Melinda always called it her “spiritual retreat,” though the phrase did heroic work disguising what it actually was: a five-day symposium — entitled curiously as "SoulCraft 5" — for the cosseted, terrified, chronically comfortable classes to discuss their anxieties in a converted barn that smelled faintly of eucalyptus and wet Labrador.

By the second morning — after the ceremonial shaking of limbs, and the chanting, and the guided breathing that left everyone slightly dizzy and self-impressed — the group settled into The Circle. Six of them, arranged with geometric precision, as if spiritual realignment required symmetry.

The leader, a woman named Celeste (née Sandra), sat in the centre like a benevolent CEO of Human Potential. She wore linen trousers and a smile that had been ironed at the edges.

“Welcome, souls,” she said, in the Esperanto of the spiritually upwardly mobile. “Today we loosen shame. Shame is the enemy of abundance. Your wants are sacred. Your universe is listening.”

Everyone nodded with reverent eagerness. Middle-class people, when told their desires are sacred, become instant mystics.

Celeste continued. “Let’s ask something simple: Is it wrong to want to retire early?”

A collective sigh. A soft exhalation of thank God. She had spoken their private heresy aloud.

“Oh absolutely not,” said Eleanor, who wore crystals the size of ice cubes. “It’s authentic. It’s aligned.”

“Aligned,” murmured the circle.

“It’s exactly what I want,” said Martin, a man whose spiritual injury appeared to be insufficient square footage. “Forty-two or forty-three. No later. That’s my truth.”

Truth, in this setting, meant desire with a yoga mat.

Celeste beamed. “Yes. You see? The heart desires what it desires. And desire is innocent.”

Then she turned to Melinda — radiant, rested, encased in a fleece that cost more than the average person’s monthly salary.

“And Melinda… what does your heart desire?”

Melinda tucked a strand of glossy hair behind her ear and smiled with the solemnity of someone confessing sainthood.

“Well, I don’t actually work,” she said, in the careful tone of a person who knows this is a privilege but considers it a burden. “But is it wrong to want my husband to keep working? I mean, he provides me with a lifestyle that nourishes me. Spiritually.”

There was a beat — and then, predictably, the room warmed with sympathetic murmurs.

“No shame here,” Celeste declared, raising a hand like a traffic warden of inner peace. “No want is wrong. The only wrong thing is denying your own abundance. If your heart requires comfort to heal, let it heal.”

Melinda felt absolved. Perhaps even beatified.

Encouraged, others chimed in.

“I want a house in the countryside,” said Eleanor. “Seven bedrooms. Space to process my childhood traumas.”

Seven bedrooms for trauma. As if square footage were the necessary container for emotional debris.

Martin nodded solemnly. “I want freedom from financial fear. Which, for me, looks like a second property in France.”

“Fear manifests as lack,” Celeste said. “Ask the universe for its opposite.”

And so they asked. The universe, via Celeste, was given quite a shopping list: retirement at forty-two, mansions with healing rooms, renovated barns for inner work, personal chefs to free up emotional labour, spa-grade bathrooms in which to process intergenerational wounds.

Someone even mentioned “wanting to feel safe” — and defined safety as a gated community with automated shutters and a plunge pool for cold-water therapy.

Melinda found herself saying things she did not know she believed.

“I think,” she said, “I really think I’m entitled to joy.”

“Of course you are,” Celeste cooed. “Entitlement is not a bad word anymore. It’s simply recognising what the universe already wants for you.”

The others nodded, relieved. The universe, apparently, was a generous concierge service with a taste for luxury real estate.

By the fourth day, everything had become absurdly serene. People spoke slower, as if enlightenment demanded a lower word-count per minute. They floated from session to session like well-fed ghosts. Someone cried during a meditation about “the childhood meadow.” Someone else wrote a letter to their future self in a luxury notebook embossed with the word EMERGE.

On the final day, Celeste gathered them for the closing ritual.

“You all came here with burdens,” she said, “and you leave with clarity. Remember: You cannot help what you desire. Your wants are not your fault. They are your destiny.”

Destiny had come a long way since Achilles. Now it involved mood boards and cottagecore fantasies.

“Go,” she said, “and manifest your lives.”

They hugged one another — the calibrated, careful hug of people who share everything except their actual lives.

Melinda drove home feeling replenished, purified, newly powerful. She rolled down the window and let the cold wind hit her face. The world looked bright, forgiving, full of promise.

She had asked the universe for what she truly wanted.

Now she expected delivery.

The Cosmic Firing Range

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