2022 was the strangest year of my life and right in the middle, I moved to Hawaii for six weeks, four of which were a yoga training program. Here is a mostly nonfictional account of that time from my memory and from my chaotic journal entries.

I got into the Hilo airport a few days before the program actually started, and it was late and raining. The head of the program came and picked me up in a car that looked like it would die any minute and smelled like weed which I was thrilled about. Let’s GO. He jumped out, hefted my suitcase into the car and we drove the 30 minutes to where we were staying, a place called “Hawaiian Sanctuary.” The teacher’s name was Alan but he went by his self-given name “Allowah,” something that I first thought was a joke but I quickly learned was definitely not. Allowah was stringy– weighed maybe 100 pounds, all bone and muscle. He wore loose fitting pants, like the ones you are thinking a hippy yogi would wear, and a threadbare shirt. His hair was longish with tight curls and his face was angular and thin. He had a high-pitched voice and he spoke slowly, deliberately, pausing after you were done talking, like he wanted to make sure you had said everything you were going to say. He showed me to a little bungalow that would be just mine until my roommate, another participant in the program, got there.

The next morning, I met his wife Beata1 and his son Sonny (also not a joke). Beata was Slovakian, English was her second language but she spoke it well, and she was much younger than Allowah. She was striking, with dark eyes and hair and had large, protruding teeth. Apparently back in Slovakia she had been a professional Latin Dancer which she told me was her great love and I believed her—throughout the training there were times where she would sneak into the practice room to dance by herself, sometimes filming herself, sometimes not. She and Allowah had met online when she saw his yoga videos and decided to flirt via YouTube comments. Eventually they started chatting not in the comment section and he said, only a few months after they “met,” that she should come to the states (Florida, specifically) where Allowah lived and so, despite the language barrier and having never traveled internationally before, she hopped on a plane to meet him. He greeted her at the airport with a guitar in his hands and a rose in his mouth and when they went out to the car, he couldn’t find it for almost an hour. A love story for the ages. Less than a year later, they had Sonny who was now three years old and very cute. He had bleached blond hair and a tan little face and his teeth were almost completely rotted out. The four of us piled into the almost-dead-looking-car and headed to the beach.

It was a bit of a hike to get down to the little cove with the volcanic black sand but there were only a few people there. I was excited to swim, and though the waves looked big, I wasn’t worried. Beata kept talking about how nervous it made her to swim there and I thought she was exaggerating. Turns out we were both right—I got out there past the waves and I thought everything was fine, it was such a beautiful day, a little rainy. The water was light on my skin and I floated on my back for a while, taking deep breaths, getting salt in my mouth, then did a few laps back and forth. When I decided to come in, I figured out what Beata was talking about: the waves were intense. I got pulled down a few times, but I was always able to muscle my way out. Mostly I was just having fun, letting myself get pulled around by the waves, letting go of control. One of the times my head got tossed up, I saw that Beata was talking to a man from the beach on shore with fins in his hand. I got tossed a few more times and got out, tired but exhilarated. I made my way over to Beata and the man, gushing about how beautiful it was. He told me that he was about to jump in and get me, that it had looked like I was fighting for my life, like I was going to drown. I laughed but he did not. He asked if I had ever swum in the ocean before and I said no, and he told me that I needed to be careful, that people had drowned at this beach. I felt embarrassed and told him that I was a strong swimmer, which was true, but honestly, I hadn’t been thinking about my swimming abilities or the danger at all—it hadn’t even crossed my mind. I had enjoyed being tossed around. We chatted for a bit and then he said that he and his buddies did an ocean swim everyday at 8am and that I was welcome to join. I may have looked like I was going to die out there but ultimately, I passed the vibe check for the morning swim.

After the beach we went to “The Natch,” a local grocery store, to buy food for the next couple of days. It was the most white-people-hippy space I have ever had the pleasure of occupying. No one looked like they had bathed in days and everyone looked a little baked. There was a ton of spiritual psychedelic art for sale and bumper stickers that said things like “THE UNIVERSE WANTS YOU TO BE HERE.” There was mushroom beef jerky. They had a machine to make your own peanut butter and it was delicious—one thing about white people hippies? They don’t fuck around about peanut butter. The “Sanctuary” as it was called, was half hotel/half camp, with a kitchen and a meeting area. People from all over would come to work and live off the land (never did figure out what all that entailed?) and commune with the island. There was a whole host of rotating people, lots of Germans for some reason, lots of dreadlocks and lots of tribal tattoos on white people. One guy got a cut on his stomach (how this happened was never fully explained to me, maybe while doing manual labor?) and instead of cleaning it and applying an antibiotic, he just coated it with mud because he “didn’t trust modern medicine.” He got a staph infection a week later. It was also a bird sanctuary—there were peacocks and chickens everywhere. Peacocks are little bitches, but they didn’t really get in our way, too busy sitting in the trees and walking on the roofs of the buildings looking down at everyone. The chickens would crow their little hearts out every single morning–which added a flavor to everyone’s little morning ritual–and the whole place had bird shit everywhere. The Sanctuary would throw a community ecstatic dance every Friday night featuring super loud reggae remixes and attended by all the local hippies, druggies, artists, homeless people, and residents. I love a good party, but this kind of party wasn’t really my thing (too few showers, too much weed, too much concern about my own bodily safety etc), so Friday nights became my time to journal and reflect to a pounding bass line.

The next morning, Chloe, the next girl in the group, arrived and went to the beach with Allowah and Beata while I took a nap. The other girls came one by one over the next few days. We went into “town” which was just as hippy as The Natch except this hippy stuff was all overpriced. I met Maddy, a sweet 22-year-old; Erika, a bartender from California; and got to know Chole better, a 23-year-old from New Orleans. We had our first real day of training, and it was a little strange, not quite what I was expecting. Instead of structured, carefully constructed classes, it was a lot more on the fly and integrated a lot of different styles that I wasn’t as familiar with. There was enough in the yoga practice that I either a) couldn’t do (as far as postures go) or b) was interested in (breathing exercises, kundalini, ashtanga) that I knew I would improve and learn something from the training, even if it wasn’t up to the standard of what I actually had been expecting. Like always, however, it was great to move my body especially after what had been months of inconsistent or nonexistent practice before this training.

On Sunday I got an Uber and went to church. I was relieved; it had been a week full of strange and new experiences, I was ready for some familiarity. In the end I got more than I bargained for: it was Mother’s Day and in the sacrament meeting I suffered through two of the cringiest talks about women I have ever heard in my whole life. Familiarity but at what price!

There were eight girls in the program that I met over the course of the first week: Mary, Claudia, Erika, Maddy, Laura, Sarah, Chloe and Chen.

Mary was from the Midwest, which, even from my first impression, was noticeable in every single thing about her. She had the sweetest little accent and looked as down to earth as she was. She had round glasses, an easy smile, a hooked nose, and kind eyes. She had fair hair which I think was naturally curly and only ever in a ponytail. In conversation, she was personable and good-natured. Mary liked to fish, hike, camp, and do lots of outdoor things which she told us all about with very little prompting. She owned 5 acres in Illinois with chickens and hoped to buy a cow the next year. She was hands down the most experienced yoga teacher there. Mary came with her mom, who stayed for the first couple days. Mary was engaged to Michael, a police officer, and they had been dating for about four years. She told us the story of how they met and it was lovely—even though they went to the same high school, had mutual friends, and lived on the same street, they met on Tinder. Modern love! Mary’s dad is an alcoholic, and she takes care of him—they live in the same house right now. Mary’s dad introduced her to a lot of substances at a young age—nicotine, alcohol, weed—and was very encouraging. She told her parents she smoked weed as a teenager and the next Christmas she got a present with weed things2 from her aunt and uncle. There was often cocaine at family parties. She didn’t really get into drugs, but she still smoked a lot of weed. Before the training, Mary had some health difficulties—she had been getting headaches and she started to lactate, which was concerning to say the least.

Erika was 33 and from San Diego, a bartender. She had mixed Mexican and Korean ancestry, with perfect skin, a large mouth with large lips, and dark eyes. Her most prominent physical feature, however, were her enormous breasts. She had perfect posture though (a feat! Gravity was not in her favor!). She had a thin waist and slender arms. Everyone wondered whether her boobs and lips were real and we could never come to a consensus. That first week she was bitten terribly by mosquitos and so she was covered with quarter-sized spots. Erika had an intense presence and was lovely, until she didn’t like you and then she was vicious. She had a pretty tough childhood and in order to process that trauma, she used acid and, of course, smoked weed for general anxiety. She vaped constantly. When she got to the program, she was in the wrong room and was furious, telling some of the other girls that she was going to sue, but a day later she got put in the right room, so she did not sue.

Claudia was my roommate. She was 38 but she dressed like she was 9 years old—all sparkles and unicorns—and I am not going to lie, it was a little disconcerting. She had the most beautiful black tightly curled hair that hung down to her hips and when she washed it made the whole room smell fresh and clean. She was petite with broad shoulders and narrow hips, like a swimmer. She had a round, open face and beautiful eyes—light green blue with flecks of gold. When she talked about something she cared about she would tip her head back as if trying to keep the tears back by force of gravity. It was a valiant effort, but it wasn’t very effective—she cried all the time. She was a nurse but lost her job because she refused to get vaccinated, and she was very into plant medicine, which is a diplomatic way to say LSD. This included a purging ritual of burning a spot on your shoulder and then pouring a little bit of frog poison on it. Shockingly, your body does all of the things that it usually does when it confronts a substance naturally designed to kill you—throw up, sweat, burp, excrete, cry, fart, and make “you feel like you are going to die.”3 Then, of course, once the body has thoroughly exhausted itself of the poison, you feel better. Claudia explained that these rituals have helped her overcome a lot of difficulties in her life and she conducted the rituals often, so often, in fact, that her right shoulder was covered with pea-sized burn marks. Claudia had a self-proclaimed shopping addiction, which was evident—even out there in the middle of nowhere, she got multiple Amazon packages a day. She believed that loving yourself and seeing your inner beauty was deeply important for every woman, something she found a way to mention, and often cry about, nearly every day. During particularly intense yoga practice (like holding a plank or doing cardio), she would take it upon herself to shout things like “You got this girls!” or “You are warrior goddesses!” She overpacked, which greatly benefitted me personally as she had things that I had forgotten (like band-aids and hair ties) in abundance. She was a Taurus. She was not in a relationship and hadn’t been in a while, but her last relationship had been with a man she met doing ayahuasca. He had helped her spiritually, and they felt very connected while doing LSD—everyone in their plant medicine group agreed that they had known each other in another life, maybe even been married. Sadly, in this, current life, he didn’t have a job, was a former drug addict, was going through a messy divorce—plus he was a Pisces, so it didn’t work out. Claudia would often say things in class like, “So is it like X?” and it was not, in fact, like whatever she has compared it to. She was sweet and was perpetually trying to cop a ride to the farmers market or the post office.

Maddy was 20, from Palm Springs, California. She had a ton of little sticker tattoos, thin, short hair, bright eyes, and a smile that made you feel instantly at ease. Maddy was easy-going and amenable, but had these funny little asides about people and things that made me laugh. She complained a lot and vaped a lot and never took herself or anything else too seriously, which made her a delight to be with. She taught a lot of yoga, was an esthetician and, when she needed more cash, waited tables. She moved to Oklahoma during covid because it “wasn’t a thing there” and taught yoga, but moved back to California afterwards where she taught at a country club to “rich white old people who love me.” She was warm and good at making people feel comfortable. She made friends with the blind cats that lived behind the kitchen when the rest of us were nervous they would have fleas.

Laura was 33, from Toronto and was an Instagram influencer. She was half Venezuelan and half Palestinian with gorgeous green eyes, dyed reddish/brownish hair, full fake lips, strong cheekbones, and a Persian nose that she told us she wanted to get redone. She was the first person I ever met to have fake eyebrows, which was exciting for me personally. For a long time, she worked as stewardess on yachts in the Mediterranean and had met lots of celebrities (she was on Below Deck apparently?). She said she had to sign a lot of NDAs about the celebrities, and I asked her if there were any celebrities she had met that were nice and down to earth and she paused and then said no. She was an only child and close with her mom. She lived in Toronto half the year and spends the rest of the year traveling. It seemed Laura knew everyone at the sanctuary right away. She was personable and talkative and leveraged her minor celebrity to seem glamorous and interesting. She wasn’t very funny, but laughed at my jokes which made me like her. Her self-perception and actual personality were not in sync. For example, it was clear that she saw herself as very smart and logical, but when she would talk, she mostly just sounded paranoid and superstitious. She believed that the universe was trying to communicate with her—which wasn’t necessarily a unique trait in the Hawaiian Sanctuary, but not everyone did it with the voice and cadence of Kim Kardashian. She thought she was very deep and asked insightful questions in class, but she didn’t.

After the first week it became clear that things were not going to be as advertised—the food was not good, the accommodations were poor, and Allowah had a unique way of doing things. The yoga was still lovely, but it was different from anything I had done before. There wasn’t much of a structure to the program, and it became obvious that it wasn’t as intense as everyone had been hoping. I decided there were things that I could learn from Allowah and that I would find a way to make it worth my time. He was disorganized and spacy, but he was very nice and had a refreshing perspective on his life and family. I love yoga teacher training and I figured I could do another 300-hour training later in my life if I felt like this one wasn’t sufficient. As far as the rest of the stuff, I wasn’t too worried—I knew how to hunker down and endure less than ideal situations. Laura, Erika, and Sarah were very upset the first few days and talked a lot about how awful it was, how mean Allowah was, how everything was terrible. The three of them were always together and they pulled others into their little mean-girl mad-girl orbit. That dynamic shifted, however, once everyone got to know Sarah better.

Sarah was in her 30s. In the first few days she told us that she had recently broken off her engagement, lost her job, and moved home. Also her cat had died. Eventually it became clear that she had just gone through, or was currently going through, a nervous breakdown. Before she had come to HI, she had been in a psychiatric hospital. About two days into the program, she told us that she believed that we were all speaking in a code and that our movements—scratching our nose with our right hand or left, yawning, where we looked—were how we communicated to each other behind her back. She would ask us why we were holding our cups a certain way or why we used our right hand on the steering wheel instead of our left. She told us that she heard voices. She would often gaze off into space and she spoke like an extraterrestrial being trying to impersonate a human. Her reactions were delayed and a little off. She repeated herself and others a lot. She would often ask basic questions about something someone had just said. Before all of this, she told us she had been living in Dubai with her dream job which had something to do with public transportation. According to her, she was very good at her job and had even met and presented to the British Monarchy on her public transport knowledge(?) and that this dream job had made her millions. She told us she was something of a genius, a type-A personality, and had gotten amazing scholarships, and gone to the best schools. I found this hard to believe based on how she spoke and interacted with the world, even without the confessions of her troubled mental state. However, it made for interesting chit chat. When Sarah opened up about what was really going on in her head, the dynamic between the angry people pod kind of dispersed. Knowing that their little complaints and paranoia had included someone who might actually be clinically paranoid? This made everyone back off. Laura became fixated on Sarah behind her back, telling anyone that would listen that Sarah needed to go home or get put in a hospital. This was probably true; however, Sarah was an adult and despite her oddities, was very nice and harmless and, more significantly, was not anyone’s responsibility.

Sarah’s roommate was Chen, a woman who was probably in her 50s (despite never actually telling us her age– this is what happens when you don’t tell people: they guess). She was a biology teacher at a community college in Iowa and that was manifest in the way she spoke and interacted with the world. It was obvious that a lot of the Hawaii experience made her uncomfortable, but she had a good attitude. She was incredibly sweet and tenderhearted. She was petite and strong with long dark hair. She described herself as a “hard-core Christian,” which seemed to be correct. Every comment she made, especially at the beginning, seemed to require her to say something about her faith. Every piece of Hindu philosophy we learned she tried to shoehorn into a Christian framework, to varying degrees of success. Chen often cried about how much God loves all of us. She also was very into hugging and anytime anyone shared anything about their childhood that was sad, she would get up and give them a hug. Everyone liked her and was respectful of her faith. She was Sarah’s roommate and, understandably, was the most disturbed by Sarah’s mental health state. Chen loved Sonny (Allowah and Beata’s son) and tried very hard to get him to be quiet and sweet. Sonny was, instead, loud, entertaining, and mostly uninterested in her. Once, Chen said, “Sonny you are so cute,” and Sonny said, “I’m not cute, I’m Sonny.” Sonny had one volume of his voice and he has never lowered it for any occasion. He took himself very seriously, as all 4-year-olds should, and liked to boss yoga students around.

Chloe was my favorite person there. She was 22, from New Orleans. She was incredibly strong and fit and worked as a personal trainer. She had mid-length dirty blond hair with tight curls, and wore glasses over bright green eyes. A few years before, she had gone sober and was completely substance free, including coffee, which was nice for me personally as someone who also did not partake. She was vegan and made all her own meals. She was serious about yoga the same way I was, and she was very good. She was down-to-earth and calm, which was a respite in the craziness of the everyday.

That first week, little groups formed and reformed. Mary and Claudia were close; Erika and Maddy were never apart from each other; Chen and Sarah had no group; and Laura, Chloe and I floated between groups. Chloe and I did a lot together—we didn’t really have a lot in common besides not doing drugs and doing yoga, so we talked about that. Most of the girls struggled to engage with the training and spent a lot of time complaining about it, whereas Chole and I were very into the training. One of the first times we all went to the beach, Chloe and I swam out into the ocean: we were the only ones unafraid to do so. This time I was more careful timing my entry and exit with the waves, so I didn’t get caught under. We saw a sea turtle and gossiped about everyone. As everyone got more comfortable with swimming, they would come out and float with us.

There were other people staying at the sanctuary, not just our yoga group, and occasionally, they would come and practice with us. The two that most frequently joined us were Daniel and Michael. Daniel was friendly and had a nice, trustworthy face, thinning hair which curled at the ends, and clear, blue eyes. He was about 40 and was in the Navy, despite never having stepped on an actual ship, instead working in DC. He said he had spent a little time in the Middle East, a little in Germany and that he was here in HI to visit his brother who he said was currently going by the name “Wizard.” (4) He had only been planning to stay for a week but had ended up staying longer because he liked the sanctuary so much. He and I would joke about all the hippy stuff, and he had a good sense of humor. He was attentive and interested in what everyone had to say and had lots of meaningful conversations with everyone in the training, asking lots of questions. Michael was the other drop-in. He looked like he was in his 50s and was small with a full head of gray hair. He had a beautiful, soft voice, an easy laugh, and was deliberate with what he said. He was retired and had lived in Thailand and Nepal doing all different types of yoga.

It took about a week for Laura to leave and her exit was as dramatic and silly as she was. On a Saturday, everyone else in the program went on an exertion to some waterfalls in Hilo but Laura and Maddy went to Kona (about two hours away) with friends Laura had made the day before. After spending a lovely day together, Maddy was ready to come back and Laura said she was staying in Kona.4 Laura planned to sleep on the ground with their new friends and Maddy did not want to do this. When Maddy pointed out that she didn’t have a way to get back, Laura got angry and “freaked out at her,” saying that Maddy was “screwing up her vibe” and “bumming her out.” Maddy ended up having to pay $250 for an Uber to get back to the Sanctuary. Everyone was confused as to why Laura would leave when she had paid all the money for the training, but then it came out—she had never actually paid. She had said that she would pay half before and half after she got there but, in the end, never made either payment. It wasn’t long before she was posting on Instagram at 5-star hotels in Kauai with cryptic Instagram captions about letting go of toxic people in your life.

Once Laura left, things settled. Everyone got more into the groove of the training and the yoga. Daniel and Michael both left and new people came. Byron took Daniel’s place—his real name was Matt but there were a lot of Matts at the sanctuary so everyone called him Byron which I guess must have been his last name? Byron was in his early 40s and was tall and broad with a symmetrical face and a strong jaw. He didn’t have much of a personality besides being nice and good-looking, and he always seemed to be thanking someone for something. Actually, that is not true—he didn’t have much of a personality unless he was talking about crypto, then he absolutely lit up. He explained crypto to everyone, both collectively and individually, multiple times. Unfortunately, he did not appreciate my jokes and observations about that fact. He had never done yoga and so he enjoyed all the classes and came on our excursions. He and Claudia flirted quite a bit which was silly but fun to watch. She would say things like, “You can hold my hand if you want.” This seemed a little random to me as a pairing until I learned that Claudia had a crypto portfolio (obviously??), so then it made more sense. One night she didn’t come in to sleep, but told me in the morning when she returned that they hadn’t had sex: she hadn’t been into it. Her feedback was as follows: his foreplay needed work (he had gone and grabbed a condom too soon after they first started cuddling) and when they started kissing, he had been too rough, pulling her hair and wanted to be in control. Claudia was not into that because she wanted to be in control.. She said he had a nice penis though; not that she had seen it, just felt it. She said he was a really great cuddler though. There is nothing like summer camp!

The alternate was Matt, a chef and a glass blower, who recently got his heart broken. Not by his ex-wife, of course, that was forever ago, but by his girlfriend to whom he was engaged before she broke it off. When he smiled, you could see all of his teeth and he had a tumor on his back that he hid with baggy shirts. He loved music and was talkative and interesting and made fantastic food, for which we were all extremely grateful. He was candid and sensitive and liked to shoot the breeze. Once, during one of the community ecstatic dances, we were all outside chatting and everyone (but me and Chloe) were drinking. He convinced me to dance, and he got a little handsy and a little pushy, his cigarette breath mouth two inches from my face. I squirmed free and pointed him to someone else. I made a mental note that I liked him better from three feet away and completely sober. Later, talking to the girls, I realized that my sentiment was pretty common: everyone had noticed that he made excuses to touch us in conversation. Erika, who was a part of that conversation, took it upon herself to send him a long text about how he was being creepy, and he stayed away from us for the rest of the training. We all missed his cooking and I had liked his conversation. Erika was very proud of herself and said that she had been through “too much shit and would rather make things awkward than let them be inappropriate,” which I respected, however the irony was not lost on me that in both instances, people had made decisions regarding me without actually checking in/ asking me about it.

After a while, the incessant complaining about the program got old. In my journal I wrote, “If one more person takes me aside to ask me what I think about the training, I will kill myself.” They weren’t wrong—it became clear that we weren’t going to get through all the material we needed to and the food, which had never been good, was worse now that Matt had disengaged. It wasn’t the observations of the things that were bad that bothered me; it was that it was all anyone would talk about. Nothing makes me more self-sufficient and self-righteous than if everyone else is having a bad time. One thing about me is I am going to swing the other way! I am a contrarian when it comes to group dynamics! (Thanks Dad I guess?) I was having a totally different experience and had come with totally different priorities. I hadn’t come because I wanted to develop discipline, I had come to escape from my shitty life that had recently fallen apart and be distracted by yoga: the fact that everyone around me was losing their mind, that the yoga training wasn’t that intense, and that the food was bad, those were all varying degrees of entertaining. I was just happy to be there because anything was better than what I had just come from. I was on my own journey to say the least. My mom came for the last week, which was funny and fun, seeing as all the insanity that I had grown accustomed to was new for her and we could laugh about it all over again.

Sarah left a week early, saying that she had gotten a job that wanted her to come right away but it turned out she had just wanted to leave—according to Instagram she spent another two weeks in HI island hopping. The last week was rough, most of the participants had given up on pretending they had any interest in the training and were getting more hostile. My own patience with the program finally wore out the final night during the closing ceremony. Allowah, who at this point had confessed to us that he really wanted to be a musician, not a yoga instructor, thought that for our last night we would sit around the campfire and sing songs. However, the song’s that he knew how to play were not songs we were familiar with and so instead, he just played songs that he knew while we listened. In between the songs we went around and shared closing thoughts about our spiritual journey in the program which became this cryptic passive aggressive exercise for everyone to say how despite all the things that were getting in their way (read: bad food, Allowah’s teaching style, not having a strict schedule) they had found a way to persevere and to realize that they had actually been perfect all along. This “ceremony” was three hours long and helped me be absolutely delighted to leave the next day.

I would not trade these weird four weeks of my life for the world. For one, I learned quite a bit about substances, legal and illegal, “natural” and (what I assume must be?) “unnatural,” and that New Age Spiritualism eventually goes so far left that it turns right and becomes libertarianism? Mostly, I watched a group of people (including me) all go a little insane. The girls all left on good terms, but everyone was sick of each other. In hindsight, this was a respite in a personally chaotic year, a kind of comedic island in the middle of hell, where the food was bad, and everything was funny. Everything was absurd but ultimately it was all low stakes and I got to eat fresh mangos and journal and swim in the ocean when I wanted to.

1
Said Bay-ah-tah

2
I obviously have no idea what I am talking about. Like a bong maybe? What are weed accessories? I have no idea.

3
A direct quote!

4
About two hours away, also, somewhere in all of this, Laura had all of her stuff? It wasn’t clear what Maddy knew and didn’t know, those details seemed to get in the way of her story and therefore were not included