Wandering Through Empty Places ( Part 2: The Road to Mahai)

When we sold the farm and yoga studio in 2019 and 2020, I still believed I would be hosting festivals. We just needed a new home.

This was the early period of COVID, when the world felt strangely suspended in time. Airports were empty. Roads were quiet. Entire retreat centers and summer camps sat abandoned.

I started traveling up and down the east coast of the United States looking at old summer camps that might become future homes for festivals and retreats.

Because of COVID restrictions, real estate agents often preferred not to meet us at the properties. We would simply arrive and wander through them alone — silent dining halls, empty cabins, forgotten gathering spaces sitting motionless in the woods.

It all felt surreal.

I would walk through these abandoned properties imagining music and dancing, workshops, conversations, people reconnecting with each other after so much isolation.

I started working on renovation budgets because most of the camp sites for sale had been empty for many years and I was trying to figure out whether I could somehow put together offers on some of these places with the proceeds from the farm. Imagining the properties full and alive felt like the first glimmers of hope for a known future amidst the strange unknown of COVID.

But then the beginning of an explosion started bubbling up. First it was mostly whispered from friends, stories that felt safer to share amidst the larger "me too" movement that was unfolding. Girls I had grown up with, now in our fourties started sharing the smallest glimpses into their stories of abuse in the spiritual community I had grown up in. And then more stories, and more.

Something inside me shifted. My entire life was reframed.

As more stories emerged, I realized I could not host another festival without some very serious changes. I began wondering about the entire model of large spiritual gatherings themselves. I started questioning the very existence of spiritual teachers and spiritual guides. I started to feel uncomfortable about the pedestals that teachers are put on, the power that is handed to them, and the vulnerable place that is opened in all of us when we gather in community and feel such a strong experience of shared open hearts. Those spaces need to be fiercely protected. We need to keep people safe.

At the same time, I was carrying enormous financial weight. When COVID shut the world down, we refunded large numbers of pre-sold Sat Nam Fest tickets. To do that, I took out massive loans — loans that will take me many decades to repay.

For a while, I believed future festivals would eventually help recover those losses once the world reopened. But when I realized that chapter of my life was over, I had to accept that those loans would simply become part of my life moving forward.

Over time, I have come to see those loans almost as teachers. And who knows, they may outlive me.

They are a reminder that even communities built around beautiful ideals can lose their way when truth is allowed to remain hidden in the shadows. Spiritual communities are not immune from harm. In some ways, they can become especially vulnerable when people begin believing that the mission itself justifies silence or blindness.

That realization changed me deeply.

And somewhere inside all of the grief and disillusionment that overtook me, another understanding quietly began to emerge.

I wanted something smaller.

Something quieter.

Something more human.

I wanted a place where people could truly exhale.