Growing Old Without Growing Up

But that hardly matters anymore. For I am also a citizen of Infantilized America, where getting old has gotten old, and youth is no longer just wasted on the young. Maybe it’s due to narcissism or nostalgia, or all our institutions atrophying. (Even for rebellious souls, what old order is there left to upset?) Maybe it springs from the heaping buffet of cultural junk-food available to us as binge-eating consumers, or from wishing to simplify a dizzying world. But ours is a country whose adultescents now play with Legos and on “adult playgrounds,” color in “adult coloring books,” and read as much YA fiction as their teenage daughters.

It’s a place where 9 out of 10 of the top-grossing films last year were of the cape’n’codpiece superhero variety. It’s a place where the average gamer is 35 years old. Where the average Brony (a man obsessed with the My Little Pony franchise targeted at little girls) is 21. Where the average backwards-cap wearer is .  .  . well, nobody’s ever done a study of that. But just trust me and ask your dad to knock it off.

So it stands to reason that “adult sleepaway camp” would become a thing, as the kids say — though I rarely hear kids say that, just adults trying to sound like them. Even everyone’s idea of a forever-young fun maven says so: “We really need camps for adults,” Hillary Clinton told an American Camp Association gathering this spring. “I think we have a huge fun deficit in America.”

Momaste, mid-sage attack (Credit: Soul Camp)

In fact, the American Camp Association reports that around one million adults now attend camp each year. So many, that some camps have even gone niche, such as Club Getaway in the Berkshires, which experimented with a reduced-rate summer camp for the unemployed. There are hobbyist camps, everything from space camp to wine-tasting camp to rock-band camp, where frustrated workadaddies can escape their cubicle farms to reimagine themselves as Jimmy Page.

But there are also scores of more generalized all-purpose camps for adults. Places like Camp Throwback in Clarksville, Ohio, where rejuveniles can experience the summer camp they always wanted, but with Drunk Field Day, Hangover Yoga, and “more sensitive guys around the fire with guitars.” Then there’s The Woods in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, where campers can enjoy volleyball, a bathing-suits-and-cowboy-boots party, and free HIV testing in a natural clothing-optional LGBT environment, just like when we were kids. There’s even Camp Grounded in the redwood forests of Mendocino, a Digital Detox production and no-electronics-permitted analog immersive experience. (Sophisticated kidults are often fonder of having “experiences” than actual fun.) Here, infantilized techies pay camp counselors to make them do what they could have done themselves for free at home (turn off their iPhones), as they play kickball, stargaze, roast marshmallows, and write letters on old typewriters in an effort to recover what’s left of their humanity.

I, however, have come to one of the newer entrants in the field — Soul Camp. When I first heard the name, I thought maybe the camp had hired retired Pips as counselors, who’d show us how to do cool Motown backup-singer steps during “Midnight Train to Georgia.” But no, this soul camp is not for aspiring black R&B singers. In fact, it’s almost overwhelmingly white (it may need to check its privilege, as the kids unfortunately do say). It bills itself as “adult sleepaway camp for the soul,” and it “isn’t the doorway to another world, it is the doorway to yourself.”

As I open the door to my rental car, I’m greeted by a throng of comely young women — never a bad start — offering bubbly welcomes and wearing tie-dye. Literally bubbly — some actually blow bubbles at me. As they do so, an older woman approaches, the “camp mom,” also known as “Momaste” (bad at yoga puns, I miss the play off “Namaste” and cause gales of laughter when mispronouncing her name “mom-mast”). A clinical psychotherapist specializing in “inner child work, shame, and successful aging,” Momaste starts waving what looks like a giant, smoking doobie all around me.

I am slightly offended. I’d read all Soul Camp’s rules before coming — there are plenty of them. Though this is supposedly a camp for adults who can make their own decisions, the forbidden list includes cliques, gossip (“let’s keep this a safe space and container to do the work”), and even flip-flops (“due to the rocky terrain .  .  . we don’t want you to hurt yourself”). Likewise, no chewing gum (so as not to trigger a spearmint allergy?). Nor are we allowed to bring alcohol. Though I smuggle some in anyway, since I’m a working journalist and found another camp-rule that provided a loophole: “Take care of you. .  .  . You do you, boo.”

Still, I have to stash my bourbon in the trunk like a criminal. Why does Momaste get to push her weed right out here in the open? “It’s sage!” she says, when I tell her to keep her filthy drugs off of me. As I cough through a cloud of sage smoke, Momaste explains it’s a Native American ritual, and she’s giving me a blessing. As she does so, another of the welcome crew hands me my tie-dyed Camp Soul T-shirt and asks if I want to fringe it. Not yet, I tell her, I’m trying to ease into the experience. “And I’m trying to move you outside your comfort zone,” she says. “Don’t worry,” I reply, smelling like a roasted chicken, “I’m already there.”

A session of ‘intenSati,’ a mashup of yoga, dance, martial arts, and interval training with Stuart Smalley-like affirmations. (Credit: Soul Camp)

It’s been a good 30-plus years since I went to camp. And the usual memory mash (tipped canoes, dirt-clod wars, sad cafeteria food) comes back most vividly in smells: that unique alchemy of wood smoke and musty bunk mattresses and fir needles and too much Polo cologne to impress the girls/cover for the showers you won’t take since hitting the showers might involve having your clothes stolen or getting your goo-loos whip-snapped with a belt by older, thuggish cabin-mates.

But Soul Camp is not that kind of camp. It has a distinct New-Agey tenor, though nobody involved would dare use the term New Age anymore, as the New Age is now awkwardly middle-aged, having been around since the 1970s. It’s as dated a term as “Space Age” — which usually connotes the midcentury Jetsons version of what we imagined the future would look like before it became the past. Most practitioners now use fresher, less ambitious labels, preferring to say they work in the mind/body/spirit space, the word “space” being more fetishized even than “experience” and almost as much as “intention” (as in, “Please set your intentions while in this space so you can really inhabit the experience”).

Looking over the list of Soul Camp’s counselors/instructors, I see that everyone has a zingy title like “Intuition Maven” or “Fear Fighter” or “Play With the World Expert.” They give talks, or “soulversations,” on subjects like “My Journey From Functioning to Flying” and “Cultivating Your Authentic Self.” They offer instruction on everything from past-life regression to Pranayama breathing to angel channeling. They are relentlessly sunny and life-affirming. They all seem to wear yoga pants and/or to have blogged on the Huffington Post.

Soul Camp was founded just last year by two nice Jewish girls, Ali Leipzig, 28, and Michelle Goldblum, 31 (daughter of Momaste, the sage pusher). For eight weeks each summer as youths, they both used to go to Camp Towanda in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, the very camp that was used to shoot the summer-camp comedy Wet Hot American Summer, they tell me as we sit down to talk by Wonder Valley’s lake. (The resort, which Soul Camp has rented for the week, is less a stereotypical summer camp than a wedding/conference space, complete with paved roads and golf carts — as opposed to Towanda, a traditional-looking, woodsy summer camp, where the first couple of Soul Camps were held. Both locations will be used in the future.)

Because of the age difference, the girls didn’t know each other, Michelle explains. “Well, I knew Michelle,” corrects Ali, “because you know all the older girls’ names. I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, Michelle Goldblum, so cool!’ ”

“So flash forward 15 years,” says Michelle, “and Ali and I both own companies in the mind/body/spirit space. I have a branding company called I AM.creative, Ali does design branding and is a body confidence coach.” I stop the girls to ask what exactly a body confidence coach is. “I help women feel beautiful in the bodies that they’re in,” Ali says. Does she get in their face with a whistle, telling them it’s not okay to have that Hostess cupcake? No, she says. “It’s more about just loving where you’re at in order to get where you want to go.”

“Oooh, Tweetable!” enthuses Michelle.

Ali, right, and Michelle (Credit: Soul Camp)

Anyway, all these years later, Michelle was in a flash mob in Washington Square Park, and Ali, who coincidentally was supposed to be there too but had to miss, went to look up photos of it on Facebook and noticed Michelle. “She used to wear a lot of neon,” says Ali. Ali messaged Michelle, they made plans to meet for lunch, but before they could meet, they coincidentally ran into each other at the same breathwork workshop. Kismet! “We were breathing next to each other!” says Michelle. They became instant BFFs. “Ali is my twin flame in many ways,” Michelle beams. When they got together, they had this “campy energy, we would be like cheering, and we clap for everything.”

“Yeah,” chimes in Ali. “We were walking in Williamsburg, this real cool neighborhood, and were like singing camp songs. [Other friends] were like, ‘Would you shut up?’ And we were like, ‘You guys don’t get it. Like, this is so fun!’ ” The girls put their heads together with the director of their old camp and decided they’d have a one-off camp at Towanda for friends, hauling along all the lifestyle gurus and wellness coaches they knew from their day jobs. The girls were so excited they started furiously texting back-and-forth. “Like, oh my gosh, we’re gonna put a camp together!” Michelle remembers. “We’re writing in hashtags! Like #adultcamp, #camp2.0, #soulcamp. And then we just wrote back over and over: SOUL CAMP, SOUL CAMP, SOUL CAMP!”

An institution was born. The friends brought friends, and now people are coming from all over the country and as far away as Singapore. The girls are even in talks with the Queen of Soul herself to come speak here. No, not Aretha. Better! Oprah!

It’s a long way from what Michelle was doing just a few years ago. Working in the pharmaceutical advertising industry, filling the void with cigarettes, alcohol, an Adderall addiction, and a codependent relationship that made her feel “needy.” That was before she changed her paradigm, transformed her life, went on an Eat, Pray, Love-type excursion to India, and now hangs with people in the wellness space who “are living their dream, and are, like, happy!”

Michelle says she and Ali are friends with a lot of the other kidult-camp directors, like the guy who runs Camp Grounded. But unlike some of the others, Soul Camp goes beyond just unplugging your phone or having Bloody Mary breakfasts or jumping in a lake. Here, campers are returning to childhood in more ways than one: “We have these different workshops all the time. Workshops about transformation. Workshops that, like, bring up memories. Repressed memories of your childhood. There are so many of us, myself included, who have, like, s— happen. In your childhood. We stuff it down and then become these people. ‘I am an executive! I have a family! I go on vacation! I’m okay, I’m okay!’ But deep down, it is not healed.”

Soul Campers tend to their chi. (Credit: Soul Camp)

Before the healing can begin, I acclimate myself to camp. Throughout the grounds, there are magic-markered signs of affirmation, what I come to think of as Stuart Smalley graffiti, after the Al Franken self-help character on Saturday Night Live whose catchphrase was “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!” Everywhere are signs: “Swim in your soul. .  .  . Did you ever know that you’re my hero? .  .  . Today is the perfect day. .  .  . You’re living your story. .  .  . [And, near the restroom,] What is your intention as you poop, puke, release?”

In addition to food for us meat’n’potato types, the buffet is always stacked with healthful gluten-free, vegan choices. The snack bar and cabins come with Kale Crunch and TeeChia Sustained Energy Cereal. With all the foodstuffs packed with superseeds, quinoa, flax, and hemp, everyone’s grateful that the communal latrines are down the hall and not in the rooms, where there could be air quality issues.

Forgoing a private cabin for the full-immersion experience in what look like Spartan military barracks, I call dibs on the bunk next to the air-conditioner to control the fan speed and drown out my snoring. My six cabin-mates are all male (the ratio of the 150 or so Soul Campers is about seven-to-one female-to-male) and insta-friendly. One, who sells advertising for an online company, goes for the hug when I offer a handshake. I relent with a bro-hug, but he turns it into a whoa-hug, holding it out for about four beats too long.

Another is a life coach who also runs a Braveheart Men’s Movement retreat in Bermuda, where they provide, among other things, goofy games and physical challenges, “community conversations about masculinity,” and “experiential exercises that allow you to connect with yourself more deeply.” He’s here to glean ideas for his own camp, the camp industry being on the rise since “nobody hangs out with each other anymore.” When he was a kid, his father was a Mason. Now the only community most people find is on Facebook or Instagram. So that these days people are subscribing to speed-round, friend-making heightened experiences to replace the physical communities and friendships they once had but sacrificed for virtual ones.

Then there’s Pup — his nickname, and an apt one. Athletically diminutive, Pup likes the girls, best I can tell, and they seem to like him back, though he decorates our room with glossy pictures of Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe, and Barbra Streisand, presumably inspiring us to stay in touch with both the masculine and feminine sides of ourselves (the latter not being a problem at Soul Camp, where the energy is decidedly feminine).

Pup, who is pushing 30, lives in the Bay Area and has a “party/live/workspace” in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, as well — when he’s home, which isn’t often. “To be honest, I just kind of float from place to place.” He’d been knocking around Europe for several weeks before coming home for a night, throwing a bunch of clothes in a bag, and making his way to Soul Camp. Clothes that Bogart wouldn’t have Big Slept in: stained-glass-colored yoga tights, brightly hued tank tops, blousy MC-Hammer-looking pants his parents picked up for him when backpacking around Thailand. “My dad’s like 70, and my mom’s like 60-something, but they’re like college kids again, backpacking around all of these places.”

Pup grew up going to 4-H camps in his home state of West Virginia and kept on going until he was 19. Real camps, he says, “with no kale chips.” He spent a year-and-a-half abroad after high school, electing to spend another year of high school in Japan so he could study Japanese and kendo. If I’m giving you the sense that Pup is some slacker kidult, that wouldn’t be a complete picture. It’s not like he has no ambition. A computer prodigy from a young age, he went to MIT and even taught a course there, which he describes as “Teaching Nerds to Talk,” helping awkward techies communicate their ideas.

Pup, Soul Camper (Credit: TWS/Matt Labash)

Pup had a company called Hunch, described as “a collective intelligence decision engine.” Much as Netflix has algorithms that recommend movies, Hunch would walk you through steps like a trusted camp counselor for the serially indecisive, helping you determine whether you should get back together with your ex or drop out of school. “I had great aspirations for it,” he says with a shrug, “but we sold it to eBay. Now it’s used to sell shoes.”

He has other interests, lots of them. Pup helped start “The Algorithm Auction,” billed as the world’s first auction of computer algorithms, intended to enshrine the aesthetic beauty of algorithms through, say, drawings of the OkCupid compatibility calculation, signed by its founders. He also runs “Pup’s Pool Party,” which can rage for days (Pup often DJs himself). The Daily Secret describes it as a monthly party for a “highly select crew of young Bay Area super-nerds convened on a secluded compound for a full weekend of coding and craziness .  .  . like a miniature, more intimate Burning Man, but without the dust.”

I listen with fascination to Pup’s tales of his varied, weird life. And though he’s smarter than I am (I’m still waiting for my call from MIT), I can’t help but put him on my psychoanalyst’s couch. I point out to him that I see a thread here: He goes to high school even after he’s graduated, he’s a 29-year-old man who goes by “Pup,” his pride and joy is throwing rolling pool parties, he stayed in camp until he was 19 years old, and now he’s coming back. “You’re Peter Pan!” I say. “You can’t become an adult. You’re clinging to childhood. Am I wrong?”

Instead of being insulted by the presumptuousness of his new cabin-mate/shrink, Pup strikes a genuinely thoughtful look. “That’s interesting,” he ponders. “This is the first time that I think someone has just sort of .  .  . diagnosed it. I think there’s a core nugget there.” But he also thinks people are giving up “a playfulness” from childhood much earlier these days. Tell that to the geriatric gamers or the 40-year-old Bronies dressed like pastel ponies, I want to tell him, but refrain from interrupting his flow. “Looking out into the world with wonder, excitement for the future,” he continues. Instead, Pup says, people are becoming slaves to their handheld isolation chambers that turn on the algorithms he’s even helped create. (No argument there.)

Pup’s back at camp, he says proudly. And others should be, too. It doesn’t matter where. “S—t, go to your anarchist camp. Go to your Soul Camp. Whatever it is you want to do. It’s a very positive shared experience in a world where increasingly we’re looking down into our electronics. Camp implores you to look out into the world.”

Looking out into the world is an admirable pursuit, but at Soul Camp, top of the docket seems to be gazing at our own navels. If Soul Camp had a theme song, it would be R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.” Each of us is assigned to a team with a counselor as captain, all with cutesy names like Sunshine Squad and Sparkle Love Monkeys. Mine is Super Soul Squad, and my team captain I call “Sarge.”

Despite the Full Metal Jacket inference, Sarge has a gentle, maternal spirit: “I just want you to take care of yourselves so I can take care of you.” I tell her I need a golf cart, which are allotted only to staff. Can she arrange it? “It might be challenging,” she says diplomatically. “But if you need a ride somewhere, we can totally hook you up.”

Sarge has us go around the table, sharing our intentions, fears, or fun facts. She starts. Having gone to the first Soul Camp in Pennsylvania, she had a life transformation after an intenSati class taught by instructor Patricia Moreno, intenSati being a combo yoga/dance/martial arts/interval training exercise, all while chanting powerful Stuart Smalley-like affirmations.

Later in the Soul Camp experience, we will all engage in intenSati, including yours truly, though I head for the juice bar early when I can’t quite keep a straight face doing hip sashays and throwing air-punches while chanting “I am a creative genius” and “I accept my power / To change this hour.” Still, it worked for Sarge. She used to be 318 lbs. But after her first workout, then an hour talking to Moreno, then lots of tears (there’re always lots of tears at Soul Camp), she decided to change her life, quit her job, and get stomach surgery. She dropped 120 lbs., while becoming an intenSati instructor herself.

From there, we are off. There’s the fledgling actress who, as she’s turning 30, doesn’t know if acting is what she wants to contribute to the world. There’s the hairdresser who just quit her job last Sunday and who has had a spiritual awakening (she’s met all four of her guardian angels), even as she’s found out she’s gluten and dairy intolerant. There’s the corporate drone who found herself in a meeting recently writing: “This place is sucking me dry. My soul is dying.”

It comes my turn, and I suppose I could open a vein and share my personal setbacks like everyone else — the lumps and bumps that are the inevitable cost of being human — but it’s gotten so dark around here, I decide to share a fun fact with Super Soul Squad instead: “I used to be a woman. And a very ugly one.” Super Soul Squad falls into stunned silence, then realizes I’m joking, and courtesy laughs. “I wouldn’t have judged your hair if you were an ugly woman,” the hairdresser generously covers.

Throughout camp, the parade of human misery continues. At lunch, I meet women who go on wellness escapes like they’re going to the grocery store. They juice and detox and are administered colonics, they are diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder, and when their therapist puts them on Zantac they can’t smell bleach and they might also have PTSD and they feel like they are “walking bum magnets” because they always attract loser men. (Okay, all of that was the same woman, but since she says she often leaves her body and/or has multiple personalities, I’m counting her as a composite.)

Then there’s Cal, Soul Camp’s financial adviser, who was a high-earning investment banker, but who left the life and now works advising clients in the wellness space. Cal tells me that I HAVE to get the “SoulPowered Healing” treatment at the network spinal treatment tables-station set up behind my cabin. The treatment involves light finger touches at strategic points on your back and, dare I say, ass that seem to miraculously release energy, which causes a sort of self-healing. When I watch others get it, they moan like wounded wildebeests and involuntarily spasm. But when I get mine done, I feel nothing, even if the hipster in the beanie who applies the magic touch while he plays Krishna-sounding chant music on his iPhone gives me fortune cookie wisdom afterwards, telling me I’m meant to be a leader. He seems like a nice enough guy, and he reportedly treats the likes of Tony Robbins. But I’d have much preferred a deep tissue massage from a Scandinavian woman with power thumbs who’d dig in more and talk less.

Campers bring their anxieties to the Fear-Burning Bonfire. (Credit: Soul Camp)

I compare notes with Cal, who tells me after his treatment he cried like a baby for the first time in years. “Why?” I ask, puzzled. “I can’t pinpoint it,” he says. But he knows that “as dudes in this society, we don’t cry.” What about John Boehner? I suggest. That guy cries at supermarket ribbon-cuttings, and he’s a heartless Republican. “That’s the exact point,” Cal says of me singling Boehner out as a noticeable event. “You’re even more suppressed about letting out that cry. .  .  . Which is what you really need. We all carry stuff from our past that we can’t even pinpoint, that happened to us that we don’t even remember. .  .  . Five years old, my dad yelled at me, and I was trying to get his affection ever since.” I express sympathy over this childhood holocaust, asking if his dad was a real monster. No, he says, his dad was fine. He was just using that as a hypothetical. His point being that you never know where the pain might come from, and when it does, it has to be released. “I felt like it was okay to cry at that moment,” he says. “And because it was okay, I kept crying and let it all out.”

After full-on exposure to the Emotional Revolution, as Pup calls it, I start getting the feeling that I’m not feeling as much as the other campers are feeling, which makes me feel like an outsider, even though everyone is being over-the-top nice to me. There is, after all, a “no cliques” rule, which is religiously observed. But there’s also a “let your internal compass guide you” rule. And my compass is telling me to touch base at home with a fishing buddy I call Cool Refresher. I’ve known him for 25 years and have never seen him cry, even once. I ask C.R. if I’m missing something. He’s a mercenary tech guy and has endured many more touchy-feely management retreats than I have. What on earth is the appeal of adult sleepaway camp, and why now? He emails back:

I’m afraid Cool Refresher might be right. But whatever the case, I have a chance to work through my fears at the Fear-Burning Bonfire. The entire camp gathers around a moonlit crackling fire in an amphitheater, and we are told to write down our life intentions and fears. I’m afraid to tell you my intentions. So I’ll just tell you my fear: being group-hugged by millennials. I dutifully write it down, as our raven-haired instructor, Julie Santiago (a former Wall-Streeter who is now a certified holistic health coach, life coach, and Vinyasa Flow and Kundalini yoga teacher), pads barefoot around the amphitheater like a seductive jungle cat, cloaked in all-white.

As India.Arie’s “I Am Light” plays over the sound system, Julie tells us to sit still, feeling the inside of our bodies. She tells us to rest in “peace and love and coziness,” to “take off all the masks, all the hats you wear, all the responsibilities.” Camp is not the time for doubt. “The work is done. All you have to do is be. You’ve arrived. So all the work it’s taken you to get here, let it go.”

Julie wants us to scan our minds for the words that are getting in the way. “What’s the s — t you’re telling yourself?” Reasons why we aren’t becoming what we need to become. “Write it. Write it like your life depended on it. Because it does. If the snake doesn’t molt its skin, it dies. Shed your skin.” The caterpillar doesn’t know why it climbs a tree, Julie adds, now freely mixing metaphors, “it just climbs the damn tree.” So if we’re ready to be caterpillars, climbing damn trees, eager to fly like butterflies, we need to “let go of stuff that is weighing you down.”

Julie gives us a Sanskrit word, “svaha.” It’s a denouement, indicating we will “let it go.” She tells us to approach the fire, with our written fears, to say svaha, and to burn them. I do as she instructs. But all this soul-searching has left me famished. I leave the fire/fear behind and get in line for a gluten-free s’more.

Much time has passed since Tom Wolfe wrote “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” You are 40 years old now, if you were born the year Wolfe documented how the old alchemical dream of changing base metals into gold had been replaced by the new one: “changing one’s personality — remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self .  .  . and observing, studying, and doting on it (Me!) .  .  . dwelling upon Me and every delicious nuance of my conduct and personality.”

Though the players have changed — it’s been a while since I met anyone who fouled their drawers during a forced marathon encounter session at Esalen— The Music of Me is still everyone’s favorite camp song, with all its various remixes.

A walk around the grounds shows just how internal the fun is at Soul Camp. Sure, I catch a few campers skinny dipping in the hot tub late one night, and there’re others doing stand-up paddleboard yoga on the lake (though even there, I overhear someone barking, “This shame is not yours! This s — t isn’t even yours!”). My Braveheart life coach/roomie and I get several games of foosball in, but there are no takers on the poly-pong table or the pool table, and Pup and another cabinmate are the only two I see hit the trampoline center. I brought a racket, but the tennis, basketball, and volleyball courts lie fallow. The horses whinny riderless in their pavilion. The pool is empty. And the lifeguard at the waterless waterslides says they finally turned off the jets, since no campers were coming.

The real waterworks come when we work it out in workshop — we have multiple choices over five periods per day. I see people cry in my Intention Setting and Prosperity Chant class, when we have to chant a mantra for 11 minutes while banging our hands together in supplication to the universe (they time it, and the tears might just be from exhaustion or repetitive-motion injuries).

In my Ancient Singing Bowls class, intended to “clean the dust bunnies out of your chakras,” instructor Kathy Hamer places bowls made out of “seven sacred metals” by Tibetan monks, the size of Mini Cooper tires, on our solar plexuses. She fills them with warm water, then gongs away with either a mallet or a singing wand until the bowl makes thoracic-rattling vibrations jiggling all of your innards. Kathy warns: “If you snore, if you pass gas, if you laugh or cry, those are carriers of energy. So allow that.”

I quickly set my intention — not to pass gas — as Kathy makes the bowl thrum, awakening the plate of turkey bacon I put away at breakfast. No energy is carried. (I’m the Jeb Bush of singing bowls.) But the woman lying on the yoga mat next to me starts sobbing uncontrollably. Kathy applies a calming touch to her forehead. When I later ask the woman why the crying jag, she says she’s not quite sure. I’m tempted to give her Cal’s number so they can go out for chai teas and a nice weep.

In my Past Life Regression workshop, instructor Mira Kelley has us lie on the floor. She uses her hypnotic voice and a muted celestial soundtrack that sounds like Vangelis playing a funeral parlor to encourage us to reach out to our spirit guides and walks us back through our past lives and deaths. I make it all the way back to 1970 (the year of my birth) before I conk out. Listening to tape later, I can hear myself snoring. Others had better luck.

A large hirsute man — I’ll call Jim — made it back through seven lives during my refreshing nap (“most of them were pretty terrible,” he says). During share-time afterwards, I nearly cry tears of laughter as Jim matter-of-factly, though hilariously, relates all his grisly deaths. In one, he had both hands cut off for stealing, was tied to a post, and was made an example to his village. In another, a storm shipwrecked him on a desert island, where he had to drink saltwater. In others, he had his heart cut out on the top of a pyramid, drowned in an airplane crash, and was tortured to death on a spinning wheel of fire. “All I know is that I felt hot, and I got dizzy,” Jim says. “Neither was very good: You’re on a wheel! You’re on fire! Enjoy!”

Chakras get a Tibetan scrubdown in the Ancient Singing Bowls class. (Credit: Soul Camp)

The rest of the sharers, whether Viking warriors or temple priestesses, related tales of treachery and incest and illicit romance that sounded like an awesome TV mini-series. All with tears, of course. Even I squirted a few for the unsung sufferers: Why is nobody ever an insurance adjuster or potato peeler in a past life?

In my Angel Circle, spiritual teacher Laurel Bleadon-Maffei, a curly redhead in a bright blue sequined shirt, channels a group of angels to speak with us, called “Josephus and the Wisdom Council.” Before closing her eyes, Laurel warns us that the angels are going to be “filling this room with a lot of love” and “tears may come forward.” Hence the big box of Kleenex on the floor. Laurel also warns us that her voice might change. It doesn’t really, but soon enough, Josephus and friends are in our midst, though he does all the talking. “Yes! Hello, everybody, we are here,” Josephus says through Laurel.

Josephus tells us Laurel wasn’t crazy about Josephus and the Wisdom Council’s name, “since it sounds like a ’50s group,” but that’s the name they respond to. He quickly opens up the floor for Q&A, telling us there are no bad questions. So I fire off a volley. After all, I’m a lifelong religious guy who believes in an afterlife, and here are angels in our midst. I’m not trying to hog the floor, but there’re lots of potential questions about the other side to ask of the angels.

But first, Josephus corrects me: “We are guides that work in the angelic realm. That doesn’t mean all of us are necessarily pure angelic beings.” I make a note to put “no false advertising” in the camp suggestion box: The camp schedule clearly says “Angel Circle,” not “Assistants to the Angels Circle.” I still ask several questions, such as “Are there fallen angels?” (yes, basically) and “Do angels feel human emotions like doubt or ambivalence?” (no). When I ask a more technical question about angel hierarchy, Josephus puts the brakes on, saying, “We want to give somebody else a chance, so is it all right if we move on?”

I yield the floor. But even with visitors from a distant land, all anyone else wants to talk about is their favorite subject: Me! My mother, my lover, my strained relationships, my career ambitions. Josephus and the Wisdom Council take all comers, essentially reassuring everyone that they’re on the right path, with advice about as specific as you get from a Magic 8-Ball. The Kleenex box still gets a pretty good workout.

Not long afterwards, I’m corralled by camp directors Ali and Michelle. They realize that they said they told me I could tape, but they’ve had some complaints. “It’s the angel lady, isn’t it?” I ask them. Among others, they say. What I’d like to know is did Laurel complain, or Josephus and the Wisdom Council? The latter was getting a little lippy with me. They suggest it was Laurel. She’s worried that a tape recorder “breaks the sacred container of experience.”

I’m not happy about this. My handwriting is lousy, and for any professional news gatherer, accuracy is Job One: I need my tapes. Ali, or maybe it’s Michelle (I don’t know since I’m not taping), suggests ditching the recorder might lead to a “richer, deeper style of reporting,” one without filters. Now, I can just “be.”

The new restriction makes me want to cry. Or drink. I opt for the latter, as I do periodically throughout the week when facing a daunting task: like the sing-along competition with Super Soul Squad. Or the exercise in the Bust Anxiety Through Tapping workshop when I have to tap my forehead with my finger while chanting affirmations about how the little boy inside me won’t be wounded by my parents. Or my prolonged platonic hug with the poetess who invented the patented therapy system Hugitation™, allowing the subject “to tap your divine source energy and hold that space for the other person.” (I last two minutes, before telling her I have to take a leak.)

As I’m standing at my car trunk filling my “water” bottle with Kentucky sunshine, I’m made by a fellow camper. I’m worried she’ll rat me out to the camp directors and get me expelled. But she doesn’t. She understands. She could probably use a pop herself. As she relates, in what is the only note of skepticism I hear in four days: “I’m totally into New Age stuff, but they can be patronizing around here. Somebody in my workshop said, ‘If you’re at Soul Camp, you’re not happy.’ Like everyone is nursing a pet injury. Sometimes, you just got to accept it and f — ing move on!”

I want to Hugitation™ her.

On the last day of camp, there is a grounding ceremony. “What’s a grounding ceremony?” I ask Sarge. “I don’t really know,” Sarge admits. “I think it’s to reintegrate? They talk a lot about reintegration around here. Me? I just go home and get back to my life. But a lot of people have trouble, because they come here to find themselves, to try to awaken something, to fix what’s broken, find what they feel is lost. So they have a hard time going back, because they’re worried how to take it home. They don’t really know what they’re going to do.”

Out in the garden, we get grounded (lots of deep breathing, stretches, affirmations, etc.). And everyone says tearful goodbyes, inserting personalized notes in the little mail pouches with all of our names on them that hang on “the Love Wall.” Campers write the things you say when you’re leaving camp: Keep in touch. .  .  . See you next Soul Camp. .  .  . I want you inside of me.

Even my Love Wall pouch is full. The true Soul Campers can smell that I’m not one of them, but they are generous, sensitive souls. They’re in touch with all of their feelings, maybe too in touch. And I wonder, if they felt maybe 50 percent less, whether they wouldn’t be better off.

I feel bad, almost churlish, for not saying proper goodbyes. But I can’t hit the open road fast enough. For we are in the Sierras, and the mountains are calling. After four days of looking inward, I’m ready to look out. Yosemite is only two hours away, so I head for that magical place, gluttonously consuming the sights: Half Dome and Glacier Point and Yosemite Falls.

The great naturalist and wild man John Muir, who’d ride avalanches for sport, summed up Yosemite’s majesty better than I ever could: “No pain here. No dull empty hours. No fear of the past, no fear of the future. These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God’s beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be.”

As sunset comes, I pull my car over at the foot of El Capitan, change into my waders, and hit the Merced River with my fly rod, in search of rainbows. Both the drought and the heavy fishing pressure are hell on the trout around here. I throw dry flies, then weighted nymphs, then break out small lead jigs, to start dredging what’s left of the deeper holes, where I imagine fish are hunkered down, praying for rain to come and tourists to leave. All to no avail.

Most days, when I fish, I’m all about the river and never look up. Josephus and the Wisdom Council could be playing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” above my head, and I wouldn’t see them. I’m too busy reading water. But today, as I’m fruitlessly fishing downstream, not even seeing the shadow of a spooked fish, I can’t help but keep looking over my shoulder at El Capitan, glowing pink in the valley’s half-light. That beautiful granite and diorite rock is not concerned about staying young. It has already stood for millennia, and will stand for millennia more. And the best part of all is that it is standing beside me right now, completely indifferent to my successes and failures, reminding me of my own glorious insignificance.

Matt Labash is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.