The Truth About My Burning Man Experience

I recently returned from my first Burning Man experience, and it was… interesting.

Simply put, it was not what I expected, it was transformational, disappointing, and eye-opening all at the same time.

Which makes for an unforgettable experience, amiright?!

(In case you don’t know what Burning Man is – it’s a week-long large-scale desert festival focused on “community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance” held annually in the western U.S.A… over 70,000 people gather and create a city from scratch in the middle of nowhere, which looks like this:)

So, I’ll give you the low down that I didn’t share on social media:

When I first considered going to Burning Man in 2023, I was a extremely resistant to it. 

Everything about it felt hard: the mere act of thinking about needing to pack enough supplies to spend a week in the desert – including food and water – shopping for the right outfits, booking travel, and all the other logistics associated with an event this big totally put me off.

 I was interested in Burning Man, but not interested enough to cope with how hard it felt.

“It’s an initiation!” Burners would tell me.

 Yeah.. not an initiation I was interested in.

 In 2024, one of my best friends was able to coerce me into saying “yes”.

“It’s my 40th birthday, and it will be my last hurrah before I have a baby!!”

I mean… who says no to that?!

After much resisting, I very hesitantly decided that I would go.

“God,” I prayed that day, “please make this easy!! Pave the way for this to happen in the most stress-free way possible.”

A few days after I’d committed to going, I got a message from a friend of mine that I haven’t spoken to in a while:

“Have you ever been called to Burning Man? We have a camp there and would love to have you if you ever want to come play. You just came to mind as I was thinking of my dream list of epic souls to burn with.”

Well, that was easy.

Even so, I had my guard up. There are over 2,000 camps in Burning Man, what if this one sucked? How did I know it was even right for me?

I got on a call with my friend, and he invited me to come to one of the monthly Zoom meetups that the camp had in the lead-up to the festival.

I attended the call, still hesitant and observant… quietly watching behind my Zoom screen. Once the hour was up, I was low-key obsessed with people in the camp. They were so kind, friendly, unique, and welcoming. It was such a community vibe.

 Even so.. I was resistant.

What about all the logistics? What about all the things that I need to prepare?

Please don’t worry!” was the recurring theme of my friend, the camp manager, and the people that I had spoken to from the group. “We’ve got you.”

I initially took this as a nice gesture, but the next few months would show me just how much they meant what they said.

Over the course of the next couple of months, the path unveiled for me at a speed and an ease that I could not believe.

My tent? 👉 Taken care of.

My bike?  👉 There waiting for me.

My outfits? 👉 Multiple organized checklists crafted by experienced Burners sent my way.

All the stuff that I would need to order and haul to the desert?  👉 Don’t worry about it, friends with RVs will bring it over.

It got even crazier than that. I would go to a party, a dinner, or community event, and I would meet Burners. More than that, I would make connections that I didn’t even know existed.

Like, how is it possible that a friend that I’d met a year ago on a beach swim in Ibiza just so happened to be in my camp, even though we seemingly had no mutual connections?

And so on… the serendipities kept on rolling.

Every resistance that I had around Burning Man was magically met by somebody who had a solution to my problem.

There was only one thing that stood in the way of me and the Playa… Which is a personal matter that I cannot discuss here, but what I can share is that up until the moment when I boarded the plane, I wasn’t sure if I could actually go.

That was literally the only hard thing I encountered about Burning Man.

Not to undermine it, because that in itself was a very stressful and uncertain initiation, and I would argue a Playa miracle…

But other than that? It was easy, breezy, lemon squeezy.

It was comical to observe how easy this thing was, and how I had created this very huge obstacle to going all by myself.

I thought the initiation was over, until I stepped foot on the Playa and had my experience there.

I came into Burning Man with specific intentions, hoping to receive clarity on the direction of my life and business, which has been going through a massive shift this entire year.

Throughout the week, I received many signs and tons of clarity, in a very gentle and fluid way…

I remember being surprised at how it all unfolded, because multiple friends had warned me:

“At Burning Man it’s not if you break down, it’s when you break down.”

But I didn’t break down.

I had a hard day, sure, but for the most part… took care of myself. Slept the hours I needed, I fed and hydrated myself, and all of the basic requirements to ensure that I had a comfortable experience throughout the week.

I noticed that I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

For the carpet to get pulled from under my feet.

For something to go terribly wrong that I would need to recover from.

But that moment didn’t come.

What came was ease…

When the air conditioner in my tent wasn’t working, the camp crew fixed it.

At the times when my bike broke down in the middle of the heat, a kind stranger helped me put it back together.

When I was feeling exhausted and fatigued, a brother from my camp gave me a nourishing energy healing massage.

I watched people around me have meltdowns, huge breakdowns, and messy situations like air conditioners that didn’t work all week and uncomfortable camps they didn’t vibe with.

But I was fine.

As the festival completed, and I got back on that bus out of the desert, there was my first dust storm… Which was uncomfortable for the hour or so that I had to endure it.

As the bus drove away back to society, I remember feeling… disappointed.

I thought this was supposed to be hard, I thought.

And that’s when it hit me.

That’s when it really hit me… The massive gift that the Playa had for me.

It took me weeks to unravel the depths of what was being shown to me.

And that is…

The addiction to things needing to be hard in order to feel deserving of the experience.

I’ve tackled variations of this pattern in my personal evolution journey, but the way this next level was delivered for resolution was SO obvious that I couldn’t ignore it.

You see, there was part of me that didn’t feel like I had a “Burner-worthy” experience because I didn’t suffer enough for it.

And I bet you, there will be Burners reading this email secretly judging me for not having the “real” hardcore experience, or whatever.

(Read on mates, before you stick to that judgment!)

I wouldn’t blame them, because that’s how I judged myself. Before I looked deeper.

When I decided to go to Burning Man, I had prayed to let it be easy.

I had prayed to be shown what it looks like for something hard to feel easy.

It was what I wanted.

It was what I needed.

And, it was what I got.

I’m not shy to doing things a hard way. I’m resilient, I have grit, I get sh*t done when it needs to. That’s all I’ve known how to do my entire life.

I’m new, however, to allowing things to be easy.

That’s what I was making space for in the build-up to Burning Man.

But I didn’t notice my blindspot, until I looked back and started to process and integrate the experience.

I saw that the entire time, there was a part of me that was on the fence, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

That’s the pattern.

That’s the coding that was so deeply embedded in my nervous system, that I was being asked to look at.

Because in order for you to get what you want, you need to get your body on board.

Lasting change happens through your body, which means that when you’re looking to rewrite big patterns in your life and make significant changes, it is essential for you to not only become aware of the pattern that’s taking place and choose a better way to do things, but to work with your nervous system to expand your capacity to operate in that new way.

In my case, once I saw the pattern, I could begin to start working on it…

This has looked like embodiment and integration work – there’s been lots of sound, breath, movement, and processing of old stuck emotions through my system – as well as sessions with my mentors, who further supported me with digging out the roots of that pattern, and processing with friends who shared the experience with me.

Believe it or not, a huge component of my integration process has been coming into deeper acceptance that life gets to be ease-ful.

And that I am deserving of the things that I want, even when I have not worked really hard for them.

It’s so edgy for me to type that out.

That’s how ingrained that reality was for me.

But, it’s just programming. You create your reality based on your belief systems, and you reinforce it through your words and your patterns of behavior.

That’s what reality Creation is: your tools of Creation being your thoughts, your words, and your actions.

In hindsight, I can see so clearly how I subconsciously attempted to make my situation harder than it needed to be. I can see how I manifested a massive obstacle, and I did it to myself, so that somehow Burning Man could feel hard.

When the whole time, the pathway was open, there was alignment, and I was speeding through with ease and grace.

This is what we do to ourselves… making things harder than they need to be!

And to be fair, it was hard for me to accept that this was not my reality 😄.

But this was my medicine.

This is exactly what I needed to experience.

This is what it looked like to have to have my prayers answered.

And, this is what my Soul was asking me to reprogram on a deeper level for this next chapter of my life:

Let it be easy.

You deserve it, even if it wasn’t hard.

Allow yourself to receive.

This reprogramming, by the way, is the “day-to-day” work that most people don’t see, of:

– Expanding my nervous system’s capacity to let love in and receive

– Allowing myself to be more and more supported by people and Life

– Changing my belief systems around my worthiness 

– Shifting dysfunctional habit patterns of overcomplicating things back to simplicity

I’ve been working on all of this PRIOR to this event that mirrored back these results… I’ve created space for this new reality to present itself.

So there it is:

My Burning Man experience was easy.

It was lovely.

I had a grand time.

And there’s part of me that believed that because of that, it was “less than” other people’s experiences.

That is the belief that I’m choosing to dissolve within myself.

Life has shown me again and again that you don’t get what you want, you get what you need.

And I trust that the Universe wouldn’t haul me across the planet in the middle of the desert, in the most extreme conditions, only to give me this experience by accident.

That’s not how it works. At least not in my world.

As I continue my integration process (I’m not done yet – that was huge!!), these are the lessons that I take with me.

I’m excited to see how I get to make things even easier moving forward and feel deserving of them, even when they land on my lap.

Because truly? The work was already done inside of me… That’s why it gets to be easy on the outside.

To your abundant EASE,

Celinne 🤍

p.s. To the mission-driven leader, who is creating big things in your life…

You are here to level into the best version of yourself, to create impact through your life and business, and become the fullest expression of yourself in this lifetime…

You know that you’re here for more, and that you can’t see what you can’t see…

Your blindspot – those limiting belief systems, patterns of behavior, and stories you’ve been telling yourself that have been keeping you small and constrained – must be addressed in order for you to take that next leap in your evolution.

If you’re done being stuck, spinning your wheels, and running around in circles trying to figure out why you’re not making the change you feel so deeply ready to make, then my Story Clarity Intensive is for you.

This is a deep-dive session where we will dive into your subconscious mind to identify exactly what patterns and belief systems have been keeping you stuck. We clear them on a mind-body- energetic level, re-stabilize you into your next-level identity, and create a clear roadmap for how to best move forward to turn your visions into reality in the next few months.

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