Coming Home at Hari Hara Center For Awakening
A beautiful and deep journey into the essence of practice and devotion: my week outside of space and time at Hari Hara in Siem Reap, Cambodia
I have been on a spiritual journey for the past few years, and it’s taken me to retreats all over the globe. And yet when I walked into Hari Hara in Siem Reap, Cambodia, I knew I had come home.
It certainly helped that I was greeted by a row of smiling faces all repeating the words “welcome home.” We were urged to take our shoes off, and from the moment I settled into the facility’s beautifully decorated welcome area with my bare feet pressed to the cool stone floors, I felt myself slipping into a dreamlike state of presence that would carry me through the whole week, bringing me closer and closer to an elusive state of stillness I’d been seeking for a long time.
So often in life, we convince ourselves that we are awake, but actually, as don Miguel Ruiz writes in “The Four Agreements,” we are all dreaming all the time, and often our dreams are built on destructive collective hallucinations. For a long time, living my life back in New York City, I really felt like I was dreaming — like I was not quite living my real life, but rather that I was in a sort of shadow world, embodying a tiny fraction of my real self. I was wrapped up in a cycle of work in a fast-paced and shallow entertainment journalism industry, and was spending all my free time on social media in an attempt to run from a powerful lack of fulfillment that morphed into a fairly deep and lasting depression. This is what inspired me to leave home and pursue a different path, a journey that has led me here.
At Hari Hara, I immediately knew I had found what I have been seeking — a different way of living, one informed by the deep wisdom of sages and enlightened masters designed for those of us who have found ourselves lost in the tides of modernity, grasping for meaning amid the polluted seas of content, competition, and global crisis.
Hari Harateaches “Yoga of Awareness,” a practice that observes a “model of health rather than a model of sickness,” as Hari Hara founder Lokta Joel often says. Day-to-day life at Hari Hara embodies the new agreements and ways of life we need in order to bring ourselves and our world away from a destructive, exploitative nightmare, towards a more regenerative and interconnected shared dream of wholeness and health.
From the first moments you step into the jungle oasis that is Hari Hara, you are invited to try out a different way of being, and each and every moment of the retreat is designed to bring you towards sustainable, lasting awareness and flow.
Hari Hara is built around and inspired by the work and wisdom of the world’s great sages. The wisdom of these sages permeates every aspect of the entire place, and Joel himself is a fount of channeled wisdom; his words ring true with observations that can only be gleaned from actual transcendence of the ego and oneness with truth.
I found what I was looking for and much more at Hari Hara. Being able to be around someone like Joel is a gift; your vibrations cannot help but be raised by the presence of someone who is so deeply in touch and in tune with his center and the energy that animates all things. He is present from start to finish at the retreat, guiding yoga classes and sitting at dinner with his adorable shining light of a young son, and his words are at once poetic and deep beyond measure while also being simple and repetitive enough to really drive their meanings home.
I came to Hari Hara feeling exhausted from earlier travels and extremely confused about what to do next and where to go. I finished the retreat feeling more at peace than I ever have before, with the tools to continue to carry that peace with me throughout all my days, no matter what.
The Daily Routine: Morning Practice + the Foundations of a Daily Ritual
Retreats at Hari Hara are well-oiled machines that feel slightly like psychedelic journeys, though no substances are offered (even coffee — though never fear, it can be purchased down the street!) Joel and his staff have been running these retreats consistently for over 15 years, so every single event and day is deeply intentional and everything is designed to bring you back home to yourself and the depth of love that lives inside each and every one of us.
Each day began with a gong at six in the morning, followed by an hour of silence during which I would wander around the lush garden, sip lime water from the perpetually overflowing shelf of herbal teas and remedies, and read book from Hari Hara’s massive library of spiritual wisdom, which features the work of dozens of great living sages, from Osho to Paramahansa Yogananda and more, as well as many other potent texts.
At seven, would head into a two-hour morning yoga session, which usually consisted of the same sequence of poses — two sun salutations, warrior I and II, half moon and tree pose, a shoulder stand, a bridge, and a supine twist. The poses are done slowly and carefully, and this whole process is designed to create the backbone of a daily routine.
This is one of Hari Hara’s greatest gifts: each and every participant will leave with a powerful daily routine. Joel and the team suggest taking 30 minutes, or 2% each day, to do a routine that consists of 12 minutes of yoga, five minutes of breathwork, and thirteen minutes of meditation.
One thing I have learned from attending many different retreats is that while you can have incredible experiences in the cocoon of a supportive environment, it means very little if you don’t maintain those practices at home. But after Hari Hara, I can say I have a new routine I plan on upholding each morning, every day of my life.
Also, I’d probably done a hundred sun salutations this year, but at Hari Hara I felt that for the first time ever, I was actually taught how to do the poses correctly. Two classes in the first two days were specifically dedicated to teaching us the ins and outs of each posture, and we worked with partners and expert yoga teachers to make sure our spines and knees and shoulders were exactly aligned in order to catalyze the proper flow of energy through our bodies. Now I know I am doing these poses in a way that cares for both my body and mind.
Despite the way yoga has been cannibalized by the West and capitalism, yoga is not and never has been about fancy poses or fast movements. Instead it’s a deep spiritual practice that can change everything, but only if you approach it with the correct form and intention. At Hari Hara I received a master class in just that, and was able to go deeper into the poses than ever before.
Hari Hara also sets up each and every participant with the tools necessary to build a consistent and powerful meditation practice. I felt that I learned as much or more about meditation from this retreat as I did from the 10-day Vipassana silent retreat I did back in Nepal, and was also able to have similarly deep experiences in meditation here — only without the agonizing challenges of Vipassana’s militaristic style. Instead, Hari Hara takes a compassionate but intense approach to teaching meditation, setting every participant up with the tools necessary to build a generative practice.
Some things can only be found in the infinite expanse of silence, beyond past and future. Joel often calls Hari Hara a “garden outside of space and time,” and for me, it has been just that: a place to escape the future and to slip into the elusive cathedral of the eternal now.
Food: Vegan, Gluten Free, and 100% Heavenly
After our morning practice, we would head over to breakfast, which would begin with a poetry reading. And let me tell you, a Hafiz poem and a beautiful meal after two hours of morning yoga is one inspiring way to begin one’s day.
The food at Hari Hara was also probably the most delicious food I have ever eaten in my life. As with most sacred things, there is no real way to describe it with words, but I will try.
All the food at Hari Hara is both vegan and gluten free, and there are no “beyond meats” or any kind of processed foods, but it never, ever felt like we were missing out on anything. Each meal was artfully displayed on a bed of flowers, incense, and jungle leaves, and every bit was cooked with love by the retreat’s devoted Khmer staff, drawn from a series of recipes created by Joel over his past two decades in Cambodia.
Another highlight from Hari Hara’s kitchen: the facility offers unlimited free coconuts, and I spent some blissful afternoons sipping cold coconut water and talking about life and spirituality with other guests in the afternoons between classes.
The retreat also offers vegan coconut ice cream, extraordinarily delicious homemade vegan and gluten free cakes, and many other snacks, so you’ll never go hungry — but the meals themselves were often so filling and nourishing that I was rarely in need of extra additions.
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner took my breath away each and every time. My advice: Even if you have no interest in meditation or yoga, go for the food alone.
A Digital Detox and a Day of Silence
One of the most unique aspects of Hari Hara is that it is a completely phone and technology-free experience. Right around when you take your shoes off, you also hand in your cell phone, and it’s not returned to you until the final morning.
I’d done digital detoxes before, and every time, without fail, I find myself truly happy to not have my phone. This time, I breathed a sense of relief as I handed mine away.
It is an absolute luxury to not have the constant rush of notifications that cell phones and the internet constantly inundate us with. Here, I found myself much more able to sink deeply into meditations than I ever am when I have my phone around.
Here, I gave myself the gift of sitting, resting, and enjoying the sunlight glancing off the lily pads on one of Hari Hara’s two verdant lotus ponds. I read in the morning, and went to bed early at night.
On the third evening, we settled into a day of silence, which would stretch through the following day. Without the ability to speak, and without a phone, my mind grew clearer than it had been in a long time. Silence — true silence — is extremely rare in our reality, where different forces are always grabbing at us and demanding our attention.
And what I found in the heart of that silence was answers that I’d always known, but long been running from. I sat by the pond in a little hut next to a hibiscus bush, asking the the silence and stillness questions I had been holding in my heart.
The answer came to me. It’s the same answer that it’s been my whole life. It wasn’t the answer I was looking for, but it’s also the truth. I realized all at once that writing has always been at the center of my life. That I was born to be a channel for the divine source that spins songs and words through me in a way I cannot understand or fully control.
I still don’t know exactly where I should go next, which is what I came to Hari Hara wondering. But I remember my purpose, and I know that true stillness and truth is found in the present moment.
We cannot predict the future. We cannot change the past. But we can reconnect with our hearts and souls in the moment. And the moment is all there ever is.
Fire Ceremonies, Ecstatic Dance, Jam Night, and More
There were so many little jewels embedded in the structure of my retreat at Hari Hara that it’s difficult to summarize them all, but I will give it a try: On the second night we all laughed our heads off during a game night. On the third we had our first of two fitness sessions, sweaty bursts of energy designed to help us blow off steam as we moved to our silent day. The third night featured a beautiful and cathartic ecstatic dance session done mostly in darkness or in faint blue or red lights. The fourth included a beautiful yin class where we were given hand-drawn notes from our teachers, cleansed with healing smokes, and invited into the luxurious practice of yin, a softer and more feminine form of yoga that I have always found to be a heavenly experience.
On our final night, we all participated in a moving fire ceremony, where we chanted mantras over and over and tossed grains of rice into the fire along with papers emblazoned with the names of things we wanted to release. As I whispered the mantra into the fire and watched the paper burn, I felt bits of my old life that I no longer needed dissolving into nothingness, returning to the sea, clearing new space in my chest where new growth can emerge.
That night we had a jam night, where I performed a song I’d written on one of my first days at Hari Hara. Inspired by a line in Joel’s book, Yoga of Awareness — “everything is consumed by the fire of love” — it is an ode to throwing everything, from suffering to projections of the past and future — into the all-powerful vortex of compassion. When everything is met with light, I have found, everything becomes light. Even that which we thought we could never live with dissolves and transforms in the fire of love.
More and more, I am convinced that we all come from love and we all return to it. I see that love glowing in the faces of most children, but adults seem to have forgotten about it. We are all wandering around in a state of oblivion, forgetting our true nature, which is simply to love. At Hari Hara I saw those around me begin to remember, and I felt the sparks of truth ignite in my own chest as well. As we all sang songs and shared poetry, I never wanted to leave.
On our final day, we had a Kundalini yoga class and a sharing circle. Many people teared up as they spoke about how the retreat had been exactly what they were looking for — how it had sparked changes they had longed for but never thought they could find — and how grateful they were to have been along for the journey.
The guests left soon after, promising to stay in touch. There was a sweetness to everyone in attendance; they all felt like family remarkably quickly, and I think this is thanks to the love that has been poured into Hari Hara for so many years. Never have I experienced a sweeter or more authentic group of retreat attendees. There were no pretenses, no airs. Only loving awareness — and a little bit of trepidation that, by the end, morphed into pure gratitude.
I personally came to Hari Hara with heavy questions on my brain about what to do next. Caught in a maze of indecision, I felt myself faltering, frozen. But over and over, Joel told us — don’t think. There is no mind. We don’t know.
And this is the truth, really. The past and future are projections, dreams. The present moment is all we have. All I can do is become present now and move in the direction of my highest excitement and love, now, in this moment. I can trust that this will carry me wherever I am meant to go.
What a beautiful beautiful experience retreat- is sounds like heaven - you are a wonderful writer- namaste
Sounds dreamy! I’ve been to Cambodia and loved it so much. You made me want there again!!