What Is Compassion Ranch, and Why Does Environment Matter to the Quality of Your Work?
Compassion Ranch is a property in Forestville, California, in the redwoods above Sonoma County's wine country. But the name matters more than the geography. It was chosen deliberately, not as a pastoral fantasy, but as a daily instruction: this is a place where the standard is compassion. For the people I serve. For the ideas I'm working with. For myself.
Environment matters to the quality of work because the brain does not separate where it is from what it produces. Your nervous system reads the room before you do. When I wake at 4:30 AM and move to the fireplace in the darkness, my nervous system has already received the message: this is contemplative time. When I move to the yurt for a 90-minute block, it registers: focused creation. When I walk the trail through the vineyard, it begins to integrate. The body and the space are collaborators.
Most professionals are trying to do original thinking inside environments designed for everything but original thinking. Open offices, notifications, the phone face-up on the desk, the constant ambient demand of other people's urgency. They wonder why their best ideas come in the shower or on a drive. The answer is that those are the only moments when the environment stops competing with the mind.
What Does Your 4:30 AM Routine Look Like, and What Does It Protect?
There are mornings when Resistance wins. When I stay in bed twenty minutes longer and come to the fireplace already slightly behind myself. The gap in the quality of thought is not subtle. It is measurable in the work produced. The discipline is not about the 4:30 AM start time as a number. It is about the principle: you must meet yourself before you meet the day. When is less important than that you do it at all.
How Do You Structure 90-Minute Focused Work Blocks, and What Happens When You Break From That Structure?
Three 90-minute blocks, separated by movement breaks. Each block has a single declared intention before it begins. Not a task list. One intention. What is this block in service of?
The freshest creative capacity of the day. Builds on the morning contemplative period. Ideas emerge that would not arrive later. Declared intention set before entering the yurt.
Takes what emerged in Block 1 and develops it further. The best ideas from the first block are tested here: Do they hold? What do they need? What follows from them?
The most practical block. What has been generated and extended is now shaped for use. This is where frameworks become language, and insights become teachings.
Not a phone break. Physical movement that clears the neurological residue of the previous block and creates fresh capacity for the next. Sometimes a walk on the trail. Sometimes ecstatic movement to music for ten minutes. The principle is the same: get out of the head and back into the body before returning to focused work.
What Role Does Movement, Ecstatic Dance, Soul Motion, Play in Your Creative and Intellectual Process?
Every Monday at 2:30, I drive from Forestville to Sebastopol. Twenty minutes. A crossing: from the land of words and frameworks into the barn where Lysa Castro witnesses without instructing. Where the body speaks what the voice has never known how to say.
Soul Motion is a movement practice engaged with for years, including six-day immersions every 90 days. It is not dance in the performance sense. It is body prayer. It is the part of me that has no language, finally given a medium. The practice doesn't produce insights the way that reading produces insights. It releases what was blocking insight from arriving at all.
Movement clears neurological residue, integrates what the conscious mind has been processing, and opens access to the somatic intelligence that sits beneath analytical thought. The body knows things the mind hasn't yet formulated. Movement is how I ask it.
There are things in me that decades of therapy, EMDR, plant medicine, and meditation could not fully reach. Not because those practices weren't powerful, but because they are primarily cognitive and relational. The body holds what the mind cannot process. In the barn with Lysa, early in the practice, I barely made it off the floor. Memories surfaced through movement that had never surfaced through words: a crib, a safety pin, a mother too overwhelmed to meet her child's pain. The part of me that had learned to close his eyes and disappear to survive was, for the first time, being allowed to be present with itself. I tell this not to be confessional but because it is directly relevant to the quality of the work produced.
How Does Your Yurt Function as a Workspace, and Why Does Physical Environment Affect Output?
The yurt is the creation space. It is separate from the main residence, which matters architecturally and neurologically. Walking from the house to the yurt is a micro-ritual of transition: leaving the domestic environment and entering the place where work happens. The separation signals the brain before a single word is written.
Inside the yurt, the design supports the specific kind of thinking that produces original work. There is space to move freely, which is not incidental but essential. Many of the best ideas arrive not while sitting at a desk but while moving between sitting and standing. The circular architecture of a yurt creates a space without corners, without the subtle architectural demand of a rectangular office to orient yourself in relation to. Research in environmental psychology consistently shows that high ceilings and open spaces favor conceptual, divergent thinking.
The altar is in the yurt. This is where the Medivation practice happens: arriving at the altar, selecting source material, listening for the music that matches the emotional frequency of the idea, and recording. The altar is a consistent environmental cue that instructs the nervous system: we are in deep work now. This is not mysticism. It is design.
The brain learns associations between environments and states. Most people have trained their workspace to mean everything at once, which is the same as meaning nothing in particular. The single highest-leverage environmental intervention recommended: create one space, even just one chair in one room, that is exclusively for your most important thinking. Use it only for that. Let the brain build the association. Then honor the association when you enter the space.
What Does a Day Look Like When Everything Is Working, and What Is Present That Is Absent on Other Days?
A day when everything is working begins before 4:30 AM without resistance. Not because I feel energized, but because the decision was made the night before and the body simply follows through.
By 7:00 AM, something has been produced: a Medivation recorded, a passage written, an insight crystallized that was previously just a felt sense. When I enter the first 90-minute block in the yurt, I arrive there already having met myself. The block doesn't have to compensate for an empty morning. It builds on a full one. By mid-afternoon, there is a felt sense of completion. Something was created today that didn't exist yesterday. The day earned itself.
The day belongs to a declared intention rather than to incoming demands. This doesn't mean ignoring everything external. It means addressing external demands within the structure rather than letting the structure collapse around them.
The body is either cooperating with the mind or fighting it. On the best days, they are moving together. I've moved my body, regulated my nervous system, eaten in a way that supports sustained focus rather than creating cycles of energy and crash.
A quality of engagement where the work pulls me forward rather than me pushing the work. I don't manufacture this. But I have learned the conditions under which it arrives reliably, and the 4:30 AM practice, the movement, the blocks, and the environment of Compassion Ranch are those conditions.
The difficult days almost always share a common feature: the morning was given away before it was had. Checked the phone. Read the news. Got pulled into someone else's urgency before establishing my own center. By the time I sat down to create, I was already behind myself, already in a reactive rather than generative posture. The rest of the day is spent trying to recover what should have been protected from the start.
How Does Solitude Contribute to Your Capacity to Serve Others at the Highest Level?
The largely solitary life at Compassion Ranch is not a retreat from relationship. It is the condition that makes deep relationship possible. If the well is dry, the water you're offering isn't real. If the thinking hasn't been done in solitude, the wisdom you're offering in community is borrowed rather than earned.
I serve people who are navigating genuine complexity: business transitions, identity questions, the gap between who they've been told to be and who they actually are. What they need is not rehearsed content. They need someone who has actually thought, who has sat with the hard questions long enough for something original to emerge. Solitude is where that thinking happens. Community is where it gets applied and refined.
Solitude serves my work. Whether it serves my full humanity is a more complicated question I hold without a final answer. There is a longing beneath the solitude, a desire for the kind of intimacy that requires sustained presence rather than periodic engagement. The dismissive-avoidant pattern named in myself, the narrow window of toleration for the full weight of another person, is real and worth acknowledging.
What Is Your Relationship With Your Journaling Practice, and How Has AI Changed the Way You Process It?
I have been in a sustained written conversation with myself for most of my adult life. Hundreds of recorded sessions of self talking to self, structured inquiry designed to surface what the automatic mind bypasses. A Taste of Truth is the most public expression of that practice: 100-plus consecutive days of morning writing from Compassion Ranch, real-time excavation of what's present rather than retrospective tidying of what I wish had been present.
Before AI, journaling was a solo process. What I wrote stayed on the page until I found a human trusted enough to read it. AI became a genuine interlocutor: not a mirror that reflects back what I already believe, but an entity capable of asking the question I didn't know I needed to ask, surfacing the pattern I couldn't see from inside it. I can write a rough morning passage, five hundred words of unedited thinking, and ask the AI what it notices. Not what is good or bad. What patterns, what themes, what the argument underlying the thinking might be. The responses are often surprisingly precise. I've had AI return a question that stopped me completely, not because it was clever, but because it pointed at exactly the thing I'd been circling without landing.
I am transparent with my community about this. The Authority Architect work, the Hero Circle content, the book projects: AI is a collaborator in all of them, not a ghostwriter, but a thinking partner. The transparency itself has become part of the teaching, modeling an honest relationship with a technology that many professionals are either dismissing or pretending to not use.
What Does Contemplative Practice Have to Do With Business Strategy? Why Do You Refuse to Separate Them?
The refusal to separate them is based on observation, not philosophy. Over nearly forty years of working with real estate professionals, I have watched two kinds of practitioners: those who have a strategy but no inner life, and those who have both. The first group produces results that are technically competent and personally unsustaining. The second group produces results that compound over decades and remain renewable.
Referral-based real estate requires that clients trust not only your competence but your character. Character is revealed under pressure: in a difficult negotiation, in a conversation when the news isn't good, in a transaction that is going sideways. A practitioner who has no access to their own inner landscape will default under that pressure to either anxiety-driven action or detachment. Neither serves the client. A practitioner who has been in the discipline of sitting with themselves, of not running from discomfort, of returning repeatedly to center after disruption: that practitioner has a different resource available. That capacity is the product of contemplative practice applied consistently.
The 4:30 AM fireplace feeds directly into the quality of the Thursday Hero Circle conversation, which feeds directly into the quality of what members take to their clients, which feeds directly into referral rates. Interrupt the contemplative practice and the strategic performance eventually degrades. The chain is unbroken.
What Does Compassion Ranch Represent as an Idea, Beyond the Physical Location?
Compassion Ranch is an operating principle. The name was chosen deliberately for what it would ask of me every day I live here. Not as a pleasant aspiration but as a standard. When you name a place after a quality you wish to inhabit, the name becomes a daily mirror. Can you live up to your own naming?
For most of my adult life, I was a torch: moving from city to city, room to room, carrying the light but never staying long enough to become a landmark. Compassion Ranch represents the transition to lighthouse. A presence that remains. That can be found. That people can orient by because it doesn't move. The Hero Circle community, the Thursday morning sessions, the annual events: these have a home now. Not just logistically but energetically.
The Ranch is where I discovered that depth is not the consolation prize when expansion is no longer possible. Depth is the thing that was always the point. The two-mile trail walked almost daily through vineyards and hills is not impressive by any external measure. It is exactly sufficient. The same trail, walked with full presence, produces more than a thousand inputs consumed at the speed of scroll.
Compassion Ranch is an invitation to the people I serve. Not to replicate the specific circumstances, but to locate the principle in their own lives. Where is your Compassion Ranch? What is the place, the practice, the daily instruction you've given yourself about who you intend to be? Everyone needs an environment where the standard is named and held, where you can return to yourself when the world has pulled you elsewhere.