Meditation Retreats at the Falls are Here

Here is the long version of a decade-long journey in Meditation that saved my Life

It's been a decade since I began exploring and practicing the many life-changing benefits of meditation. It saved my life. Here's how:

When I began, I was "in a world of hurt". My high-profile international career had ended abruptly. With high expectations and a golden parachute, I had invested my entire life savings in 750 acres of land, equipment and a plan to develop an "intentional community". I was up to my neck in debt, having personally guaranteed the bank loans at the end of 2006. The real estate market collapsed 3 months later in the 2007 sub-prime mortgage crisis. On the heals of that collapse, 2008 brought the collapse of the rest of the economy with bank bailouts at the expense of American taxpayers and property owners. Thankfully, I had developed a close, trusting relationship with my local banker.

My youngest son, plagued with debilitating schizophrenia, had died of suicide followed by his wife two years later. We forged ahead.

I thought I was a pretty resilient guy, but things kept piling up. Years spent on the edge of bankruptcy, everything looked bleak. I went down lots of rabbit holes looking for truth and solutions. I slid into suicidal depression. With the unfailing support of my wife, we held on. The original plan was for a high-end, gated development. But it was tough times. I had spent three months in due diligence, developing a sophisticated business plan. I knew how to do that. Lots of experience creating business plans in my career that resulted in things like over 15,000 7-Eleven stores in Thailand.

I targeted baby-boomers. It was a generation beginning to retire. Flush with cash, they would be looking for a second home or downsizing to live in a beautiful, natural paradise . But The best-laid marketing plans became trash when the world shifted under our feet. The boomers lost their 401k's. Their plans changed too. We pivoted to sustainable living, self-reliance moderated by an intentional community dedicated to living the golden rule. It was a personal, spiritual quest that felt right both for me personally and people living in fear. It was slow going. It worked, even if not according to plan, or as quickly as I needed it to be. I learned patience.

My banker foreclosed on every other development on the mountain. The deep-pocketed guys had protected themselves behind corporate walls. They folded their tents and left. A clean bankruptcy just wasn't an option for us. It would have meant we lost everything.

Somehow we hung on. We completed development of a small close-knit community under that theme of self-reliance in close community in tough times. We had survived, while learning to live a lean life-style.

In hind-sight, I think all that experience was preparing me for what we are seeing now at a whole new level. Trust is at an all-time low. Fear, an all-time high. Chaos is the "order of the day". The political chasm between left and right, deep and wide. Everyone holding their breath in anticipation of AI decimating all jobs. It feels like we are still just at the beginning. In my darkest years, I learned that prep'ing with toilet paper, gardens and food storage weren't the most important things. Mental and spiritual resiliency is far more critical in times of great stress.

But in those dark times, I still had to pull myself out of a deep mental hole. I had built a guest house out of shipping containers next to our down-sized house. We had expected it would be a transitional house that would meet basic needs until we recouped some wealth.

We had also built a log cabin on our property for my aging mother so we could care for her. She passed, leaving it empty. We tried renting it out. There was no reasonable market for long term rentals in a little back-water town where there were few prospects for jobs. We discovered Airbnb and began rebuilding our nest egg. Slowly.

The first short-term rental of the guest house went to a single lady who stayed with us for a month. She could see I was struggling. She made some suggestions about "gratitude journaling". I had somehow missed that class when I got my MBA. It was foundational to a recovery that led to a much deeper exploration of meditation - for about a decade. It wasn't just life-changing. It was life-saving. I climbed out of my self-made hole. That wasn't enough. I aimed for heaven. Life purpose, joy, peace. With practice, it all came.

So why am I disclosing these deeply personal things to the world?

You need to know that I make no claims to being a guru of any kind. I've been to India a number of times, negotiating whole-country deals and managing the International Division for big American brands like Baskin-Robbins, Dunkin' Donuts, Papa John's and several others. But I never made it to the Himalayas to hang out with ascending masters and gurus.

Like my formal business education, I've found that authentic wisdom comes from real-world challenges that you figure out how to overcome. And then you do. Sometimes failing. Learning more from the trials and failures than from the easy successes. You learn what works and what doesn't. You learn about unfounded hype. You learn that some things work well, but only under certain conditions and not so much in others or they work for some people but not all.

We are all human. I had traveled the world, learning from different cultures and approaches to life. I learned that, at some level, we are all the same. At another, all different. Different challenges, strengths, weakness and experiences.

Many years ago, I lived in Japan for a couple of years and learned to speak Japanese. I had often heard the kotowaza (proverb) "all roads lead to the top of the mountain." That may be the thing that humanity holds in common whether we recognize it or not. But all roads are different even if they lead to the same destination. Each person's road, their life's journey, is different".

I brought that insight to my eclectic study of meditation. I found that there are a few consistent threads that run through every meditation tradition. Intention, Attention, Repetition for retention, Breath-work, and altered states of consciousness are constants. Outside of those there are a million ways to meditate, each one fitting the goals, purposes and individual strengths of the practitioner. And there are fallacies about meditation from would-be yogis that make it harder to do than it should be.

I've tried many. I trained under Paramahansa Yogananda's self-realization course. Became a certified hypnotherapist at Edgar Cayce's A.R.E. Practiced Zen meditation under now-deceased Buddhist monk, Shinzen Young. Attended week-long meditation retreats under Dr. Joe Dispenza where the focus was less on spiritual growth than on the neuro-science of meditation. Meanwhile studying everything I could get my hands on from the mystical modern founder of psychology, Carl Jung to Indian Yogis and philosophies of life like the Hero's Journey (The Hero of a thousand Faces) and University Based groups that channel ET's and document their findings over 30+ years.

Have I studied it all? Barely scratched the surface. The wisdom of the ancient Eastern mystics stretches back a thousand years before Christ. He too learned it and taught it.

What I can claim is that those whom I have introduced to the art and science of meditation leave with the comment, "that was life-changing".

And then it's up to each of them to practice it and to actually change their own life. Dr. Joe Dispenza often speaks of how the brain is plastic, repeating the phrase, "What fires together wires together" It's the brains equivalent of developing "muscle memory" through repetition that I learned endlessly practicing scales and arpeggios that form the basis of my ability to improvise on the saxophone even after 50 years of not practicing.

Before coming here, some said they had given up on meditation because they just couldn't stop the brain chatter. To which I tell them, "You missed the whole point." It's not about silencing your mind. It's about learning to discipline your mind. Silencing the mind is not only impossible, but unwise. The chatter is too valuable to silence. The gifts of peace, intuition and a disciplined mind are too great to miss.

Now, for the invitation:

Over the past couple of years, I have spoken to many of my guests about plans to begin doing meditation retreats.
I drafted an elaborate week-long curriculum. I was on the edge of announcing dates in the spring. I consulted former guests who had indicated a strong interest in attending. Everyone had conflicts with the open dates. I continued to work on modifications as time slipped by and the dates I had picked became filled in our accommodations with bookings.

I pivoted to 2-3 day weekends, as someone suggested, trying to squeeze a week's work into a couple of days. But weekends always fill up early and the schedule was cramped at best.

So, I took it to my own meditation session to contemplate and find a solution. I felt inspired to restructure again. A core theme for the retreats is "Make meditation accessible to everyone".

Here's the plan:
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The week-long course is experienced in one-day segments that can be strung together to fit your schedule. You can fit a one-day retreat into your plans even if you have booked accommodations for only one night. Follow up between sessions with private practice. Come back for the next learning and practice session at your leisure.

Book anytime and request your own personalized retreat. If it happens to coincide with another guest or there are multiple participants from your group, GREAT! We will combine them. Small groups make for great discussions where we explore stumbling blocks and what works in different situations for different people. Participants will be capped, for now, at twelve. Private session? Same price per person. You have my full attention.

Meditating below the Falls

Note: We will get an early morning start. So, an overnight on-site stay the night before is required. If you have already booked your accommodation on Airbnb, Hipcamp or VRBO, you can still reserve your place on the retreat from our website or just give me a call.

Click here for the course Summary and schedule for the introductory Retreat.