Ring in the New Year at Rising Circle Ranch

This threshold deserves more than a countdown and a glass of champagne. Start the new year giving intention, reflection, and joy the space they deserve.

The holidays arrive, and between family, work, travel, and the usual December swirl, the time and energy you’d like to devote to what really matters to you can easily disappear. There’s barely room to hear yourself think, let alone sit with the memories, longings, and questions this season tends to stir up.

What do I most value? How do I want to live this year?

Then January arrives and the calendar resets. But a new year doesn’t do the inner work for you – even if part of you wishes it would. So we make a list, set some intentions, and then the things that matter most quietly slip back under everything else.

You want to meet the new year differently – giving yourself the time and space to look honestly at the year behind you and greet the year ahead with attention, curiosity, and joy.

Your best thinking doesn’t happen on a to‑do list, and your most meaningful living doesn’t come from a planner – it shows up when you slow down enough to listen.

Five winter days in Santa Fe to look back honestly, listen forward carefully, and cross into 2027 with something meaningful.

MEA Lead Facilitator Mary Hofstedt has spent years turning research and ritual into experiences that people don’t just remember, but quietly reorganize their lives around afterward. MEA CEO Derek Gehl brings decades of experience in changing course in a full, demanding life – and a clear sense of what it really takes to translate intention into a different way of living.

Together, they’ve created a five‑day, research‑informed, ritual‑rich New Year’s immersion that moves with intention from the year behind you to the one ahead.

You’ll begin by looking back. Through guided Inner Tracking and a simple life review, you’ll map the story of 2026 – not the highlight reel, but the true texture of the year: what stretched you, what sustained you, and what you’re still carrying that deserves to be set down.

Then you’ll listen forward. You’ll use practices that help you notice what’s genuinely calling you now – rituals like Burning & Blessing, Seven Directions, Awe Walks under the winter sky, and conversations that make it easier to hear your own inner wisdom.

From there, the week turns toward how you want to live in the year ahead. Drawing on Harvard’s Human Flourishing research, you’ll work with five core domains of midlife wellbeing and begin building simple, sustainable systems that support each one, so you leave with much more than resolutions you forget once regular life gets loud again.

All of it happens at Rising Circle Ranch – 2,600 acres of New Mexico high desert, where cold mornings give way to wide blue skies, trails wind through arroyos and ancient rock, and evenings end by the fire. It’s the kind of place where your shoulders drop on day one, the circle feels like a village, and your thinking finally has room to go somewhere new.

Mary Hofstedt

MEA’s Santa Fe Program Director & Facilitator Lead

Mary’s an experienced leader of mission-driven organizations and initiatives that benefit individuals and communities and strive to advance a more hopeful, caring, and connected world.

As a facilitator and strategic advisor, she’s coached teams and facilitated multi-year projects to transform communities, created and led training and dialogues across the country, and worked for 15+ years with research-practice bridging organizations including Challenge Success and the John W. Gardner Center, both Stanford University-affiliated research organizations.

Before joining MEA in 2024, Mary took a mid-career sabbatical to reflect on purpose, study Spanish, travel, and volunteer with whale shark research and conservation. She also serves as a Senior Advisor with Heartwise Learning, and works with both corporate and educational clients in strategic planning and values alignment. She’s thrilled to be based back in Santa Fe after a 22-year stint in the Bay Area.

Derek Gehl

MEA CEO

Derek Gehl is a serial entrepreneur, speaker, and author whose work has always been driven by a desire to help people transform their lives from the inside out.

After building one of the world’s early internet marketing companies, the birth of his first son in 2008 led him to redesign his life around what mattered most: being present with his family while continuing to build meaningful, values-aligned businesses. In the years that followed, his path evolved toward helping people in midlife pursue their entrepreneurial dreams and, from 2017 to 2024, creating successful natural health and longevity brands that supported people’s wellbeing in very practical ways.

By his late forties, Derek realized that what he missed most was direct human connection – the kind that happens when people come together to tell the truth about their lives and chart a different course.

That’s what he found, unexpectedly, at MEA’s Navigating Transitions workshop, where his initial skepticism about “midlife wisdom schools” gave way to a felt experience of intelligent, caring community and real, grounded change. That journey from skeptic to participant to CEO means Derek leads MEA not just as a strategist, but as someone who has personally walked through the questions and thresholds of midlife.

Today, Derek brings decades of experience in entrepreneurship, digital transformation, and wellness to MEA’s mission of reimagining midlife and building a vibrant global pro‑aging community. He’s especially interested in what it actually takes to translate intention into a different way of living in a full, demanding life – making him a natural fit for a New Year’s week devoted to honest reflection, clear choices, and sustainable practices for the year ahead.

This year, cross the threshold on purpose.

There's a version of January 1st where you wake up knowing – not hoping, not resolving, but genuinely knowing – what you're saying yes to this year, and what you're ready to leave behind.

That's what five days at Rising Circle Ranch can give you. Clear mornings, good company, honest reflection, and research-backed practices that hold up long after you've unpacked your bag.

The threshold is coming regardless. The only question is how you cross it.