Why I Choose Wildness Over Luxury At My Retreats … Every Single Time

by | Jul 18, 2025 | Articles | 1 comment

I have had a long career as a retreat facilitator of expressive arts, intuitive painting and creativity for healing workshops. And one of my very first retreats was held at the Ghost Ranch Conference Center in Abiquiu New Mexico. I found Ghost Ranch when I went on a personal retreat and I fell in love with the beauty of the red rock desert and the incredibly powerful energy that exuded from that landscape. Like deserts from the beginning of time, it was a sacred environment that stripped you of pretensions and brought you face to face with what was raw and essential and real. 

I felt such a wild sense of freedom, spaciousness and permission there and knew that it would support me and my students to expand into the fullness of who we all were as creative beings. 

Ghost Ranch itself is owned and run by the Presbyterian Church so it is essentially a church camp. Which meant that it was pretty basic in terms of the physical structures which included the cabins and hotel rooms.

But because it was so basic I didn’t have to worry about things getting chaotic or messy or the inevitable out of control creative accidents.  We didn’t have to spend endless hours tarping the floors and covering the walls in plastic. People could accidentally spill a container of water on the floor or knock over a palette filled with paint and it was no big deal. We didn’t have to be concerned with the essentially impossible task of protecting the physical space that we were in from paint getting anywhere, because no matter HOW much tarping you do,  that paint is going to find a way. And I can’t even begin to tell you what an amazing blessing that was. If you have ever tried to host a painting retreat one thing you will discover is how many retreat centers there are where the main concern is making sure you don’t get ANY paint on ANY surface of the venue. Which puts a HUGE damper on the free expression of the creative process.

 There were no constraints around actually being artists! No concerns or expectations to be neat and careful or quiet or … goddess forbid.. appropriate! We could drum, dance, make noise, splatter paint and experiment with all kinds of ways of being creative. There were places to paint both inside a couple of big rooms and outside under a covered veranda, so people had the luxury of moving around to find their perfect spot.  People could do what they wanted creatively within the confines of the workshop which included just about anything.

They could make big, brash, bold, ugly, messy, overworked paintings that could not be interpreted but were a full expression of the painters joy. One woman painted a HUGE and I mean HUGE penis going into an equally large vagina. And she was painting outside on the verandah which meant that her painting was visible to anyone walking past. I was a little worried that we were going to get censured by the church ladies for that one, but no one made a peep. 

It was a pretty no holds barred kind of a creative experience. 

And because it WAS essentially a church camp it was quite affordable which meant that I didn’t have to charge people ridiculous amounts of money to attend. And that made it much more accessible for people who didn’t have tons of disposable income.

This sense of creative freedom was all that mattered to me and I couldn’t wait to bring my beloved students to this magical creative world. 

So imagine my surprise when a couple of days into the retreat I started hearing rumblings and complaints from various people about the workshop. Now what they were complaining about wasn’t the workshop itself. They loved my facilitation, the abundance of art supplies and the total permission they had to be wildly and wonderfully creative.

But what they WERE cranky about was the fact that Ghost Ranch itself was not a FIVE Star Resort!! 

The meals were church camp fare which meant they weren’t exactly gourmet and there were very few accomodations made for various dietery needs. They had vegetarian and non-vegetarian options and that was pretty much it. The food was abundant, heavy on carbs and more or less healthy  but not very exciting for a more discerning palette. 

The lodging was little adobe huts called casitas that had electricity, a roof over your head and bunk beds. Towels and sheets were provided ( by me)  and the bathrooms were communal church camp bathrooms where the showers were kind of drippy and were located about 100 yards from the casitas themselves, so it was a bit of a trek for middle of the night peeing. 

But the casitas faced a gorgeous red rock mesa, you could hear the coyotes howling throughout the night, and the sky was huge and expansive and filled with the most amazing stars. 

So when my grumbling students came to me with their complaints I had to sit them down and remind them that we were on an adventure into the mysterious landscape of our creative souls and not here to be catered to and be made comfortable.

That the stripped down elements of the environment and the fact that they didn’t have all of their creature comforts put them in a position where they had to face themselves in all kinds of new ways. That there was serious medicine here in this land and what we had was such an incredible opportunity to see who we were without all of the things that supported our familiar identities. And that all of their bitching and moaning about things that really didn’t matter to the expressed purpose of the workshop was just another form of resistance to the creative process. 

My little speech mostly worked.  I had one woman, who was really atttached to things being super swanky, who tried to sneak out in the middle of the night.  But I was able way-lay her before she got to her car. And she ended up coming back to Ghost Ranch for the next five years of my retreats because she finally got what I was talking about and the transformation she experienced was so powerful for her. 

But everyone else pretty much calmed down and got back to the work of being creative. Partly because they got the message that their complaints weren’t going to have any real impact me and partly because they knew in their hearts that I was right.  

My last retreat at Ghost Ranch was in September of 2017 and I still miss it terribly. The combo of the red rocks, the mesa, the casitas, the coyotes and the magical creative freedom it provided was unparalleled. And I’m so very grateful that I had the opportunity to facilitate over twenty Wild Heart Painting retreats on that sacred land. 

I’ve held retreats in various places since then but my commitment to providing an environment that supports folks to be real and raw and honest has never, EVER wavered. My primary value when looking for a space to teach is whether or not my students can be as free as possible to be utterly and unapologetically themselves, unfettered by cultural restrictions … even as artists … to be nice and refined, pretty and pristine and uncontroversial. 

 

And if I have to choose between fancy amenities and that wild creative freedom, I will choose the opportunity for creative liberation each and every time. 

Comments

1 Comment

  1. I agree I have been to yoga retreats out there. Slept in a shed without plumbing or electricity. It reset my spirit.

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