In 1998 I attended a week long workshop that combined intuitive painting with drumming and movement.

The facilitators brought all the art supplies and we spent hours painting from our hearts during the day. In the evening they played drums and took us on meditative inner journeys, and then we played the drums and danced around a campfire getting into our bodies and connecting deeply with the earth and our creative selves.

The workshop itself was glorious and the facilitators were highly skilled in creating a beautiful space of creative support and acceptance.

But what was even MORE glorious was where the workshop was held. The rented a space to teach and feed and house us at a place called the Ghost Ranch Conference Center in Northern New Mexico. Prior to this event I had never BEEN to New Mexico and had no clue about the jaw dropping, transcendent red rock desert beauty of this part of the world.

And I also had no idea, when I first set foot upon that land, how deeply this place would call to me and become a major influence in my life for the next twenty years.

New Mexico is called The Land Of Enchantment for good reason. The landscape is alive with a certain magical quality that I have never encountered anywhere else. The Ghost Ranch Conference Center is located in a little town called Abiquiu and was owned and operated by the Presbyterian Church. In that same area is The Christ In The Desert Monastery, run by the Benedictine Monks, The Dar Al Islam Mosque, and it’s where the famed artist Georgia O’Keefe lived and painted for the last 35 years of her life.

It’s an area that draws both spiritual organizations and people to settle there to be fed by a mystical energy that floods your spirit and your senses from both the stunning red rocks and the immensity of the brilliant turquoise blue sky.

I fell in love with all of it almost immediately and felt like I had found a soul home.

One evening after the events of the day had ended and I was walking back to my little adobe casita, I stopped in front of a lone, towering cottonwood tree guarding the trail I was on, like a sentinel from another world. The moon was gloriously full, a Harvest Moon in Pisces, shimmering like a glowing spotlight through the branches and I was moved to throw my arms around the tree’s ancient trunk.

In that moment I felt my heart connect with the tree’s heart and it spoke to me. It didn’t speak to me in words, but in a language much older and deeper than human thought. And it communicated to me, in no uncertain terms, that I was here at this workshop because I was meant to bring other people to this place and give them the opportunity to be creatively fed and inspired by the deep magic living in this wild and sacred land.

And so I did.

The land and I formed a creative partnership in that moment that fed me and my many students for almost two decades through my Painting From The Wild Heart intuitive painting retreats.

And it was here that I first discovered how absolutely essential the land where I held my workshops was in terms of what kind of experience my students had when they attended one of my retreats.

At Ghost Ranch there was a deep invitation into wild freedom and being challenged to go beyond what was familiar by being divested of ordinary comforts that got in the way of unleashing the undomesticated self.

One of my students ( who came back again year after year) referred to it as “art bootcamp.”

I’ve held retreats at the ocean, in the mountains, on the shore of an ancient lake and in a California valley oak and redwood forest. And each place contributed its own magic and medicine to the creative circle.

I also remembering reading somewhere that mystics are naturally drawn to wide open spaces… like the deserts, the mountains and the ocean… because those kinds of environments allow them to tap into that mystical experience of numinous expansion and divine connection that feeds their mystic souls.

For almost 5 years, since early in the pandemic, I have been bringing my beloved students to a place called Borrego Springs which is in Southern California, about 2 hours away from San Diego.

Borrego Springs is a tiny, scruffy, artsy town, right on the outskirts of Anza Borrego State Park, which is 500 square miles of dramatic badlands, cactus studded-slopes, twisting slot canyons leading to secret oases, craggy desert peaks, and wildflower extravaganzas that cover the desert floor in the spring.

And the first time I came to this untamed desert wilderness my mystics heart rejoiced.

The pandemic wreaked havoc on my Creative Juices Arts business in many, many ways. But one of the most heartbreaking outcomes was that I lost not only my home studio, but all of the retreat venues that I had called my spiritual homes disappeared for a number of reasons.

So finding a place in the desert where I could bring people to paint, to reconnect with their creative source in community while being held and nourished again by the healing wildness of a sacred landscape, was a dream come true.

What I love about the desert is that it strips people of their need for masks and and allows them to meet themselves, naked and spiritually alive, without having to perform based on other people’s needs and expectations.

The desert slows you down and allows you to access that spiritual core of your being where your own inner mystic lives. And being able to paint from that inner connection is just icing on the mystic cake!!!

So if you are longing for a big stretch of sacred time just for you, where you will be supported by the star-studded expansive night sky, the howling of the coyotes and the deep quiet that only the desert can bring, to allow YOUR mystic soul to express itself freely without judgments or constraints, come and join us for this week long intuitive painting journey in November 7-13,2026.

For more info and to register, click on the image below.