of a few days, they weaved together tangible and tactical career-advancing insights, a space to fully re-charge and re-align, and even delivered some much needed wisdom. Wisdom in the form of showing us ways to drop into the present moment, truly connect with the people around us, and find more fulfillment in the simplest, but most profound parts of life.”
We’re back with another retreat this October. And this go around will be bigger and better. We have more seats (up to 15 stellar folks), more and better tools, and added an additional coach. All of this, AND we’re charging less than we did last year.
If you’re someone who wants to level up your leadership, tap into a deeper purpose, a deeper level of intuition and knowing, expand your leadership toolkit, and develop a lifelong set of peers to grow alongside of, I cannot think of a better way to spend the money. Think of it as an IRL, tried and tested leadership lab for your growth and development.
If you have any q’s, you can reply to me here. If you’re interested, you can reach out to 2023CatskillsImmersiveRetreat@gmail.com
Cheers!
-Justin