Why We’re Making More Room for the Sacred Pause

We just launched RisingCircleRanch.com, a new website devoted to something that has quietly become an important part of MEA: private retreats.

Between our Santa Fe and Baja campuses, we now host more than 40 private retreats a year. Companies come. Leadership teams come. Alumni groups, university cohorts, families, communities, and groups of friends come. Even the occasional wedding party. Sometimes they arrive with a curriculum and an agenda. Sometimes their agenda is basically: Can we please stop having an agenda for four days?

I’ve come to believe that one of the scarcest luxuries in modern life isn’t a spa treatment, a Michelin-starred meal, or 1,000-thread-count sheets. It’s spaciousness.

That’s especially true for people whose lives are devoted to others.

One of my favorite examples is The Sacred Pause, a retreat we’ve now hosted three times for faith leaders. The idea is almost comically obvious: What happens when the people who spend their lives renewing everyone else get a chance to renew themselves?

Pastors, rabbis, imams, Buddhist teachers, chaplains, and other spiritual leaders live at the intersection of some of the most intense forces in society: grief and hope, birth and death, faith and doubt, community and conflict. And in these polarized times, they’re increasingly being asked to be spiritual teachers, therapists, community organizers, conflict mediators, cultural translators—and occasionally human lightning rods.

That’s a pretty ambitious job description.

Sacred Pause gives them five days to put down the job description. The retreat brings together an interfaith cohort of 25-30 leaders to rest, reflect, explore midlife transitions, reconnect with purpose, and—perhaps most importantly—be with other people who understand the invisible weight of being the person everyone turns to. As one past participant beautifully put it, “I spend my life in my role, and at this retreat I could just be me.”

That’s why we’ll be hosting many more retreats for faith leaders next year.

It’s also why private retreats have become such a natural extension of what we do at MEA. Our Rising Circle Ranch campus sits on nearly 2,600 acres of high desert—hiking trails, horses, enormous skies, campfires, and enough silence to finally hear yourself think. Baja offers a different medicine: ocean, sand, sunsets, and the wonderfully clarifying realization that most emails aren’t nearly as urgent when you’re barefoot.

A private retreat isn’t just an off-site in a prettier place. Done well, it’s a pattern interrupt. You take people out of their habitual environment, slow down the clock, deepen the conversation, and create enough psychological and physical space for something unexpected to emerge.

Maybe that’s why we named our Santa Fe home Rising Circle Ranch.

The circle reminds us that none of us does this alone. And the rising reminds us that renewal isn’t retreating from the world.

Sometimes you have to retreat in order to return.

And heaven knows, the world could use a few more renewed people right now.