The Sacred Compass
Embodied leadership formation for people building communities that thrive.
Opens at a four-day mountain retreat — fall, winter, or spring · twice monthly private sessions · a monthly circle of fellow builders · the chance to integrate real transformation.
Entry starts at whichever retreat falls first in your window · Retreats three times yearly, six seats each (next: September 23–26, 2026) · Fundable through renewal grants and professional-development budgets
Your community cannot outgrow YOU
You pour into your congregation, your company, your movement, your team — competently, generously, for years — and some essential accounting never balances. The people you serve are helped and still struggling. The institution takes what you give and asks for more. You keep working harder inside a model that was never built to hold anyone, including you.
Here's what I want you to hear: that's not a personal failure, and it's not burnout. It's a container problem. Most of us learned to lead inside structures that run on someone being spent — usually the leader, often everyone. You can't rest your way out of a leaking container. You can only build a better one.
That's what this program is for. Not more self-care bolted onto your calendar. Not a program that teaches you to escape your work in order to survive it.
A formation: learning, in your own body first, what a thriving container feels like — and then building it around the people you lead.
This is not a self-help program. It's for leaders who intend to change the world, and who understand that the first structure they need to change is closer to home.
The Compass, briefly
A compass doesn't 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. 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.
The two currents
The first is somatic: your leadership lives in your nervous system before it lives in any plan. The steadiness people feel in your presence, the tension a room absorbs from you without knowing why — that's the body leading. Breathwork, movement, and guided process work train it directly: completing what's stored, and building capacity for joy, passion, and vitality as felt, repeatable states rather than lucky accidents.
The second I can only honestly call spiritual. Ten years of listening to people at thresholds trains a particular ear for the pattern underneath the story. In our work I put that ear in your service, and I teach you to hear it yourself: what your body is telling you, what your community is asking, what's ready to change. Call the source what you like — God, intuition, the still small voice, the universe. You can be a lifelong person of faith or someone who winces at the word "spiritual"; the work meets you either way.
And underneath both runs a question of balance. Most leadership culture trains one kind of energy: drive, structure, output, control. The energy that listens, tends, receives, and regenerates gets treated as soft, private, optional. In my lineage we'd name these the energetic masculine and feminine, and a container only thrives when both are working. Strength that doesn't dominate. Care that doesn't collapse. You'll practice both until your leadership carries them on its own.
What is The Sacred Compass Path?
Three components across nine months, then a fourth that's just as deliberate: integration.
The retreat — Finding Your Sacred Compass — opens your program.
Four days on 50 acres in the Shenandoah foothills, ninety minutes from DC, with at most six of you. Guided breathwork and embodied practice, deep individual work inside a small confidential group, and genuine unstructured hours — the pond, the hot tub under the stars, nourishing meals you don’t have to prepare. The retreat isn't the product; it's the ignition. Retreats run fall, winter, and spring; whichever falls first in your window opens your nine months.
Private sessions — twice monthly, eighteen in all.
You and me: somatic work, clinical hypnotherapy, and discernment. Some sessions build capacity — joy and vitality as trainable states. Some read what's underneath a decision you've been circling. Some work directly on the container you lead: the meeting that drains everyone, the conflict you've been managing instead of transforming, the culture change you can feel but can't yet name.
The Circle — monthly virtual gatherings with everyone currently in the program.
Pastors, founders, executive directors, organizers, each in a different season of their program. This room is where you practice the skills of a thriving community on a real one: witnessing without fixing, receiving without deflecting, holding power lightly. What you learn to do in the Circle is what you'll build back home.
Then comes integration — not a stop, but the season where you take what you've built into your actual leadership: your team, your congregation, your family. Support doesn't end here. I check in around the twelve-month mark, and more is available anytime you want it. This is support for a year, and beyond if it's needed.
The Four Seasons
The program moves through the Four Tenets of Embodied Love
FIRST SEASON — SELF — "I love myself — I am both the subject and the object of loving towards my own being."
The training ground. Not because you're the problem, but because you're the instrument. Every skill this program teaches gets learned in your own body first.
SECOND SEASON — BELOVEDS — "My heartfelt desire is to love and be loved."
The first community you practice on: partner, family, closest friends. If the new capacity can't survive your own dinner table, it won't survive your board meeting.
THIRD SEASON — COMMUNITY AND THE WORLD — "I offer love to all people and work toward a better future... I love creation and my part in it."
The outward turn. The container you've learned to build, built where you lead: your team, congregation, company, movement — and the change it makes possible beyond them.
FOURTH SEASON — INTEGRATION
Time to integrate the change. Three months where you take everything from the first three seasons into your actual leadership, and find out what holds when you're the one applying it. This season isn't a break from the program — it's the part that shows you just how deep your capacity has grown.
(These tenets grew from the Principles and Skills of Loving developed by my mentor, Rev. Jerry J. Jud, at Shalom Mountain — a lineage of embodied practice refined over fifty years. I've expanded them to hold the full territory of a leader's life.)
My own training ground
I'm not teaching you a theory of leadership. I'm teaching you the thing I had to learn with my own body on the line: how to build a life and a work that can hold what you're asking them to hold.
Before this, I was a college chaplain for a decade — the rooms where people meet the biggest moments of their lives — with my clinical training in the trauma bays of a Level 1 hospital. I rose through higher education to acting associate vice president before I left, so I've also sat where many of my clients sit: at the decision-making table, holding what can't be said out loud there.
I hold an M.Div from Yale, clinical hypnotherapy certification, trauma-informed yoga training, Gottman relationship credentials, and somatic retreat training from Shalom Mountain, in the fifty-year lineage of Jerry Jud's Principles and Skills of Loving — the lineage my Four Tenets of Embodied Love grew from. My spiritual study runs wide: I've sat at the feet of Buddhist lamas, tantric practitioners, and Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars, and all of it informs the ear I bring to this work.
And then there's the education no institution grants: I lost my mom and my best friend to cancer, walked my own medical gauntlet, and left the career I'd spent my life climbing because staying was costing me my body. I write about all of it publicly in my newsletter, because I believe the guide should go first.
So when I sit with you, I bring both — the clinical training that keeps deep work safe, and the lived knowing of what it takes to set a heavy thing down. My whole practice rests on one conviction: the body, the spirit, and the mind are one thing, and healing asks us to work with all three.
Who this is built 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. 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 results
In you: a nervous system that can hold a hard room without absorbing it. Joy, passion, and vitality as states you know how to reach on an ordinary Tuesday. A needle that swings freely — all four directions readable. The capacity to receive, which most leaders lost so long ago they've stopped noticing.
Around you — because this is the point: meetings that end with more energy than they started with. People who stop performing wellness at you and start telling you the truth. Conflict that composts into something instead of just recurring. A community, team, or congregation with its own capacity for change, so the yield of your work finally becomes visible — and shared, so it no longer depends on your depletion to exist.
And then the integration season holds it, instead of handing you one more thing to maintain.
What it costs — and what it builds
Organizational rate — $11,800.
When a congregation, grant, or professional-development budget funds your seat. Includes everything institutions need — invoicing, program documentation, board-ready reporting — and every organizational enrollment underwrites community and supported seats.
Community rate — $8,800.
Self-funded. Same program, same retreat, same care; the difference is whose budget carries it.
Both rates include the retreat, all eighteen private sessions, nine Circle gatherings, and all preparation and integration work.
(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.
On funding:
Congregations regularly cover this through sabbatical budgets and Lilly Endowment Clergy Renewal Grants (up to $60,000 — the application cycle opens each November, and I provide a complete grant packet). Companies and nonprofits cover it through professional development. Ask me for documentation formatted for your board, committee, or employer — it's ready to for your review.
Need more flexibility?
Just the Retreat
Want to begin with just the retreat? Four days, six seats, pre- and post-retreat private sessions included.
Self-funded: $1,500 ($1,200 early registration).
Organization-funded: $2,400, or $3,200
Everything you invest counts toward the full program if you continue within thirty days.
Is there a non-retreat 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.
The 7-Session Integration Program is a season of work in its own right: seven private sessions, virtual, built around one question your life is asking, over about three months.
$2,800 self-funded
$3,900 organization-funded
The full fee counts toward the program if you continue within thirty days of your last session.
To answer your question…
Is this a wellness program? More self-care?
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 — nine months of active work, then integration, where you're putting it into practice in your real life, with support still available if you want it. You come away with the skills no 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. Three retreats run each year — fall, winter, and spring — and whichever falls first in your window opens your nine months. Start in September and your harvest season lands on the actual summer; start in January or April and it's still three real months, timed to your program.
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 doesn't allow it, talk to me on our call and we'll figure out what fits. I also offer a 7-session Integration Program (no retreat) that might be for you.
Is this a cohort?
Enrollment is individual; your program opens at your retreat. 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 nine months 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 7-Session Integration Program if a 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 Congregations & Grants 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.
What do you mean by intuition and discernment?
In our sessions, I'll sometimes offer what I hear: a pattern, an image, the thing under the thing you came in with. Some clients call these readings; I think of it as listening at depth. You're welcome to receive it as prayer, as intuition, or as pattern recognition earned over ten thousand hours — what matters is whether it's useful, and you'll know quickly. Everything is offered, never imposed.
Is this therapy?
No. This is trauma-informed somatic and spiritual work — deep, and different from mental-health treatment. If you're in an acute season, let's talk first and I'll help you find the right support.
Do we stay in touch after the program ends?
Yes. Around the twelve-month mark — nine months of work plus your harvest season — I reach out for a free thirty-minute check-in. We explore what has held, what's changed, and what's next. Some people feel complete at 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.