If you want a single high-potency transformational experience that makes you not only more different but also more useful, this is it. You become someone who moves toward problems rather than away, and a host that can react well in a crisis (given people are often trusting you with their lives). Beyond practical medical knowledge, this is valuable for experience designers because it's primarily pedagogical, experience design that reinforces learning. They drill core principles over and over, then put you in mock rescue scenarios to test what you've learned. This training shows you how to teach someone and then use experience design as a test, demonstrating how to reinforce learning through experiential scenarios.

An ibogaine treatment is simultaneously a deep psychedelic journey, a tool for measurable brain enhancement, and an exercise in compassion. A 2023 Stanford study with military veterans suffering from TBI demonstrated reliable cognitive enhancement across 22 metrics. Being in a journey with a diverse group is humbling and provides its own spiritual growth and fundamentally shifts your perspective on your own struggles. From an experience design perspective, Beōnd creates a space for healing that works for both populations. The experience is immersive from the moment you arrive. There are gratitude circles each morning to help you connect with others’ journeys, there are massage, acupuncture and other healing activities to support the work, and there is a period of digital detox to allow clear reflection.

Burning Man may be less accessible with higher ticket prices but the good news is that there is likely a regional version just around the corner. Not only is the transformative quality of "burning" well documented (including by research from Dr Molly Crockett at Yale), the benefits of joining a year round community are hard to quantify.

Cohort-based experiential learning creates conditions for lasting change. You're immersed socially, coming out with new skills, new self-understanding, and actual friends. The specific experience of the training matters. The one I did was a full-day immersion with yoga in the morning, studying during the day, and yin yoga in the evening. I particularly liked the mythopoetic approach to Chinese medicine and five elements theory. With a teacher training, you leave not only changed but certified to share the practice, turning personal transformation into capacity to serve others.

Being in a diverse group of men who are all working on themselves from different lived experiences can meaningfully alter stereotypes you didn't know you held. Beyond the weekend work itself, you're joining a global community. Sacred Sons creates a network that extends far past the retreat, turning a transformational experience into ongoing connection and support. From an experience design standpoint, Sacred Sons is an evolution of the Mankind Project, updated by facilitators who felt those gatherings could be updated for a younger generation. The format itself is the medicine: men's work as community building directly addresses the male loneliness epidemic by getting men together in person, off their phones, for cathartic experiences followed by lasting connections.

To be a potent facilitator, people must trust you. Sharing your personal narrative is one way to build that trust.

This course is a way to evolve how we embody and share our wisdom, telling a story both verbally and nonverbally that connects, brings people into the experience, into their bodies, into your energetic world, offering a new lens that enhances their lives.

This workshop incorporates the Alexander technique, moving like animals, freeing your voice, commanding the stage, owning the room, and taking people on a journey with your stories. This work has all of it. For some, this will be just the beginning, for others, it's iron sharpening iron.

Damanhur is worth exploring because it offers a radically different way of living, creating, and imagining community—so far outside normative culture that simply encountering it expands your sense of what is possible. What makes it powerful as a design reference is not any single ritual or structure, but the way an entire worldview is made livable: values are translated into architecture, myth into daily practice, and long-term intention into social systems that evolve over decades.

As a design principle, Damanhur demonstrates that transformation does not come from isolated experiences, but from coherent worlds—where symbols, spaces, rituals, governance, and economics reinforce one another. Its temples and social experiments act as a living provocation, inviting you to question inherited assumptions and experience an alternative worldview from the inside, not as a visitor, but as a temporary participant in a different reality.

Anyone who is on the East Coast or coming through New York must absolutely experience the epicness of Producer Mondays. If you want to learn about how to create an immaculate vibe combined with high excellence in performance, Producer Mondays is the apotheosis. Being in the venue itself is worth the price of admission; from the lighting, to the music, to the DJ, Producer Mondays transports you. The moment you walk in, you are prepared for excellence. And they do not disappoint. The organizer Ray Angry curates a massive ensemble of horn players, string players, vocalists, guitarists and drummers who have played with D'Angelo, Robert Glasper, performed at the GRAMMYs, and more. It will blow your mind and leave your body buzzing.

I was so impressed with the Jhourney Retreat design, it's completely unlike any other meditation retreat I've ever done. The entire format is designed to front-load the theory, and then help you design experiments that you can run for yourself to access these altered states of consciousness. The partner 'jhourneying' exercises are super creative and effective, and they're extremely good at collecting a lot of feedback from all of the participants and iterating with each retreat that they run.

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate" Carl Jung. Your presence has power. You just walking into the room has a field of energy that people are responding to. We've all seen someone walk into a room a feel a magnetism or repulsion. We've watched facilitators take chaos and with their presence either create a breakthrough or more chaos.

How do we work this, develop it, create awareness and transform what gets in the way of creating powerful containers? How do we honor our gifts and reclaim our power from the shadows? Horses hearts are 5 times the size of humans. As prey animals they pick up on your energy and tune into your shadow, see and respond to whats alive in your body that your not conscious of. With a skilled facilitator you can transform deep patterns in your system and evolve in your self understanding which leads to self development.

Singing With Nightingales is one of the few experiences in the world where humans are invited to witness—and gently take part in—a co-created encounter between human and more-than-human voices in the wild, helping restore relationship through shared presence, embodied listening, and care.

This place was born out of pure experience design artistry. Committed organizers transformed dilapidated buildings into opera houses and experiential, magical spaces. Old Cadillacs were buried in the ground to create the most unusual drive-in, projecting strange old movies under the desert sky. Neon signs returned to the lake. An upside-down house appeared. The entire space feels otherworldly and strange. It's nostalgic, decadent, and mysterious.

This is a true gypsy circus in the 21st century.

Joe Hudson and the team are extremely gifted at creating the conditions for both emotional safety but also surfacing patterns and ways that people keep themselves stuck without realising it. The schedule is extremely intense (more so than most retreats I've come across), and they are extremely creative at coming up with group and partner exercises to facilitate deep transformation.

This training gave my body a real sense of capability, which created emotional openness rather than chronic bracing. Now when I work with men expressing large emotions, my system stays steady. For designers, Protector 1 is a study in how to work ethically with fear, how to create honest feedback loops, and how to build real capacity rather than just catharsis.

I love the moments in facilitation when I reach a point where I truly don’t know what comes next. In those moments, the field begins to guide the process, revealing what wants to be seen and included beyond the limits of my own thinking.

Learning how to tune in, listen, and move with whatever emerges — without filtering everything through the mind — is one of the core foundations of great facilitation.

Family Constellations trains this capacity. It is a beautiful blend of deep personal healing and reconnection with our ancestors, and a powerful modality for cultivating awareness, intuition, spontaneity, and the use of space to sense, move, and explore energy.

The Magic Castle is magical in itself — a mysterious castle filled with hidden rooms and corridors, nonstop magic shows, magicians hanging out and eager to test their tricks on you, some of the best mentalist shows in the world that will make you question reality, and a very special pianist who plays even your most obscure requested songs.

But it’s not only the magic that makes this LA institution an extraordinary experience. It’s the secrecy. The feeling of exclusivity and mystery. The hidden corridors and corners. The small touches. The space design. The sense of being in a world of its own.

Don’t miss it if you’re in LA.

This experience is unique first and foremost because it takes immersive theater to a profound level, both in the depth of the texts and in how meta and thoughtfully inclusive the entire piece is.

It also pulls you into the story days before you attend, with strange instructions and “homework” to complete ahead of time.

Paired with a unique location that carries a cool underground feeling (the theater has operated out of an illegal space for years) and, more importantly, the creators’ deep commitment to psychomagic, this becomes a true masterpiece of immersive art.