Sacred Compass Leadership Training
Embodied leadership formation for visionaries building communities that thrive
A Year-Long leadership development program to build the capacity needed to create lasting change.
Over four seasons you move from steadying yourself, to strengthening your closest relationships, to leading a whole community, to making change out in the world. It is a full year of formation built to grow your capacity as you implement the techniques and insights for where you are right now.
By the end of the year, you're leading from clarity instead of momentum, with a felt connection to your own insights and real relational skills for the people you serve. You'll know how to build genuine belonging in the communities you hold, not just run programming. And you'll have a practiced, felt sense of how to create space for what's next.
What does the Sacred Compass year look like?
Summary: In a typical month you have one hour-long private session with me, one group call with the other participants, and a workshop with each season learning the Four Tenets of Embodied Love
A full year offers an opportunity to not only learn, but implement, iterate and then integrate the work, with four full seasons of support.
What’s Included?
A four-day opening retreat on fifty acres in the Shenandoah foothills, with lodging and meals included. This is where the somatic work begins
Private one-to-one session every month, plus a dedicated session before the retreat and another after it, so your year starts with extra support and stays personal throughout
A monthly group call, where participants think alongside each other and receive real-time support for implementing this work now
A live workshop each season, introducing that season's tenet and the practices that move you from learning to integration
A recorded library of the seasonal workshops and guided audio practices for the in between
A private voice-and-text line between sessions, so you can reach me for a quick unstick instead of waiting for the next call
A custom workbook and journal to carry the work between sessions and keep it close in daily life
For those who want more immersion,
a second retreat is available as an optional add-on.
(Subject to availability)
Enrollment that can begin in any season, and a program that runs fully alongside your work. Apart from the retreat, it is entirely virtual.
Note: August held as a sabbath and integration month, because rest is part of the curriculum, for both you and me.
Who this is for
A founder who built a company on whole-hearted values and watches the old patterns creep back in anyway — hers included.
A pastor who believes the church can be done differently and is tired of proving it alone.
An executive director whose organization helps hundreds and quietly grinds through its own staff.
An organizer who can mobilize a thousand people and wants to learn how to keep them — nourished, joyful, still here next year.
A physician who practices whole-person medicine and watched her own clinic turn into the thing she left.
And the would-be leader: the one who sees what their workplace could become and hasn't yet claimed the authority to build it.
You don't need a title to belong here. You need the intent to build something that doesn't run on anyone being spent — and the willingness to start with the container closest to home.
A note of care: this is deep work designed for people who are fundamentally resourced. It isn't a substitute for mental-health treatment — if you're in an acute season, reach out and I'll help you find the right support first. The mountain will still be here.
The Four Seasons
Each season is drawn from the Four Tenets of Embodied Love. A simple, yet profound framework to help balance each area of your life and leadership, in order to come away with the capacity for lasting change.
The example months given below are for a start at the Fall Retreat. However, you may begin at the start of any season as the work moves through the Four Tenets in order no matter when you start. You can begin the program and attend the retreat that best suits your schedule.
First Season: Self ~ Autumn: September - November
“I love myself. I am both the one who loves and the one being loved.”
The year opens in the body, if possible with the retreat, because the deepest patterns rarely yield to thinking. Over four days and through the season that follows, we use somatic practice and subconscious exploration to meet the four emotions that quietly run most of us: anger, fear, grief, and unworthiness. You learn to feel them without being commanded by them, to see what in you is depleted and what needs tending. By the end of this season you lead from a steadier center, and your capacity has room to grow.
Second Season: Beloveds ~ Winter: December - February
“My heartfelt desire is to love and be loved.”
From the self we turn to the people closest to the work. Drawing on the Gottman method and years of relational training, you learn the skills that actually hold a marriage, a friendship, and a team together: how to make and receive repair, how to stay in a hard conversation without fleeing it or flattening it, and how to keep compassion alive even after trust has cracked. These are the quiet mechanics underneath every relationship you lead. You leave able to be trusted with conflict, which is most of what leadership asks.
Third Season: Community ~ Spring: March - May
“I offer love to all people and work toward a better future.”
Now the work widens to the rooms you are responsible for, your team, your congregation, your company, your movement. You learn restorative justice practices and mediation to tend rupture before it quietly splits a group, and the harder-to-name art of building belonging: the joy, delight, and shared meaning that make people want to stay and give their best. A community that only survives its conflicts is not yet thriving. You leave able to carry a group through its worst week and toward its best self.
Fourth Season: The World ~ Summer: June - July (August is held as a sabbath and time for integration)
“I love creation and my part in it.”
The final season turns outward, toward the change you are here to make. Working with passion and life-force energy, you learn to build the container in which real change can take hold, the energetic, relational, and practical conditions that let a vision actually land. This is where capacity stops being something you guard and becomes something you put out into the world. You leave able to turn what you can imagine into something that outlasts you.
The Four Tenets grew from the Principles and Skills of Loving, taught by my mentor Gerald J. Jud at Shalom Mountain and refined over fifty years. I have expanded them to hold the whole territory of a leader's life, weaving in somatic practice, clinical hypnotherapy, the Gottman method, and restorative justice. This is my life's work and countless hours of training and experience handed to you in a single year.
About the leader
Rev. Maeba Jonas, M.Div.
There is work only you can do, and it lives inside a wisdom only you can see. Let’s discover it together.
I’m Rev. Maeba Jonas, an interfaith chaplain with a Master of Divinity, a certified clinical hypnotherapist, a somatic practitioner, and a Gottman-trained relationship coach.
I trained at Yale and have led inside institutions like Johns Hopkins, and for far longer I have been the person others come to when the ground shifts beneath them.
I built this training for the leaders and caregivers who never ask for help until they cannot take it anymore.
I know, because I lived it. I rose to the level of Acting Associate Vice President — doing the work of three people — only to find myself paying the cost with my body.
Fortunately, my somatic training and life-long spiritual study allowed me to see a way out.
Now, I teach those who are doing the work that matters to listen deeply to what matters to them, in order to create the capacity to lead a community that thrives.
Why a Compass?
A compass does not tell you where to go. It tells you where you are, and it only works when the needle swings freely.
Lead long enough inside a depleting model and the needle sticks: you keep moving, competently, in the last direction you were pointed, but struggle to find balance in all aspects of your life. This program frees the needle.
Then, it teaches you to navigate by it, so the community you're building follows a leader who can actually feel where true north is.
What changes
For you:
Vitality, passion, and joy become states you can reach on an ordinary Tuesday, not dependent on when the calendar finally opens up. Your inner compass reads clearly in all four directions, so you always know where you are and which way to move. And you regain the capacity to receive as fully as you give, which quietly changes what becomes possible for you.
Around you:
“As within, so without.” Meetings begin ending with more energy than they started with. The people around you stop performing wellness and start telling you the truth. Conflict composts into something useful instead of recurring on a loop. Your team, your congregation, your workplace grows its own capacity for change, so the work puts down roots beyond you and its results finally become visible and shared.
In the world:
The final season turns all of it outward. What you have built in yourself and your relationships becomes the container for something larger: a vision that takes hold, a change that lasts, work that expands instead of work you are left to maintain. You do not end this year with one more thing to carry. You end it having created a pathway to transformation.
Investment — $10,800
(Payment plans available)
A limited number of supported seats exist for organizers and clergy of under-resourced congregations — ask me on our call.
Since this work is relational, the first step is a conversation. Reach out to find a time on my calendar and discover if the Sacred Compass is right for you.
Need more flexibility?
On funding:
If you need a board, a bishop, an HR team, or a grant to say yes, I have gathered everything they will need in one place: a program description written for reviewers, a budget justification, sample grant language, and board-ready documentation. Send them to the funding page, or bring it to your next conversation with them.
Just the Retreat
Want to begin with just the retreat? Four days away, a small number of participants, pre- and post-retreat private sessions included.
$1,500 ($1,200 early registration)
(Everything you invest counts toward the full program if you continue within thirty days.)
Is there a virtual option?
Some seasons of life don't allow four days away — caregiving, a search process, a newborn, a body that needs to stay close to home.
A Single Season program is a season of work in its own right: six private virtual sessions, built around the questions your life is asking, over about three months.
$2,900 (payment plans available)
(Everything you invest counts toward the program if you continue within thirty days of your last session.)
Frequently Asked Questions…
Is this a wellness program?
This is designed as a leadership formation program. Wellness programs help you recover from your work; this, instead, changes how your work works. The program runs a full year, start to finish, with real rest built into the design rather than bolted on after. You come away with the skills not just to implement changes, but with strategies to face challenges as they come up in a fundamentally different way.
I'm not sure I count as a "leader."
If you're building something — a team, a congregation, a company, a movement, a workplace culture you can currently only imagine — you belong. Some of the most important people in this work don't have the title yet. That's often why they have room to build differently.
Do I have to start in September?
No — enrollment opens at the start of any season: Self (Autumn), Beloveds (Winter), Community (Spring), or World (Summer). Retreats currently run twice yearly, fall and spring, with more dates planned as the program grows; you may join whichever retreat works best for your calendar and timing.
The next retreat is scheduled for April 2027.
Can I do private sessions before the retreat?
The retreat opens your program by design — it's where the Self season actually ignites, in a way a private session alone doesn't match. If timing genuinely will not allow it, talk to me on our call and we'll figure out what fits. I also offer a Single Season that might be for you.
(An exception may be made if you have done extensive personal growth work before or are familiar with the Shalom Process™)
Is this a cohort?
Enrollment is individual; your program opens at your season and you join the retreat that fits your schedule. The community lives in the monthly Circle, which runs continuously — you join a room that's already alive, with visionaries at every stage of their own program.
Do I have to commit to a year to work with you?
Sacred Compass is the work I most believe in. You're also welcome to begin with the four-day retreat on its own, or the Single Season Guidance if a four season-long container isn't possible right now. Either way, what you invest counts toward the full program if you choose to continue.
I'm clergy — how does funding actually work?
Your congregation applies jointly with you for a Lilly Clergy Renewal Grant (up to $60,000; applications open each November), or funds it through sabbatical or continuing-education budgets. I can provide a complete sample grant packet for your reference. See the For Organizations page.
I'm a leader, but the "Rev." gives me pause — is this religious?
Fair question. I'm an ordained minister, but have spent my career as an interfaith chaplain. The sacred is welcome in the room — and the work itself draws from a multitude of religious and spiritual frameworks, which I have studied over my lifetime. Often those who have been hurt by religious institutions find this work to be a gentle way back into the Divine. They do not get to hold what “God” means to you. You are welcome here.
Do we stay in touch after the program ends?
Yes. Around the twelve-month mark, we will schedule a final session to conclude the year and I reach out for a check-in during the months that follow. We explore what has held, what's changed, and what's next. Some people feel complete at this time. Some are ready to create something new.
Sacred Compass alumni also get a discount on future retreats, if space allows.
Start by getting your bearings
Every enrollment begins with a free call. Bring your questions and the community you're trying to build; I'll bring mine. Mostly we'll find out where you are — which is what a compass is for — and whether this is a fit. If it isn't, I'll tell you so and point you somewhere good.