WILD & SACRED
A GUIDED EXPERIENCE OF SURRENDER AND RENEWAL FOR THE ENTREPRENEUR
Between Beaches | MacDonald Spit, Alaska
Wild & Sacred was a multi-day immersive experience created for entrepreneurs who needed space away from the constant demands of building, producing, deciding, and doing.
Set at a remote Alaska property accessible only by boat, the experience was intentionally designed around a simple idea: sometimes clarity doesn't come from thinking harder. It comes from changing the conditions around you.
MY ROLE
CONCEPT | EXPERIENCE DESIGN | CREATIVE DIRECTION | BRAND IDENTITY | BOTANICAL STYLING | FACILITATION | DIGITAL DESIGN
COLLABORATION
Created and facilitated with Lacey Eshleman of Ignite Consciousness
THE IDEA
Sometimes clarity doesn't come from thinking harder. It comes from changing the conditions around you.
Wild & Sacred began with a question: What might happen if we could take entrepreneurs away from the constant input of ordinary life long enough for them to hear themselves again?
Instead of creating another business retreat filled with information, we wanted to create space. Space for reflection, experimentation, conversation, solitude, creativity, and whatever might surface when the noise of life faded.
The intention was to help participants reconnect with their own ideas and instincts, explore what was no longer serving them, and make room for whatever wanted to come next. The experience was designed to engage more than the thinking mind, using environment, nature, food, creativity, movement, rest, conversation, and sensory experiences as different ways back into awareness.
The First Part of the Experience Was Leaving
Participants couldn't simply drive to Wild & Sacred.
They traveled to Homer, then crossed Kachemak Bay by boat to reach Between Beaches on MacDonald Spit. Once there, they were surrounded by water, mountains, cabins, beach, and weather, physically separated from the environments where their ordinary lives and businesses operated.
That transition was intentional.
The distance created a threshold between everyday life and the experience we were asking participants to enter. Before a prompt was answered or an exercise began, the process of getting there had already interrupted the familiar.
Sometimes changing perspective starts by physically changing where you're standing.
The Rhythm of the Experience
We didn't design Wild & Sacred as a series of workshops. We designed a rhythm.
Over the course of the experience, participants moved intentionally between community and solitude, reflection and creation, guidance and freedom.
Rather than filling every available hour, we considered when people needed stimulation and when they needed space to process it. Guided experiences were followed by opportunities to wander, rest, journal, explore, talk, make, eat, sit alone, or simply do nothing.
SPACE TO HEAR WHAT COMES NEXT
DESIGNED TO BE FELT
Taste. Touch. See. Feel.
We wanted people out of their heads and back into their senses.
Food wasn't simply catering. Nature wasn't simply scenery. Creative exercises weren't activities to fill time. Even solitude wasn't empty space between the "real" programming.
Meals, fire, water, flowers, texture, movement, meditation, writing, conversation, rest, and the landscape were all part of the experience.
We cooked and shared meals. Participants received thoughtfully assembled treat boxes. They explored the shoreline, gathered around the fire, worked with their hands, soaked in the environment, and had time when absolutely nothing was required of them.
The intention lived in the accumulation of those details.
We designed the pauses as intentionally as the programmed moments, leaving room for rest, solitude, spontaneity, and whatever surfaced in between.
MAKING AS A WAY OF THINKING
Participants were invited to create temporary botanical mandalas and three-dimensional mood studies using flowers, foliage, found natural materials, painted color studies, texture, and collected objects.
But the purpose wasn't simply to make something beautiful.
The exercise offered another way to process an idea or feeling before trying to explain it. Color, texture, form, composition, and intuition became tools for thinking.
There was freedom in the fact that the work didn't need to become a product. It could be rearranged, photographed, dismantled, or simply disappear.
Making became another way of listening.
The BrandTHE BRAND WAS PART OF THE EXPERIENCE
The experience began before anyone stepped onto the boat.
Wild & Sacred needed its own visual language, one that could begin setting the tone before participants arrived and continue through the physical experience itself.
I developed the identity around softened coastal color, botanical illustrations by Lacey, organic forms, restrained typography, photography, and tactile details inspired by the environment and the feeling we wanted to create.
That visual language carried through the identity, website, promotional materials, participant communications, workbook, botanical experiences, and physical details of the retreat.
The goal wasn't simply visual consistency.
The brand helped tell people how the experience was supposed to feel.
Wild & Sacred had a clear intention and structure, but there wasn't one prescribed way to experience it.
IDENTITY | ENVIRONMENT | FOOD | NATURE | FACILITATION | CREATIVE PRACTICE | SOLITUDE | COMMUNITY | CHOICE
Each element offered another point of entry.
Someone might find clarity while writing. Someone else might find it walking the beach, making something with their hands, sitting around the fire, sharing a meal, talking with another participant, or choosing to spend an afternoon alone.
Our job wasn't to determine which moment would matter.
Our job was to make room for many different moments to matter.
THE PARTICIPANT WORKBOOK
Part itinerary, part journal, part guide, the Wild & Sacred workbook traveled through the experience with each participant.
It offered context, prompts, practical information, and room to write, but it wasn't a set of instructions for arriving at a predetermined answer. Participants were encouraged to write in it, question things, follow what resonated, and leave behind what didn't.
The workbook became a physical record of an experience that belonged to each person individually.
CREDITS
WILD & SACRED LOCATION
Between Beaches | MacDonald Spit, Alaska
CONCEPT + EXPERIENCE DESIGN + CREATIVE DIRECTION + BRAND IDENTITY
Amber Lanphier
FACILITATION + EXPERIENCE DEVELOPMENT
Amber Lanphier + Lacey Eshleman
MEDITATION + ENERGY WORK + ILLUSTRATIONS
Lacey Eshleman | Ignite Consciousness
PHOTOGRAPHY
Kyndra Leahy