The afternoon sunlight broke through the pine trees in soft, golden shafts, slanting through the forest canopy like strands of warmth pulled straight from the sky. After the heavy morning of mirror work—after the silence, the reckoning, the pain of facing their own eyes for far too long—there was something almost sacred in the way the retreat facilitators gently herded the campers across the wooden path and into the next space.

It wasn’t one of the regular pavilions this time. This was ...