# Man Who Paid $5,000 For "Wellness Retreat" Spends 3 Days In A Tent Eating Kale, Gets Told His "Negative Energy" Is Ruining The Vibes
**Camp Mystic, Maine** — In a turn of events that absolutely nobody who has ever met a wellness influencer could have predicted, a 34-year-old tech bro from Boston is currently demanding a full refund after allegedly being "gaslit, starved, and forced to listen to a didgeridoo for 72 consecutive hours" at a luxury "digital detox" retreat in the woods.
The retreat, run by a woman who goes by the single name "Sage" and claims to be a "shamanic business coach," promises to "realign your chakras and purge ancestral trauma" over a long weekend. The price tag? A cool $5,000. For a tent. In Maine. In September.
Reddit user u/BurntOutInBeantown, who we'll call "Dave" for reasons that will become painfully obvious, posted an absolutely unhinged AITA thread yesterday that is currently sitting at 14,000 upvotes and counting. The title? "AITA for telling a wellness retreat leader that her 'healing crystals' are just fancy rocks and asking for a refund after she served me a single kale leaf for dinner?"
Spoiler: The internet is very divided, but mostly because half of us can't afford kale.
According to Dave's post, he signed up for "Camp Mystic" after a particularly brutal quarter at his startup where he "nearly had a stroke watching the stock ticker." His therapist suggested a digital detox. He found Camp Mystic on Instagram, where Sage's profile features moody photos of her hugging trees and captions like "The universe doesn't care about your quarterly earnings."
Red flag number one, Dave. Red flag number one.
"I show up and immediately I'm like, 'this is a trap,'" Dave writes. "They take my phone. Fine, whatever. They put me in a canvas tent with no electricity. Fine, whatever. Then they tell me dinner is at 6 PM and it's going to be 'foraged.' I'm thinking, okay, cool, like mushrooms or something. It was a single kale leaf. A raw kale leaf. On a slate plate. And Sage told me to 'chew it slowly and think about where it came from.'"
Dave, who admits he "eats Chipotle five times a week," allegedly responded by asking if there was a DoorDash radius for the middle of the Maine woods. Sage, according to Dave, told him his "negative energy was polluting the group's aura."
Here's where it gets really unhinged.
Day two of the retreat apparently involved a "silence pact" where nobody could speak for 24 hours. Dave, who is "not exactly a quiet guy," decided to break the silence to ask if anyone had a cell signal because his mother was having a medical procedure. Sage allegedly told him that "silence is the only medicine" and that his "attachment to his mother's timeline is a trauma response."
"I lost it," Dave writes. "I said, 'My 68-year-old mother is having a hip replacement, Karen. I don't need a trauma response, I need a text message.'"
The group, according to Dave, turned on him. One woman told him he was "ruining the collective vibration." Another man told him he needed to "surrender to the process." Dave, who at this point had consumed approximately 400 calories in 48 hours, allegedly told the man to "surrender my refund check."
Then came the fire ceremony.
On the final night, Sage led the group in a "cacao ceremony" (which Dave described as "drinking hot chocolate that tasted like dirt") around a bonfire. Participants were asked to write their "limiting beliefs" on a piece of paper and throw them into the fire. Dave, allegedly, wrote "I believe this is a scam" on his paper and threw it in.
Sage was not amused. According to Dave, she stopped the entire ceremony, pointed at him, and said, "You are carrying the energy of a colonizer."
Now look. I'm not saying Dave handled this perfectly. But telling a guy who just paid five grand to eat a raw leaf in a tent that he has "colonizer energy" is certainly a choice.
"I stood up and said, 'Ma'am, I paid for a wellness retreat, not a cult. I want my money back or I'm calling the Better Business Bureau and the local news,'" Dave writes. "She said, 'You are not ready for this work.' I said, 'You're not ready for a Yelp review.'"
Dave walked three miles to the nearest town with cell service, called an Uber (which cost $180), and went straight to a diner where he ordered "the largest cheeseburger they had." He then posted his AITA thread, asking if he was wrong for demanding a refund after "disrupting the healing process for 12 other people."
The comments are absolutely unhinged.
Top comment, with 8,000 upvotes: "NTA. You paid for a wellness retreat. They gave you a hunger strike with a side of gaslighting. Also, 'colonizer energy' is wild coming from a woman who charges $5,000 for a tent."
Second comment: "YTA for thinking a 'digital detox' meant anything other than being bored and hungry in the woods. But also, Sage is TA for charging $5,000 for what is essentially a very expensive camping trip with extra steps."
Third comment, which perfectly captures the internet's mood: "ESH. Dave for being an obnoxious bro who can't function without sauce packets. Sage for being a grifter who thinks kale is a meal. But mostly, the universe for letting this happen."
Sage has since responded on her Instagram, posting a video where she says, "We had a participant who was not ready to heal. He chose the path of resistance. I wish him well on his journey." The video has 300 comments, 250 of which are from Dave's burner accounts.
Camp Mystic
Final Thoughts
Having read through the coverage of “Camp Mystic,” I’m left with the uneasy sense that what’s being marketed as a digital detox or spiritual reboot is really just a luxury sanitarium for burnout, where the wealthy pay to be convinced their anxiety is a mystery rather than a symptom. The irony is thick: you go to a place that charges thousands to unplug, only to find the staff cataloging your every emotional tremor for a future podcast episode. In the end, Camp Mystic isn’t a solution—it’s a high-end mirror reflecting our desperation to commodify peace, and I suspect the only real magic is the price tag.