So, What Happened At Burning Man?

Would I recommend driving 3500 km to Burning Man, leave a day early (miss the most important part, the temple burn) to squeeze in one more 4-day conference while my husband drives another 1000 km to barely make it to our flight back to Europe on the day our visa expires?

No.

And yet this urge to take advantage of life, this insatiable thirst to awaken and to feel everything while I still have the chance… seems to be making decisions here.

Now, I’m writing this while recovering from the inevitable post-adventure flu that my body patiently waited until the moment I stopped to finally collapse. Don’t worry, I’m recovering with hubs at an all-inclusive spa resort in Athens, excited to return to work and client calls next week, and looking forward to the months of therapy ahead to process and integrate what happened at Burning Man.

Burning Man, for Me

For some, it is the world’s best party, for others it is an opportunity to explore sexuality and hedonic pleasures. For seekers like me, it was a ritual of life and death.

If you’ve read Stealing Fire, or The Immortality Key, you may know how humans’ hunger for meaning, their relentless questioning about what life is all about and what happens after death, has given birth to rites of passage for thousands of years.

Even though I feel very disconnected from my Greek heritage (if anything, I’ve spent all of my adult life trying to be more than the culture I was born into), Aristotle, Plato and countless others of my ancestors religiously took part in the Eleusinian mysteries, drinking a psychedelic-infused brew called kykeon once a year for nearly two thousand years to “die before you die so you don’t die when you die”.

The Eleusinian Mysteries were the ancient Greeks’ most sacred rite: a secret initiation to experience symbolic death and spiritual rebirth and offer a glimpse of immortality.

If anyone was to reveal what was taking place in those sacred mysteries, they would be sentenced to death! And Prometheus risked his life to steal that magical potion for his parties.

I get it . I’ve gone to great lengths to experience life on psychedelics for the potential that my life (and mind) will never be the same again.

Burning Man, in my experience, is this modern day rite of passage. What in the hero’s journey is the great ordeal, the portal of death and rebirth.

Facing Death

Two weeks ago, I experienced the most painful and profound journey of my life.

It began with a simple question I asked my husband: “Will we be together forever?”

“There is no forever”, he said. Then he read to me four passages about death, written on the Temple walls.

Far, far away from the parties and chaos of Burning Man, stands a wooden structure: the Temple, the heart of the event. This is where people leave photos, letters, and offerings for lost loved ones, things they are grieving, letting go of, pain, anger and everything they wish to release and burn on the final night.

There, were four passages written by poet Noah Schnaubelt (@roarandtender) which marked my initiation into finally, beginning to accept death as part of life.

*Poem about death by Noah Schnaubelt (@roarandtender) at the Temple, Burning Man 2025*

I’ve realized that I’ve been afraid to die.

And that fear of death was constricting me.

I’ve been resistant to life and afraid of life, afraid of opening up fully,

because I’ve been resistant to death.

To understand what burning man is to understand the meaning of life and death.

Burning Man is a great metaphor for life. All this beauty and art is created, some of it taking a year to create, so much effort, money, energy, love is poured into transporting massive installations for thousands of miles, only to be burned to the ground.

A friend who in her 70s came to the burn for the first time, asked,

“It’s beautiful but isn’t all of this in vain?”

It is.

And isn’t life in the reality of death?

It’s been painful and incredibly hard to stop weeping and grieving the impermanence of beauty, relationships and life itself knowing it will all eventually pass.

I found consolation in the words of Jack Kornfield, picking back up After the Ecstasy, the Laundry as soon as we left the playa:

Kabir, the Indian mystic poet, asks:
“Can you tell me who has built this house of ours?
And where do you hurry to before your death?
Can you find the thing of true value in this world?”
Whatever the source of this profound questioning, we must follow where it leads.

Seven years ago, I would not have been able to endure this amount of pain. I would have freaked out and have wished for it to stop. Now, understanding how healing works, that the only way out is through, craving to feel endlessly alive and to get deeper and deeper to the core of it all far more than I’m tempted to escape pain,
I found this experience to be pivotal.

It was my initiation. A true rite of passage. Like a bar mitzvah: entering in a state of agnoia (innocent, childlike unawareness) and leaving more of an adult. Waking up from the dream to the reality of life (and death).

“The best day of our lives”

The irony was that the intention for that trip was “to have the best day of our lives”.

Long gone are the days that I expect psychedelics to heal me in one sitting or to even meet my intention as if I’m placing a cocktail order at a bar.

I’m so patient with healing these days it worries my husband. I’m okay to be sad for as long as sadness needs to be felt, deeply, seen deeply, wholly accepted until it moves through.

I’ve got the rest of my life for this.

That, and the fact that I asked for joy and was delivered pain was not not my intention. The journey showed me what was in the way of that intention. Joy might be point C, but my journey revealed point B. How am I supposed to get from A to C without first passing through B? That’s all that it is.

In other words, how am I expected to feel joy without first feeling all the pain?

How else am I supposed to move forward?

How am I supposed to have fun, all the fun, if I don’t heal first?

Healing is not in the way, it is the way.

After this, I expect the next episode to be enjoying life… the one between death.

Why am I here? To remember. To know who I am.

“When we live without connectedness, we can feel a subtle longing, as though we know something essential is missing.
It is this elusive spirit which holds us completely, which nourishes the heart, summoning us toward our search for what life is all about.
We are pulled to return to our true nature — to our wise and knowing heart.”
— Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, The Laundry

I’m sad my husband felt sad for my sadness. But I’m even more sad that he feels like sadness should be avoided and it is not accepted. I accept sadness and pain and I find so much beauty in them. They teach me how to be resilient. How to be stronger. And feeling them deeply, makes me better at feeling joy, gratitude, and ecstasy deeper. There is no life without death. There is no joy without grief. And in-between the impermanence, lies all the possibility.

This has been the most profound journey of my entire life. And all I want is more of those. Interestingly, I had a facilitated 5-MeO journey as preparation for Burning Man and my final words as I was coming out if it were:

“On one hand, I don’t want this to end. On the other hand, I don’t want to die again.”

This is the best day of our lives as long as we become ever more awake, and remember (our power).

At the end of the day, everyone gets out of it what they set out for.

And since this is what I signed up for from the very beginning: here’s to a life worth living. Worth dying for.

With heart, soul, and gratitude,

Alexandra

Temple Passage:

You Are Going To Die.

And everything you’ve cared for– All that rises eventually will fall.

This is the only truth: Cold. Brash. Heartless. . . And also full of possibility;

There is opportunity here to pull a diamond through this weight of a black hole.

To know, embodied beyond reason, that through such brief and unmistakable fragility

every moment can be precious tinder, every breath you still are given– Gold.

You are going to lose: Everything. Everywhere. Piece by piece.

Until at last your grasp on whatever you thought important snaps, and you travel finally home:

A place you can take nothing with you . . . Is this a reason not to love?

To turn away before the grief of loss consumes all thoughts?

Is the cost of breaking worth the gift to hold?

I can tell you: We did not come to this world to numb;

to live a life where no sound echoes on the drum, a life where the heart is too afraid to feel its blood.

Why would we? This is the very reason to love: to make every fleeting moment worth the hurt.

to feel the possibility of beauty in every chance to have a chance at all.

To feel the heartbreaking sweetness of letting go, and of each new grace

that comes to fill the after. Which they will. If you’ll soften.

We are all going to die. In some long years, (still so short), and that is if we’re lucky.

This is the very reason to start loving today . . . How much longer can you afford to wait?

Are your angers worth it? Does that belief need you to be so damn sure of it?

Have you tasted enough mystery?

Have you received kindness? Have you felt what it is like to share?

Have you paused your to-do list and stepped outside just because?

When was the last time, like a child, you simply started to run?

When was the last time, like a child, you gently stopped to nap in the sun?

When was the last time, like a child, you allowed tears unrestricted to flood?

When was the last time, like a child, you looked all around you at everything,

at everything with love?

— Noah Schnaubelt found in the collection, A Life of Prayer & Song: A Poetry Collection.