Third Nature Summer Camp Part Three
A journey of growth that led to feeling that the magic is within me ✨
This Labor Day Weekend, I went to an adult summer camp run by Third Nature for the third time (I previously went and wrote about my experiences in 2022 and 2023 respectively). I’d describe the camp as half personal growth (ex. facilitated workshops and activities) and half fun (ex. lake time, campfires, sports). This year’s camp brought 82 of us to Camp Scatio in the upper Hudson Valley of Upstate New York, with over half being returners like me.
This camp and community have made such a positive impact on me over the years. It was great to reconnect with the community in person for the first time in two years, as well as visit NYC beforehand for a few days to visit some friends too for the first time in two years as well.
Going to camp this year had me reflecting a lot on where I was in life when I went to camp in 2022 and 2023, and my growth since then.
My 2022 camp experience was all about community and connection. At that point, it was a question whether there were actually people out there who aligned with my values and interests. I was still finding ways to seek out community in a post-COVID world. Now, I’m so grateful to have so much community from like-minded people in my life that feels so abundant. Along the way, I realized some of my desire for community had roots in a lack of self-kindness. I left my first camp with the one-word intention of self-kindness.
2023 was all about slowing down and finding rest. I was feeling a bit burnt out with a fast-paced life in San Francisco and realized I had overextended into the community realm without as much regard for time for myself. I made inroads on my intention of self-kindness by finding peace in being on my own and just appreciating the beauty of the moment amidst a camp of 50 other like-minded people. In my 2023 camp reflection, I wrote “At this year’s camp, I felt like I was able to feel enough self-kindness to be fully at peace with being with myself, and feel higher levels of self-kindness than I perhaps ever have.”
Coming out of camp that year, I felt the feeling of love emanating from my heart. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but hoped to understand more in the future. I wrote that “Coming out of camp, something I felt that I can’t fully explain is that I felt full of love. I felt an increased capacity for love for the people around me and the world. On multiple occasions in the days that followed camp, I found myself putting my hand on my heart when I felt this to just feel this love and be grateful for it.”
Fast forward to 2025, and I certainly do have a deeper understanding of that love that I felt. I now understand it to be the camp opening my heart to the infinite love and beauty that’s already in me and in the world. Love and compassion have been a big theme in my life this year generally that has unlocked a lot, and it showed up at camp in many ways.
One example is a group exercise we did called Constellations, where we mapped out aspects of a situation in our lives that we were seeking clarity on. I hoped to seek more clarity on translating the love and fulfillment I’ve found in my personal life to a professional career that’s sustainable long-term. Through having fellow campers embody parts like my successful embodiment of my vision, worries, fears, and the love within me that grounds me, I realized that I had a felt sense that I was actually already living the successful embodiment of my vision. I was able to embody a higher consciousness that witnessed my parts, and felt that there was nothing I would change about where I was at. I had a felt sense of trust and harmony that I was already exactly where I wanted to be, especially with my friend Rachel posing as “love” for me in the exercise and going around to shower love to all the other parts in the Constellation like my worries and fears, infusing harmony and ease to the overall system.
Generally, I felt an increased capacity to give and receive love too. One of the highlights of camp was on the last day, when the founder and camp director Brian shouted out his mom in front of everyone while the vibes were brimming with warmth from a great weekend. Brian attended that very camp (Camp Scatio) for seven weeks every summer in his childhood since age eight, and so did his mom. In front of all 82 campers, his mom, wife, and newborn baby - he told us amidst pausing to hold back tears that - “none of us would be here without my mom” 🥹.
In that moment, time seemed to slow down. I saw the camp co-lead Andrea (who I respect a lot and was sitting near me) wipe away tears from her eyes, and saw another fellow camper start to cry in the distance. And so did I.
After that, we had 30 minutes to pack up our stuff, and I spent 15 minutes of it just processing that experience and being present with the trees, connecting across time to try to feel into the meaning of the camp setting we were in that had held Brian and his mom in their childhoods, and what I just witnessed. After some time alone, I came to the conclusion that it was the most powerful expression of love I have ever witnessed. To understand Brian’s journey of working hard to create an authentically successful career and life, to reflect on the meaning of family and my own journey to try to build on the shoulders of my parents, and so much more. Brian, thank you for setting the bar so high and continuing to raise it with how outstanding of a human being you are.
Takeaways
The gap between the magic of camp and the magic in my life outside of camp doesn’t feel as big anymore.
When I first attended camp in 2022, I thought it was a transformative experience. I didn’t even know the magic and level of community and connection I experienced was possible. Now, the magic at camp is certainly still there, but I feel that I’ve been able to cultivate a lot more of that magic in my life outside of camp as well. This includes of a long list of intentional choices like living with and near friends, living close to nature, meditating and journaling every morning, writing gratitude, cultivating the ability to listen to my heart, and much more. At camp, I felt like it was an amazing experience, and there was also a part of me that felt “I also can’t wait to get back to my life in San Francisco.” The feeling of this closing gap felt like a testament to how much I’ve grown, and that the intentionality I put into making values-aligned life choices may be paying off.
More specifically, I started to see that the design of camp mirrored some of the inner work I do and the way I design my life. In addition to living in community with friends and having third spaces to meet like-minded people and living close to nature in my life in SF, I felt many of the facilitated prompts and activities at camp around journaling, meditating, reflecting, and setting intentions mirrored things I do in my own life. In some cases, I happened to have already done the same visualizations or reflections at camp right before the prompts were given to us, such as taking time to reflect back on our journey the past few days together and reflecting on our initial camp intention we set before the closing campfire.
Generally, I felt growth in my sense of intuition and ability to follow my heart and give myself what I most needed. Some of the more powerful moments I had at camp actually came spent on my own - in stillness and in nature, but building off the supportive container that camp provided.
I also felt like I had a lot less to mentally process than in previous years. In past years, the supportive space and community of camp would give me a container to surface and process some challenges that had built up in me mentally. This year, I felt like I had a lot less to process. It validated the feeling I’ve been feeling this year that I’ve greatly improved my ability to process things and do inner work in real time more than ever before with the increased awareness and tools I have. Feeling like I had fewer challenges to process made me feel like I had more capacity to hold space for others and be of service, which I did lean into.
In the days following camp back in SF, I have felt further validated that there’s so much magic in my life in SF that mirrors the life of camp, instead of feeling withdrawal from leaving the high of camp.
Overall, what I believe this points to is that camp opened my heart to the magic of life that’s possible, and gave me tools and clues on things to work on over the past few years that I’ve been integrating. I realized that maybe the magic of camp was inside of me all along, I just needed to find the ways to open my heart to it and cultivate the right environments for it to blossom.
Other Takeaways
I could feel my growth from past camps quite clearly. I could even remember past challenges I’d have at camp (ex. struggling to tone down my optimizer part at the start of my first camp, not being as comfortable spending time on my own) and feeling the distinct lack of them this time around, and just feeling ok and trusting of the unfolding of life.
Upon writing the things I was grateful for from camp afterwards, I was filled with this feeling that my camp experience felt like some of the highest embodiments of trusting the unfolding of life that I’ve ever felt.
I think this is because I followed my heart and intuition throughout camp, and could see in retrospect that everything I did (from taking time for myself to rest to intentionally seeking out certain people I felt drawn to) all led to beautiful moments in a way that made me feel like it all happened for a reason.
Over the winter holidays, I serendipitously ran into my camp friend Marissa 24 hours after landing in Bangkok while solo traveling and following my intuition, and we spent the rest of the evening hanging out. Catching up and spending time with her at camp this year again was one of the highlights of my camp experience.
While leaning into fun and childlike play has been harder for me at previous camps, I found it easier this time around with the increased “go with the flow” mentality I’ve found myself embodying in my life more. We had a “World Cup” with a mix of playfully competitive games, where I felt more presence and less thinking of what others would think, and felt more openness to try new things like Acro yoga too.
A Culminating Experience
One thing I wasn’t sure if I was going to mention in this piece is that this may be my last camp. I did come into this camp thinking it may be possible that this may be the case. The combination of what I experienced around feeling like my life outside of camp has caught up to the magic of camp, and some logistical factors like it being a bit of a trek from the West Coast (these past two camps I’ve traveled the farthest) made it feel more real that it may be my last camp. Who knows how the future will unfold, but my heart feels a different calling than what I’ve felt in the past, certainly different from the “I want to come back every single year” that I felt after my first camp.
Unless I’m in a totally different phase of life and may be wanting the environment of camp, it’s harder for me to imagine being involved in the same way unless I am involved in a different way, such as more of a contributor or facilitator role. I did get to do some of that this year in being a sounding board for one of the facilitators in planning their workshop activity, which felt fulfilling. Overall, this points to a general feeling that the next step after finding all of this love and fulfillment in me is giving back and helping others find that love within themselves, rather than continuing to be more so of a consumer or trying to further expand upon my own personal growth alone.
The reason I decided to include this in this piece is that the story of my camp experience this time around wouldn’t be fully told without it. The truth is that in the middle of camp, I started to feel grief around the potential “lasts” that the possibility of it being my last camp would entail, and wasn’t sure who to tell it to. Shoutout to 10-time camper Shiv for being the first one to hold space for me around it. Then I told the 7-time camper Marissa. Then one of the camp co-organizers at the closing campfire on the last evening. It went well and was a loving conversation with deep respect, and ended with a group hug, one of many that evening.
All in all, this was a great camp experience and trip. It was great to reconnect with the Third Nature community, and great to experience camp again. At the end of my 2nd camp recap, I wrote “It’s really hard to describe in words, but I feel like this community has been a perfect set of experiences and people that have helped me become the best version of myself.” It has been such a journey of growth for me these past 3.5 years of being in this community, one that has led me to now believe that maybe the magic I felt at that first camp was inside of me and all of us all along - if I’m able to create the conditions conducive to it, listen to my heart, and open up to the beauty of the world.
Thank you for sharing. It was my first time at camp & to see the impact this has had on your life, how you have been able to intentionally implement camp magic into your life!
Full body chills. Love bearing witness to your growth and being a part of it, too 🩷