Absence, presence and perfection
Perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away. — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
We often think we grow by adding. It is some kind of mathematical certitude. We add knowledge. We add accomplishments. We add stuff. Yet we can only add what can be counted, calculated.
And what if the deepest lessons came not from adding but when something is taken away? From losing something essential?
The following is a journey into subtraction.
I wanted to share what I learned when I removed food. Removed water. Removed words. Removed light. Removed air. In life we often experience the removal of health, money, certainty. In some cases we can also remove the self.
These absences were not due to loss, but to choice. They became doors.
Invitations to challenge what we take for granted.
And often, it is absence that reveals what is always present.
Beyond the palace walls
I’ve watched Western students arrive in India or Nepal for their first yoga training. Most of them met poverty, chaos, disease, and even death, for the first time.
And I always thought of the Buddha leaving his palace.
In the legend, Siddhartha had never seen illness, aging, or death. The palace had protected him from the real. But the moment he stepped outside, everything changed. His life cracked open.
That’s what happens when we come face to face with less. With rawness. With what we never had to encounter before. The moment when what we thought was the world turns out to be just the palace walls.
Ascetics and Tantrics
Yoga has many paths.
For centuries, stemming from a dualist philosophy, the ascetics sought the divine by removing the mundane. They retired to caves and forests and created many of the practices I’ll explore here.
But others saw the world differently. Tantrics believed the divine was not apart from the mundane but within it. They didn’t try to escape the prison, they turned its walls into gateways.
For the ascetic, absence was a lifestyle. For the tantrics it was only a practice. In both, the goal was to strip away what we think sustains us, to find the unspeakable truth hiding behind it: What are we truly made off and what is truly important?
Welcome to the Wisdom of Absence.
Needs
Air. Water. Food. Shelter (from cold). Light. Connection. Primary needs. Biological urgencies. Each absence explored here removes one of these basic needs. Not to punish the self, not to purify or atone for sin, but to discover what lives beneath the surface of survival.
Behind every disappearance lies a revelation.
Absence of words
(1 month in silence)
In November 2008 I spent a month in silence at Kopan Monastery in Kathmandu. It wasn’t a silent retreat (I’ve done many of those), yet I chose to remain silent among others who could speak freely.
The first few days were challenging. I had to sit with my desire to contribute, to participate in the conversations around me. But as I stayed silent, I began to see what was behind the urge to speak. I realized: I wasn’t offering anything to others, I was asking for something. To be seen. To be heard.
That realization brought a wave of humility. Even shame.
I saw how much of what I said in life was not for the benefit of others but to affirm my own existence.
With that clarity, I made a promise, to speak with intention, to listen deeply, and to give myself the attention I kept asking for from others.
“Silence is the language of God; everything else is poor translation.” — Rumi
Absence of light
(10 days in total darkness)
How do you describe darkness without filling it with words? The more I tried to explain it, the more I realized: darkness cannot be described, it can only be experienced. But once experienced, there is no un-experiencing it.
In October 2017, I spent ten days in a darkness retreat. No light. No stimulation. Eyes wide open, yet nothing to see. Quickly, the world outside vanished. I lost the memory of my face, my body, even the concept of being seen. Smiling or wearing clothe became futile. With no mirror, no reflection, no social gaze, my identity began to melt. My jaw softened. My masks dissolved.
The geography of space shifted, I felt where my toothbrush was with another form of memory. Like instinct I knew where the door, the bed, the shower were. It felt like floating in outer space, or perhaps, inside the womb of the universe.
Unusual phenomena unfolded. My mind entered states of complete stillness, sometimes blank for an hour or more, yet fully conscious. I experienced lucid dreams with eyes open, indistinguishable from waking reality. I fell into conscious sleep, my body asleep, but my awareness fully awake, silent and still.
After three days, the dark wasn’t dark anymore. Shapes and colors emerged, then visions, then whole landscapes. My mind was projecting reality onto the void. I was watching Maya, the great illusion, unfold from within me. The more I paid attention, the more it took form.
I realized: this is how we build the world. All of it. From inside.
What I saw in the dark: My mind creates. My self protects.
And my soul longs to be seen.
Darkness showed me my aloneness, not loneliness, but the metaphysical solitude of being a conscious self projecting its reality. And it showed me something else: I was not looking at the dark, I was the dark. I was spaciousness. I was Akasha.
Time dissolved. Hunger faded. Sleep reduced. I did nothing for over 200 hours. Not one distraction. Only thoughts, feelings, and eventually, the silence beneath them.
It was a womb. A grave. A temple.
And when emotions arrived, fear, shame, guilt, anger, I could not hide. In the merciless mirror of darkness, there was nowhere to run. No distraction.
I saw myself. I forgave. I wept. I healed.
The darkness became a voice. A mother. She told me:
"You have helped so many, now let me help you.
You forgot yourself, and now you remember.
You are not empty. You are the void.
I am you. You are me. We are one and the same.”
I learned that darkness is not the absence of light; it is the source of it, the presence of the infinite. That true healing begins when I stop hiding from myself. That I cannot fake my way through transformation. It demands honesty, presence, and surrender.
The darkness did not enlighten me. It emptied me. And in the emptiness, I found light. Meeting the self with no mirrors. Light arising from within.
Absence of food
(10 days without food)
In May 2008, I joined an eight-week yoga teacher training in Byron Bay, Australia. It wasn’t my first training, I had done many before, but this one included something I dreaded: a ten-day water fast. No food, only water.
The group energy helped. That was one of those times the ego served a purpose. We were all doing it together, and that carried me through the first few days.
I learned that true fasting doesn’t really begin until day three. Before that, my body is simply burning what it already has. I’m the skinny type, so I expected to struggle, but something surprising happened. After the third day, it didn’t get harder. It got easier. A strange kind of clarity emerged. All my beliefs about food started to dissolve.
By day six or seven, my yoga practice transformed. I had more flexibility, more endurance, more strength. My mind was calm. My body felt light. It was unbelievable.
But the most remarkable shift didn’t happen to me.
One morning, my partner turned to me and asked, “Did you notice something?” I paused, looked closely, and realized she wasn’t wearing her contact lenses. She wasn’t wearing glasses either. And yet she could see.
Her eyesight had improved so dramatically during the fast that she no longer needed correction. I was stunned.
Fasting taught me a lot about food, but more so about my relationship with it. I saw how often I ate from boredom, stress, or habit. How often I reached for food not out of hunger, but to soothe something deeper.
When food disappeared, so did my compulsions. Not forever, but long enough to notice their grip. And in that space, I found freedom.
In the absence of food, I found nourishment of a different kind. I saw what hunger reveals. What remains when the fuel is gone. What clarity arises.
Absence of water
(5 days without water)
In August 2015, I was guided into a Vision Quest, a traditional North American rite of passage that involves staying alone in nature for five days. This one took place in the Rogue Valley near Ashland, Oregon.
I knew I would be fasting. What I did not know is that I would also be entirely naked, without water, and contained in circle of tiny tobacco prayer ties, four colors strung together, small enough to prevent me from lying down. I could only sit, squat, or curl into a fetal position.
At night I could hear the wildlife and my mind filled with the presence of mountain lions and black bears, abundant in the forest. Sleep was almost impossible in such a small space. By day, I watched the sun cross the sky. At night, I tracked the movement of the moon. Hours were long.
Each evening, a guide would bring me to the river for a sweat lodge. My thoughts rebelled, why would I attend a ceremony of sweating if I was meant to conserve water?
By day 4 something absolutely incredible happened.
I clearly perceive my body drinking water from the sound of the nearby stream. I felt it absorb moisture from the forest around me. To confirm this, I experienced no thirst. It was like my body had become one with the river and the forest around.
Absence of air
(4 minutes without air)
I had practiced freediving before I even knew the word. As a child growing up by the Mediterranean Sea, I would disappear for hours beneath the surface, entranced by the underwater world. But it wasn’t until much later that I chose to study it more consciously.
I had trained in yogic breath retention, including advanced practices known to push the edge of consciousness (and safety). But freediving was different. In May 2001, I drove to Baja California to explore the marine sanctuary of Cabo Pulmo.
In Baja, I followed a white rope into the big blue, where gravity seemed reversed and the ocean became a vast womb, both home and death at once.
What I learned defied logic. I discovered that the desperate feeling of needing air is not caused by a lack of oxygen, but by the accumulation of carbon dioxide. The signal can be delayed, silenced even, with training. And there’s no true signal for oxygen deprivation, only unconsciousness.
I learned that the key to depth was not strength, but surrender. That relaxation was more powerful than will. That the deeper I went, the more I had to trust. The body became quieter. Time slowed. Awareness spread. I touched a silence I had never known.
In the absence of air, I found another way to breathe: by surrendering the breath to trust and allowing my nervous system to stabilize under stress.
Absence of self
(One second, or an eternity, without self)
At Burning Man in August 2014, I experienced a near-death experience through the use of psychedelics. It shattered the carefully constructed sense of self and reality I had relied on.
I wrote:
I entered a room so full of light it blinded me, so saturated that there were no shadows, no edges, no depth. Then, without warning, the light vanished. Not dimmed, erased. I was plunged into absolute darkness. There was no floor, no sky, no orientation. Just a groundless, infinite void.
At first, my mind scrambled. Was I falling? Floating? Dying? But there was no sound, no acceleration, no edges to grip. Nothing to fight or figure out.
Then, something shifted. The resistance faded. Like a tide retreating, the ego’s grip loosened. I stopped bracing. There was no fall, only stillness. No threat, only presence.
And in that surrender, something vast emerged. Not as a vision, but as knowing. I wasn’t in the void, I was the void. I was not falling through emptiness, I was the emptiness.
I saw that the self I had clung to was a mirage, and in its place was something ancient, boundless, and true. I was not separate from God, or life, or death, I was the field that holds them all.
I learned there is no ground, but no need for one. There is no self, yet nothing is missing. That letting go is not death, it is the beginning of trust.
In the absence of self, I found the presence of everything. I learned what is known beyond knowing. That the fullness of life reveals itself in death.
When life removes everything
But all absences in life are not chosen. Sickness (absence of health). Poverty (absence of money). Loneliness (absence of friends). Depression (absence of vital energy). And many more.
Theses losses are not part of a spiritual discipline, yet used adequately, they initiate nevertheless.
In life, pain is inevitable, growth is optional.
What have I learned form losing energy, clarity, love or even safety?
Was I able to sit with the loss and still listen?
The wisdom of less
The practice of absence is not bout self-denial. They are about clearing the noise. Making space for “what is” rather than the story that took its place.
Because something always arise in the silence.
Something always live in the empty moments.
Presence is not something we add.
It is what remains when we stop trying to become something else.
Everything comes out of nothing
Music comes out of silence.
Creation comes out of emptiness.
Light comes out of darkness.
Life comes out of death.
The more I lose, the more I find.
Not the story I expected.
But what is behind the story.
It is my experience.
And that of many others before me.
PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.
Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.
With all of those experiences, you should have no fear of death and dying. Shed your skin and live in the light!
So well written! Thank you for this. Was a great piece to read first thing after waking up. So much wisdom 🙏❤️