I opened my eyes about halfway through the Japanese sound bath. Lee Johnson, a 65-year-old rancher and dead ringer for the actor Sam Elliott, was tiptoeing around the room in his white tube socks, ever so gently ringing a small bell at various distances from the heads of my fifteen classmates, who were lying on yoga mats in a circle, deep in meditation. Johnson, who normally wears work boots and a white hat with his creased Wranglers and handlebar mustache, had been doing this for a good thirty minutes already, working his way through a progression of bells with different tones until landing on this one, which combined several chimes to produce a cascade of treble notes that evoked a soft patter of rain.
I’d come here, to the Modern Elder Academy, a so-called midlife wisdom school that opened this summer on a sprawling ranch outside Santa Fe, partly because I don’t typically go for things in the self-help realm and wanted to challenge my prejudice. I also legitimately wanted some guidance. And now here I’d gone and broken the spell by looking.
I first heard about MEA a few years ago from a friend, a busy New York media CEO who’d attended a retreat at the organization’s other campus, on a Baja beach near Todos Santos, Mexico, and come back with a lightness I’d never seen in him. When I learned that MEA’s founder, a famous hotelier and part-time Texan named Chip Conley, was opening a second campus just one state over from me in New Mexico, I took it as a sign. I had just turned fifty and given up any claim I still had to youth. I was a divorced dad with creaky joints, two jobs, and little time for contemplation. I signed up for one of the first weeklong retreats—Navigating Transitions—and showed up in July with equal parts skepticism and commitment.
It was day three when I opened my eyes and saw the yoga cowboy in his socks. He’d led us on a few mindfulness activities in the preceding days and told us stories of his motorcycle adventures up and down the West Coast, working on ranches, and river-guiding and communing with Native American spiritual leaders. Something about the socks—the kind that come in a sheaf of two dozen at Costco—pierced the mystery of him for me. I closed my eyes again and feigned meditation for another twenty minutes. When we all eventually sat up, one of my classmates asked Johnson where he’d gotten the beautiful bells, surely hoping for an exotic story about a Kyoto temple, or at least an Alaskan campground. “I bought them online,” Johnson said.
I had just begun to fully believe in MEA’s transformative powers, as if Conley had channeled some kind of New Mexico magic into his hospitality venture. The strangers in my group, whose ages spanned from fortysomething to seventysomething, had already shared some of our greatest dreams and fears. There was a young start-up founder from New York looking for human connection, a retired Colorado architect making the transition to painting, a couple of educators from Washington state about to ditch their jobs and travel the world. We’d listened together in awe as a thunderstorm echoed its way across the landscape at dinner one night, and then watched a double rainbow arc across a purple sky. We’d begun to call each other compadres, as MEA suggested. Now the most trivial detail had pulled me out of my trance. I had more to learn.
About twenty miles south of Santa Fe, U.S. Highway 285 crests a hill, and the vast Galisteo Basin opens ahead, a sweeping plain of high desert scrubland guarded by mountains on the horizon in every direction. MEA occupies the center of it all, on a 2,600-acre plot known as the Rising Circle Ranch, where a jagged ridgeline bisects the landscape and stands of cottonwood trees shade the arroyos.
Conley, who made his name in the travel business when he founded a chain of boutique hotels in the eighties named Joie de Vivre Hospitality and later sold it to a Hyatt Hotels heir, bought the Rising Circle in 2021. After exiting Joie de Vivre, he’d taken a job mentoring the young founders of Airbnb and helped them turn their couch-surfing business into a hospitality juggernaut. The experience led him to write a book, Wisdom @ Work: The Making of a Modern Elder. He wrote the New York Times–bestselling Emotional Equations in 2012, and had been a mentor to other leaders over the years, including a young Gavin Newsom, now California’s governor, and the Texas hotelier Liz Lambert, whose Hotel San José on Austin’s South Congress Avenue was inspired by Conley’s first motel in San Francisco. Conley himself had been coached in business by another Texas icon, Herb Kelleher. He wrote the Southwest Airlines founder a letter asking for advice when he first started Joie de Vivre at age 26, and the two kept up a correspondence that lasted a decade.
Conley’s post as resident wise man at Airbnb came shortly after a tumultuous series of personal crises. He’d lost five male friends to suicide in the span of two years before he sold his hotel company, and he almost died himself after a cut on his leg went septic. “I was feeling a lot of the things people sometimes feel at midlife,” he remembers. “Like, wow, death is closer to me, and I feel disappointed in myself in certain ways.” He calls it “a dark night of the ego,” and it led him to start reading academic research on midlife—of which there wasn’t a ton.
The average American lifespan today is thirty years longer than it was in 1900, Conley learned, so there’s simply not a lot of precedent in human history for people to be in their fifties and have as much living left to do as they did when they first entered adulthood. From research by Yale’s Becca Levy, Conley learned that people who view aging as a positive can actually gain years of life. From Stanford’s Phil Pizzo, he learned that being able to define one’s purpose in life leads to greater satisfaction. It all added up to a great argument for dreaming big in his next chapter.
One day while he was running on the beach in Baja, where he had bought a house, Conley had an epiphany, or what he calls a “Baja aha”: Why are there no midlife wisdom schools? He was still at Airbnb at the time, but he got to work and opened the first MEA retreat center in 2018 just down the beach from his Baja house, in a whitewashed beachside compound with red roof tiles and bougainvillea climbing the walls. He designed a curriculum that blended the scientific research he’d been reading with some mystical rituals and self-help aphorisms. Media attention from the likes of Brené Brown, Jenna Bush, and Tim Ferriss ensued, and the idea of reframing midlife began to gain an eager audience.
When Airbnb went public in 2020, Conley was suddenly not just rich, but Silicon Valley rich. He parted with the company shortly thereafter and started spending more time at a home he’d bought in Austin that year. The MEA expansion to Santa Fe began almost immediately. A historic adobe building transformed into a library, living room, and classrooms, and work began on a new pueblo-revival structure to house 22 guest rooms. Conley hired a chef, Krista Steinhauer, who previously owned the beloved Marfa mainstays Stellina and Food Shark, and a director of operations, Sarah Bolen, who previously ran several of Liz Lambert’s properties in Austin and Marfa, including the San José and El Cosmico.
Conley, who at age 63 maintains a kind of boyish curiosity, hopes the property will be a draw for Texans in particular, just as the Baja campus draws a disproportionate number of Californians. More than a quarter of visitors to Santa Fe come from Texas already, and the state’s large urban population makes it by far the greatest nearby hub of busy professionals—MEA’s ideal guests.
Conley’s two cofounders at MEA, former professional snowboarder Christine Sperber and tech veteran Jeff Hamaoui, take turns with him facilitating retreats, and occasionally they have the help of well-known authors and spiritual leaders, such as Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert (her session was on “awakening magic”), filmmaker and skateboard entrepreneur Stacy Peralta (“radical transitions”), and activist Lynne Twist (“the soul of money”). The first retreat at the Santa Fe campus featured the musician and activist Michael Franti. The Christian mystic Richard Rohr led a session the week after I left.
Sperber led my session, along with several other employees, including Johnson. The mornings began with cowboy yoga and meditation, followed by an hour of circle time, where everyone passes around a pockmarked piece of cholla wood and, when the stick comes to them, spends a few minutes talking about whatever’s on their mind. The compadres talked openly about their struggles with aging bodies, cancer recovery, career change, divorce, grief, empty-nesting, retirement, and more. They admitted to loneliness and lacking purpose. They talked about feeling despair for the future of the country and even humanity.
I tend to keep my guard up with strangers, and talk therapy has always felt self-indulgent to me. But in a room full of people sharing their innermost thoughts, the most awkward thing would be not to join them. As the week went on, I talked more and more openly about my failed relationships and resistance to authority, and about the times I’ve chosen stability over risk and then—surprise, surprise— that I felt like I was in a professional rut. We were supposed to say “I am complete” as we finished sharing and handing the cholla to the next person, but that’s where I couldn’t bring myself to go along with the ritual. “That’s all for now,” I’d say.
Every day also included several hours of class time. After getting everyone to loosen up with a dance session to Madonna or Beyoncé, Sperber would lead the compadres in a discussion of concepts such as establishing a growth mindset or finding flow—the kinds of pop psychology tropes that I usually tune out but that have plenty of backing by empirical research. I found myself nodding along and diligently taking notes.
Much of what the MEA curriculum does is try to reframe life events from negatives to positives—often with a little clever wordplay. A failure is a learning opportunity or a good first try. Worried about imposter syndrome? Try calling it explorer syndrome. And a pileup of wrenching midlife changes isn’t a crisis at all, but a midlife chrysalis—a transitional pupa state from which I would, if all went as hoped, emerge as a beautiful butterfly.
About halfway through the week, Sperber announced it was time for one of MEA’s signature rituals. On a piece of paper, each of us was to write the aspect of ourselves that we intended to shed. Then, one by one, we’d cast our papers into a fire and announce to the group what was replacing it, whereupon we’d be fitted with a handsome metal bracelet. It sounded straightforward when she explained it, but then I couldn’t figure out what to write on the paper. Something about my personal relationships? Something about my career? Did I have to choose just one? I thought the point of being here was to navigate the pileup of issues I faced. Was there some underlying cause I should be casting into the fire—and if so, what should I do if I hadn’t yet identified it?
I tried to explain my quandary to Sperber, and one of the compadres, a soul-searching retired Microsoft executive, said he was struggling with roughly the same thing. Sperber told us essentially that it was up to us to figure it out—which made perfect sense but didn’t solve my immediate problem. I ended up writing something about being more entrepreneurial in my career, but it didn’t feel authentic.
In the occasional windows of solo time I had to reflect on what I was trying to accomplish here, I’d retire to the plush bed in my otherwise tastefully restrained room (Saltillo tile floors, geometric textiles, a handsome dark armoire). But the days were usually packed front to back with group activities. We spent an afternoon meeting the horses that live on the ranch and learning about equine wisdom. We hiked to the ridge early one morning and took in the enormity of the landscape. Thanks to a few rainy few weeks before we arrived, the desert was uncommonly green, punctuated by chollas blooming an electric magenta. We gorged ourselves on Steinhauer’s family-style meals—a mole that was somehow intensely rich and light at the same time, chile relleno, immense salads, and fresh pastries and whipped honey butter.
One night after listening to Johnson tell stories and sing Willie Nelson songs while everyone else drank wine and palomas, somebody produced a portable speaker and played an eighties hair-band song. When one of the compadres, a social worker from San Diego, sank to her knees and started playing her best metal air guitar, a handful of us who hadn’t yet wandered off to bed cheered her on. A law-firm controller from San Antonio started air drumming, and one song bled into an hour-long session of middle-aged broken souls acting like goofy kids together.
Talk to anyone at MEA about its name and they avoid the E word: elder. It started with Conley’s instinct for reframing and wordplay; he wanted to pull the word away from its old-people association and instead emphasize its more positive connotations around being learned and respected. It’s a lot to ask. If you’re trying to build an exciting destination, naming it for the root of the word “elderly” doesn’t help. Most of my compadres were there for the association with another word: Conley’s last name. They’d read one of his books, or knew him by reputation in the business world, and wanted to absorb some of his magic. His seventh and most recent book, Learning to Love Midlife, is especially relevant.
Conley’s presence looms large over the campus, even when he’s not there. He was halfway around the world, in Iceland, during my retreat, but people who’d never met him talked about him as if they were staying in his home. At one point we essentially were: His ranch house, atop a hill on the far side of the property, flanks a pool with a commanding view; my compadres and I spent an afternoon there swimming.
When I met Conley, who arrived at the end of my week, he made a point to say he’s careful not to position himself or other MEA leaders as gurus or people who have all the answers. Rather, he considers himself a “social alchemist” or a “mixologist of people”—and therein lies the key to MEA’s success. A happy workforce and company culture had been the heart of Conley’s hotel chain—a business philosophy he’d learned from Kelleher’s Southwest. After selling that company he took a year to study what makes different kinds of festivals work around the world, and came upon the term “collective effervescence,” coined by the social theorist Émile Durkheim. It’s the feeling of togetherness that occurs when people coalesce around a thought or action at a specific moment—a whole audience singing along at a concert, say, or a group of middle-aged people playing air guitar.
MEA’s retreats are an attempt to manufacture that feeling: the rituals, the family meals, the moments of collective awe in the landscape. The cast of characters Conley has assembled is built to be eccentric and inspire guests to embrace their own eccentricities. In Baja, for example, his staff includes an expert in West African shamanism. When MEA was hiring for a land manager in Santa Fe, Johnson was the least obvious of the candidates, Conley told me, but the fact that the cowboy could also be a mindfulness guide and “one of the resident weirdos” made him a great hire.
Conley plans to expand rapidly in Santa Fe. After more than three years of design and construction, the retreat center opened this June on the ranch. Two months later, a second compound opened a few hundred yards away on the ranch, this one geared toward corporate retreats. A spa between the two areas will come next, and then he plans to turn an old Catholic seminary he bought on Santa Fe’s Museum Hill into an event space.
Conley doesn’t do anything lightly. But in building MEA he is also operating with the urgency of somebody battling stage three prostate cancer. It’s a subject that his guests whisper about but which he discusses openly, because it’s the exact sort of pivotal life moment on which he’s based this business. “When people ask me how I’m doing, my favorite way to answer is, ‘I’m raw and imperfect,’ ” he told me as we walked his favorite trail on the ranch, through the badlands along the arroyo. “And that feels so good to say, because I am raw and imperfect.”
So am I, I thought. I wasn’t miraculously fixed after my week at MEA. And I’ve struggled to express the insights I picked up in words that don’t sound like the kind of stock therapy phrases I’d been skeptical of to start: cultivate community, give yourself permission to fail, practice active listening. But I wear my metal bracelet every day, and the idea that I’m starting a new chapter armed with fifty years of life lessons feels exciting. “The difference between routine and ritual is the willingness to be altered,” Johnson told us at one point.
Several weeks after I got home from MEA, Conley wrote online that he’d gotten some bad news about his cancer. It was a more virulent strain than his doctors had previously understood, and he likely won’t make it another ten years. The post prompted an outpouring of support from his vast network of friends and acolytes, and he followed up with a vow to “hold nothing back, walk away with no regrets.”
People pay to read Conley’s books and seek his counsel for good reason. But when I try to imagine myself back in Galisteo now, I still can’t shake the picture of Lee Johnson in his socks. I imagine him at his kitchen table, at the end of a long day, googling for a good price on Japanese bells. And I see now, of course the resident yoga cowboy weirdo is also as real and regular as the rest of us. I might not be complete. I might not be a butterfly. But my eyes are open.
A weeklong retreat costs $4,000 to $6,000. About half of attendees get financial aid that ranges from discounts to full scholarships provided by an affiliated nonprofit with funding from alumni.
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