Desert Wisdom: Practicing Resilience

Desert Wisdom

There’s something about the desert that speaks directly to our capacity for resilience. Perhaps it’s witnessing how life persists—how the juniper twists toward light through rock, how wildflowers emerge after the briefest rain, how the landscape itself has endured millennia of wind and weather yet stands magnificently present.

This October, I’m going to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico to guide a small retreat called Living Resilience. As I prepare the practices and contemplations we’ll explore together, I’ve been reflecting on what this particular landscape offers our overwrought nervous systems and busy minds.

The Wisdom of Space

Ghost Ranch encompasses 21,000 acres of high desert wilderness. When you immerse yourself in such vast land, you can find yourself in pockets of profound awe that help bring life and our place in the modern world into perspective. This physical spaciousness creates an immediate physiological shift—the shoulders drop, the breath deepens, the gaze softens to take in the expansive vistas. The stunning terrain offers countless places where you can be held by canyon walls, mesmerized by distant mesas, or simply surrounded by the boundless sky above.

In our daily lives, this kind of space is increasingly rare. We move from screen to screen, conversation to conversation, responsibility to responsibility. Even our “breaks” are often filled with stimulation. The desert offers another way—a landscape that invites us to notice the space between things, to appreciate emptiness itself.

During our retreat, we’ll practice with this spaciousness, letting it inform our meditation, our walking, our conversations, and our quiet. We’ll explore how physical space can create internal space, and how that internal space becomes the ground from which resilience naturally emerges.

The Practice of Witnessing Change

The high desert is a sage teacher of impermanence. The light shifts dramatically throughout the day, transforming red cliffs from rust to crimson to purple to shadow. Weather moves visibly across the landscape. Stars appear with astonishing clarity and then fade with dawn.

Our contemplative practices at Ghost Ranch will include intentional witnessing of these natural cycles. We’ll gather for dawn meditation as the world awakens, pause at midday to notice the fullness of light, and circle in the evening as darkness returns. Through this rhythm, we practice being with change rather than resisting it—a core capacity of resilience.

Finding Our Place in the Larger Story

When you walk the trails at Ghost Ranch, you’re traversing a landscape shaped by millions of years of geological forces. The towering cliffs, the sculpted arroyos, the resilient plants that have adapted to thrive in this seemingly harsh environment—all tell a story of endurance and beautiful adaptation far beyond human timescales.

This sense of participating in a continuity much larger than our individual lives offers perspective that’s difficult to access in our daily routines. During our retreat, we’ll explore practices that connect inner and outer landscapes—noticing how the desert’s natural resilience mirrors and awakens our own. Through contemplative practices on the land, we’ll engage with both the visible beauty around us and the internal resources it helps reveal. These practices help us sense our larger belonging—not as an abstract concept, but as a felt experience that resources and grounds us.

The most surprising thing wasn’t what I gained on retreat with Ashley, but what fell away. All the stories I tell myself about not being enough couldn’t survive in the natural terrain. There’s something about standing with an ancient tree or a winding river that puts everything in perspective. I found myself breathing differently, sleeping more deeply, and returning home with a sense of possibility I hadn’t felt in years.

An Invitation to Practice

The Living Resilience retreat isn’t about acquiring new information about meditation or resilience. Rather, it’s an opportunity to practice together in a setting that naturally evokes our capacity for presence, wonder, and renewal. Through guided meditation, contemplative walks, eco-dharma talks, and periods of quiet, we’ll create conditions where insight can emerge organically.

If you feel drawn to this kind of practice and place, I invite you to consider joining our small gathering. The retreat is designed to be accessible to both experienced practitioners and those newer to meditation. What matters most is your willingness to be present—with yourself, with others, and with the remarkable landscape that will hold our practice.

The Living Resilience retreat will be held October 19-23, 2025 at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico. For registration details and practical information, please visit the retreat page. Space is limited to ensure an intimate experience.

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You can also learn more about Ghost Ranch Retreat Center here.