The White Lotus and the Spaces In Between

On presence, power, and what lives between cultures

Watching Season 3 of The White Lotus, set in Thailand, has been stirring something in me. The setting is lush and the atmosphere is highly curated. On the surface, it’s a story about guests, mostly western, mostly wealthy, unwinding at a luxury resort where everything has been catered to them.

But as the days unfold, so do the dynamics. The interplay between guests and the local Thai staff starts coming into view. This process isn’t rushed. It lets the contrast emerge gradually: the ease of those who arrive, and the performance of welcoming for those who live there. We see brief moments where those worlds intersect, but they mostly keep their distance.

It reminded me of a familiar pattern I’ve noticed when a certain kind of entitlement enters through the gates of another culture and assumes the environment will adjust to its expectations.

I’ve spent time in spaces where different cultures and ways of being intersect - sometimes respectfully, sometimes not. And I’ve felt the friction that can happen when one way of moving through the world takes up more space than another.

Watching the show, I kept thinking about an experience I had in Hawai’i.

A Ceremony in Hilo

Years ago, after my father passed, his Hawaiian friends held a traditional ceremony for him from a canoe in Hilo Bay. We sang and chanted, and released his ashes. It was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever been a part of.

My father was Chinese-Japanese American and was born and raised in LA, but he’d spent many summers in Hawai’i growing up and had a very strong connection to the Big Island. I had been raised by my grandparents and met him for the first time as an adult. We were still getting to know each other when he died. He had been a Lomi Lomi massage practitioner, an ancient and deeply spiritual healing practice, and one of the men present at the ceremony had been his mentor. He’d passed the practice to him, as is done in the Hawaiian tradition. During my father's final months, he began to share his Lomi Lomi with me, but his illness limited how much he could offer. The transmission was incomplete.

Later that day, over lunch, I chatted with some of the Hawaiians about their healing practices and clinic. These were elders in the healing community, people who had known my father well, and who had been part of his own learning.

When I mentioned I was heading to a Lomi Lomi workshop at a retreat center on another part of the island, I felt a shift. A few of them exchanged glances, and they rubbed their fingers together in the gesture for money. They spoke disparagingly about the center. They said they doubted I would encounter anything truly authentic. Although they wished me well, their energy had changed. In that moment, what I saw as a continuation of my training, they saw as something else entirely.

I carried that moment with me when I left.

Into Another World

When I stepped through the doors of the retreat center, I walked into another world. Suddenly I wasn’t in Hawai’i anymore. The setting was tropical, but it was like being back home on the mainland with the same language, rituals, the same unspoken hierarchy. Everyone I saw was white. It didn’t feel like a bad place. In many ways, it was incredibly familiar to me. The retreat center had a legacy of being the birthplace of Ecstatic Dance, something that had been part of my life. But I had stepped out of one world and into another. It felt like something vital had been stripped away.

Still, there was something real and valuable being offered. The Hawaiian teacher leading the workshop was grounded and present, and clearly carried the lineage with care. But the container itself - the structure of the retreat, the setting, the dynamic among participants - was built for a western audience.

That’s part of what made the experience so complex. For generations, practices like Lomi Lomi had to be passed down quietly. After the arrival of American missionaries in the 1800s, traditional healing arts were suppressed, and in many cases outlawed. Practitioners continued in secret, sharing the practice within families. Teaching Lomi Lomi publicly, especially to outsiders, was once unthinkable.

So to be learning it in a retreat setting, openly and alongside mostly white mainlanders, carried weight. The teacher was the real deal. But he was also navigating a structure shaped by the very forces that once tried to erase the practice he was now offering.

Still, I can’t ignore the tension. The retreat center was offering something valuable: teaching people to slow down, to listen, to connect more deeply with themselves and the world around them. And that’s so needed. Especially in American culture, where disconnection is often the default. But it was also a business, operating within a capitalistic model, catering mostly to white mainlanders who could afford to be there. The work itself felt genuine. The teacher was deep and grounded. But the structure raised questions that I still don’t have answers for.

And it was inside the very structure that felt so clearly shaped by western frameworks, where I learned something that spoke to a feeling I’d carried my entire life but didn’t have words for. Our Hawaiian teacher introduced the idea of circle culture vs pyramid culture. A different way of holding power. A different way of relating. Something ancient. Something wise.

The Illusion of Escape

In The White Lotus, wealthy guests arrive seeking something without fully understanding the world they are stepping into. To them, the island is a backdrop, an experience to consume. But for those who live and work there, it is home.

Something between what the tourists believe they are experiencing and what is actually happening beneath the surface is something I felt in Hawai’i.

This is what The White Lotus exposes so well. The guests don’t see themselves as part of a larger system. They don’t recognize the ways in which they are shaping and altering the places they visit. And yet, their very presence changes the dynamic, whether they intend it to or not.

Power in a Different Suit

Something I’ve bumped up against over and over again in healing arts spaces is the way power shows up in familiar ways. The majority of the teachers I’ve had in healing settings have been white. Most of the students, too. And although there is an embracing of the Eastern or indigenous traditions that the practices are rooted in, the structure remains the same.

It’s the same unconscious centering of western perspectives, just in a different suit, even as people believe they are moving beyond them.

At The White Lotus, the guests assume their experiences are authentic because they are expensive, because they are performed with just enough cultural detail to feel real. But what they are getting is something curated for them, something that exists because of their presence, not despite it.

That’s what I felt at the retreat center in Hawai’i. The familiar elements of healing work were there - the shared language, the openness, the intention. But when I thought back to the ceremony in Hilo Bay, there was a stark difference. That experience had held all of me. Not just the parts that fit within a certain narrative, but the fullness of who I was.

Being Included, Being Held

What I keep coming back to is the difference between being included in a space and being held by it. At the retreat center, I was included. I knew how to move in that world. I understood the language, the customs, the expectations. But at the ceremony in Hilo, I was held. Not because I knew what to do, but because something deeper was at work, something not designed to cater to me, but that made space for me anyway.

This is something I think The White Lotus captures in its own way. The guests believe they are part of the culture they are stepping into, but they are only moving through an illusion. They are included because their presence fuels the economy, but they are never truly held by the place itself.

And I don’t know if there’s a clean resolution to that. I don’t know if there’s a perfect way to move through spaces like these without, on some level, participating in the very thing we might be trying to avoid.

But I do think awareness matters. The ability to see beyond the curated experience, to recognize what is being lost or altered in translation, to understand that some spaces were never meant to center us. That matters.

And maybe the more we see, the more we can shift how we show up. Not just as consumers of culture, but as people in relationship with it.

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