Circle of 12 People • Exclusive to MEA
Transformational Listening™
Let Life Speak to You!
Can’t make April? Join us for the October session instead.
Gail Larsen
Author, Transformational Speaking | Speaking Coach to Bestselling Authors & Renowned Leaders | Founder of Real Speaking®
What if life didn't require more effort or figuring out – just deeper listening?
What if clarity doesn’t come from striving or strategy, but from allowing, noticing, and letting life show you what’s ready to unfold?
Most of us were taught to think our way through – planning, analyzing, anticipating every next step.
For a long time, that worked.
It kept things moving and gave us a sense of control.
Until it didn’t.
The world has gotten louder.
Every scroll offers another framework, another expert, another certainty. You’ve done the work: read the books, taken the workshops, learned the language of growth.
Still, your own guiding signals can be hard to hear.
Not because they disappeared – but because they rarely shout.
Listening, as we practice it here, isn’t solemn or serious –
it’s curious, alive, and often surprisingly playful.
When we rush past what’s stirring inside or tune out the quiet truth beneath someone else’s words, we start missing what matters most: the nuance, the signals, the openings for connection, and the life that's been waiting for us all along.
When listening gets lost.
Too much information crowds out our own knowing. Decisions feel heavier, and we look outside ourselves for reassurance before trusting what we already sense.
The questions keep coming:
You're not missing knowledge. You're missing access to the wisdom life is always offering – wisdom you can hear when you listen.
Jennifer Schaefer, Healer & Program Director
What you may be longing for now.
When thinking isn’t helping anymore, it’s because it wasn’t informed by listening.
When listening changes everything.
That’s what happened to MEA CEO Derek Gehl.
For most of his life, Derek trusted his mind to steer him – planning, analyzing, thinking his way through every challenge. It worked for a while, but when the big questions came, logic alone fell short.
Then he sat in a circle with Gail Larsen.
She invited him to listen differently: to his body, to timing, to the natural world, to conversations that arrived like messengers at just the right moment – to the languages of life he’d spent years overriding.
“I never realized how much I was missing,” Derek says now. “Listening isn’t just about the mind. There are other instruments I can use in business and life. I’m tuning into a deeper frequency now, and it’s changing how I lead, love, and make decisions.”
When we begin to listen –
to ourselves,
to what’s unspoken,
to what the body knows before the mind does –
choices feel clearer.
Relationships deepen and we start hearing the truth that can open an entirely new path.
That shift from thinking to listening is what Gail Larsen teaches.
“There is a voice inside you that doesn’t use words. Listen.”
– Rumi
The playful & powerful work we’ll do together
Over four days with Gail, you’ll enter a Listening Playground™ – a living field of exploration where you slow down enough to hear what’s been waiting beneath the noise.
You'll explore four dimensions of listening:
Listening to Yourself
Where are you in your story now? What thread has guided you all along? What is your body asking you to notice, release, reclaim, or trust? How do you recognize your “Holy No” and your “True Yes”? How do you know you know what's true?
Listening to Life
When we set aside busy minds, new forms of guidance emerge – synchronicity, intuition, timing, dreams, symbols, and inner knowing. Here you’ll begin to notice the ways life is already speaking to you.
Listening to Each Other
Here we learn an ageless way of addressing conflict that awakens possibility rather than debate. Presence becomes medicine, and conversation turns to alchemy.
Listening Together
When a group aligns around shared inquiry, something extraordinary happens. Individual insight becomes collective wisdom. Through heart coherence, we hold a big question related to our shared future and listen together for what wants to emerge. What we discover is what none of us could access alone – a new story to guide us collectively.
What's available in this field is truly beyond words.
What these four days look like
You'll be part of a co-created Listening Playground™ with shared inquiry, ritual, story, silence, and play. Insight arrives through invitation and experience, not effort.
You’ll listen through practices that include:
We take the work seriously, but not ourselves.
There’s even a Holy Fools chair for those moments when we notice we’ve climbed back into our heads (noticing is half the work).
Holy Fools are dangerously alive and free enough to notice what we’d miss if we were trying to be right. We trust curiosity more than conclusions, because curiosity keeps us in relationship with what’s still becoming.
This Workshop Is For You If…
This workshop may not be the right fit if...
What you’ll gain from Transformational Listening™
A clearer relationship with your inner blueprint
See the thread that’s been running through your life, how it’s been trying to get your attention, and what it’s asking of you now – in your choices, your work, and the way you serve others.
Tools for listening to life in real time
Play with synchronicity, body signals, resonance, and surprising openings as practical guidance for choices, courageous conversations, and next steps, including the way you lead, coach, facilitate, or hold space for others.
Greater trust in your inner guidance
Recognize the difference between fear, habit, and true knowing so you can stop overriding what you feel and start acting on what you sense, whether you’re making personal decisions or guiding clients, teams, or communities.
More courage to follow what’s true
Build the capacity to follow what you know, even when it leads beyond the familiar, and bring that same courage into your life so the people you support feel safer telling the truth and discovering a new story of their own.
“Join me on the Listening Playground! Fun and play aren't frivolous – they keep us alive to life with curiosity. (Why else would I still be at this at 80?) When we play, we restore flow. When we listen, we remember how to belong."
~ Gail Larsen, aka
Provocateur of Possibilities
Meet
Gail Larsen
Modern Elder Extraordinaire | Award-Winning Author | Founder of Real Speaking® | Former Executive Vice President of the National Speakers Association
Gail Larsen is an internationally respected teacher and facilitator known for her original work in authentic expression and Transformational Speaking™. Fast Company calls her approach “transforming your relationship to your voice via the deepest stirrings of your soul.” For more than 30 years, she’s worked in intimate circles and one-on-one, helping people listen for what’s true, live in alignment with who they are, and speak from that place with clarity and courage.
Her award‑winning book, Transformational Speaking: If You Want to Change the World, Tell a Better Story, has guided thought leaders, entrepreneurs, bestselling authors, and members of Oprah’s Super Soul 100 to discover and deliver their authentic message.
MEA’s Kari Cardinale recently described Gail as “simultaneously a master teacher, laser-focused listener, keeper of ancient wisdom, and comedian.” That rare combination shapes learning spaces where insight and laughter coexist, seriousness loosens its grip, and people feel both supported and challenged to show up honestly.
Gail also founded Holy Fools Day – an annual celebration honoring those willing to follow truth over convention and wisdom over certainty.
Transformational Listening™ is the natural evolution of her life’s work, cultivating the capacity to listen when certainty no longer works and curiosity becomes the way through. Together with Transformational Speaking™, it offers a grounded, soul-centered way of navigating what’s emerging now to the discovery of a new story.
Supported by the MEA team
Step into transformation in the high desert
Rising Circle Ranch | Santa Fe, USA.
Our spectacular Santa Fe campus is located on an upscale regenerative ranch featuring traditional Pueblo architecture and nearly 2,600 acres of wildlife, hiking trails in the arroyo, and awe-inspiring beauty. Close to historic Santa Fe, an artisan’s mecca.
PLUS: Gourmet from-scratch meals, snacks, and drinks featuring locally sourced ingredients, made by our in-house chefs
Time with the ranch horses
The horses at Rising Circle Ranch are part of your experience, offering a different kind of wisdom – they listen to what's beneath the surface and mirror back what we might not yet see in ourselves.
You'll spend time with them in ways that support the listening work: presence, attunement, noticing what emerges when we meet another being without an agenda.
The horses know this 2,600-acre landscape of wildlife habitats, arroyo trails, petroglyphs, and high desert vistas. Being in their presence becomes part of the listening playground.
Your workshop also includes:
What if the answer isn't out there, but in here?
Your new story awaits.
We'll play, pray, create, and listen as though the future depends on it.
Because it does.
“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us,
long before it happens.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Book your spot today
Transformational Listening™
Can’t make April? Join us for the October session instead.
MEA is the exclusive home of Gail’s Transformational Listening™ and Transformational Speaking™ programs
Longtime teacher and guide Gail Larsen invites you into the discovery of what becomes possible when you stop trying to figure things out – and let life show you what’s ready to unfold.
Please review our cancellation policy in the FAQ below.
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes this different from other workshops?
Many programs try to give you more tools for thinking, planning, or fixing your life. Transformational Listening invites you into a different way of knowing altogether – where you learn to listen to your body, your inner signals, the land, synchronicity, dreams, and the people around you as “languages of life” that are already guiding you.
Instead of another step-by-step curriculum, you enter a co-created Listening Playground: four days of shared inquiry, ritual, story, silence, and play where insight arrives through experience, not effort. You’re not asked to perform; you’re invited to notice what becomes possible when you stop trying to figure everything out and let life show you what’s ready to unfold.
Do I need experience with any particular practice?
Not at all. You don’t need a background in meditation, journey work, ritual, or any specific modality. All you need is genuine curiosity and a willingness to be surprised.
Across the week, you’ll be gently guided into practices like embodied listening, time on the land, labyrinth walks, automatic writing, ancestor and story work, and partner dialogues. Each practice is invitational and paced so you can participate in a way that feels authentic and manageable for you.
What if I'm not sure I'm "intuitive" or "spiritual" enough?
You don’t have to identify as intuitive, spiritual, or “woo” to be here. Many participants describe themselves as practical, analytical, or skeptical, and discover that they’ve been listening to life all along – they just didn’t have language for it.
This immersion is about learning to trust the very human ways you already receive guidance: body sensations, timing, patterns, images, emotions, and the conversations that arrive at just the right moment. You’ll have room to explore all of that without pressure to believe anything you don’t.
Will I have to share personal things with the group?
You’ll be part of a small circle of 12 people where depth and honesty are welcome, but nothing is forced. There will be invitations to share what you’re noticing, what you’re experiencing in your body, and how life is speaking to you, always at a level that feels right for you.
The group agreements prioritize confidentiality, non‑fixing, and presence over advice‑giving. You’re listened to, not analyzed. People often report feeling both “gently revealed” and profoundly respected.
Do you recommend travel insurance?
We highly recommend purchasing travel insurance to protect your investment in this experience. Travel insurance can cover unforeseen illness, travel complications, flight delays or cancellations, and other emergencies that might prevent you from attending. Each participant is responsible for selecting coverage that meets their individual needs and circumstances.
Getting quotes: We recommend the website SquareMouth, which allows you to compare multiple travel insurance providers in one place.
What is your cancellation policy?
Because we commit one of only 12 spaces for you, tuition payments are non-refundable.
If an emergency should arise, your tuition may be applied to another program with Gail Larsen within 12 months with a $500 rescheduling fee.
Still deciding or have questions?
Connect with our helpful team of Advisors
Our Advisors are all MEA alumni who can offer genuine insights into our programs. They’re passionate about helping you finding the right fit to make your next chapter the best one.
Daniel Booz
Lucas Erie
Leslie Bartlett