Winter Leadership Pilgrimage · Northern Mongolia
For leaders who want to meet themselves at the edge
14 days · February 11–24, 2027 · Ulaanbaatar, East Taiga & Lake Khuvsgul
This is for people who feel a call toward a leadership that is embodied, honest, and deeply aligned with what matters.
Fourteen days north, toward the Siberian border
For fourteen days in February we travel north through Mongolia toward the Siberian border. We are traveling to a geographic edge in order to encounter something of our own.
Winter here is extreme. Temperatures fall far below freezing. We cross the frozen surface of Lake Khuvsgul with people who know how to read the ice by sound and pressure, then travel into the taiga to spend time with hunters and reindeer herders who have learned not simply to survive these conditions but to create a home inside them.
We meet Buddhist teachers, shamans, and holders of living traditions shaped by relationship with land, ancestors, community, and forces beyond individual control.
In this environment, presence is not an abstraction. The body has limits. Weather changes. Ice moves. Other people are needed. There is something here for our own moment: how do we make a home in the intensity of today?
Departure. Threshold. Encounter. Return.
The old playbook is answering a question the world has stopped asking
Ecological instability, accelerating technology, geopolitical volatility, social fragmentation. One weather system rather than four storms, and the consequences of decisions made by people with power now travel further than ever.
Much of modern leadership has been organized around mastery. There are limits to what can be controlled, and for many of us the shift this moment asks for cannot be reached through another framework. We have to meet our own edge.
What this is not
This is not a test of endurance
It is not about conquest, and it is not about manufacturing hardship. We are creating a safe and carefully held encounter supported by experienced local guides and facilitated processes.
There will be challenges. There will also be silence, conversation, hot springs, stillness, beauty and care.
The intention is not to overwhelm ourselves. It is to explore our edge and expand our capacity.
Hunting, and the questions it opens
There is a hunting element to this journey, and it is not a hunting trip. The distinction matters enough that we want to be clear about it before you decide.
We learn from Mongolian hunters what hunting means to them, and what it is to live in relationship with the animals, the land and the natural world. There is instruction in tracking, in reading terrain, in traditional and practical skills, and in the safe handling of firearms. Permits are in place.
There may be opportunities to take part in an actual hunt, and it is possible that someone takes an animal. It is not expected of anyone, and it is not the point.
The point is closer to this. What feels right, and what feels wrong, for you? What does it mean to hold power in relationship with life? What does it mean to stand in protection of life, and to recognize that protecting life can sometimes mean taking it?
Sitting with those questions is part of the journey. It belongs to the same thread as everything else here: a more intimate relationship with life, rather than one held at the distance of control or abstraction.
The inner journey
The outer edge gives us a place to meet the inner one
Leadership can activate some of our deepest human material: our relationship to power, recognition, ambition, belonging, control, responsibility, and the desire to be seen. It can reveal our fear and our defenses, our wounds, and the places where service becomes entangled with our own unmet needs.
So there is a healing dimension to this pilgrimage. An invitation to meet our own shadow around power and leadership. To understand what drives us and what we defend against. To examine our relationship with visibility, authority and control, and to tell the difference between service and the need to be needed.
Through somatic practice, facilitated inquiry, and ceremony, we make space for what usually stays beneath the surface to become more conscious. Not to perfect ourselves, but to become more available. To host greater intensity, to exercise power with more awareness, to hold responsibility without becoming more defended, and to reconnect with the deeper purpose beneath achievement.
The invitation is to become more capable of serving life.
How the Journey Unfolds
From the capital into the far north
The journey moves from Ulaanbaatar into the remote landscapes and communities of northern Mongolia.
We travel into the East Taiga for a homestay immersion with Tsaatan reindeer-herding families, sharing daily life, learning about reindeer herding, and living the rhythms of winter in one of Mongolia’s most remote regions. We spend time with the Darhad community and learn from shamans and other leaders whose lives and traditions have been shaped by this land.
With instruction from local hunters, we learn practices shaped by generations of living within this environment and by an intimate knowledge of its animals, weather and terrain.
We cross the frozen expanse of Lake Khuvsgul…
and make our way toward the warmth and restoration of natural hot springs.
The landscape and wisdom of Mongolia become part of the container itself, and a co-facilitator in the process.
Your Facilitators
Brandt and Bjoern
We have each moved through periods of descent and reorientation that changed our understanding of leadership, healing and transformation. Our own lives have brought us into questions of power, purpose, service and identity, and what it means to lead from a place deeper than achievement or control.
We do not offer this journey because we have resolved these questions. We are walking them ourselves. We offer it because we believe these questions deserve spaces large enough to hold them.
In Collaboration With…
local guides, elders, and community members.
The Land as Facilitator
The land is not a backdrop. It actively shapes the experience — in a slower, quieter, and deeply relational way.
What’s Included
- All accommodation, including homestays with Tsaatan reindeer-herding families
- Most meals and transport within Mongolia
- Experienced local guides and winter travel support
- Hunting instruction, and the crossing of frozen Lake Khuvsgul
- Shamanic ceremony, and teachings with artists and spiritual teachers
- Somatic practice, facilitated inquiry and group integration
- Hot springs and cultural experiences throughout the journey
Not included List
- International airfare to and from Mongolia
- Travel and emergency evacuation insurance (required)
- Personal purchases and expenses
- Gratuities
Joining this journey
Upcoming journey dates:
- February 11–24, 202 — Now Open
Get in touch for the full details, or set up a call to see whether this journey is right for you.
Why this container
The argument underneath the journey
All of this rests on a claim: that the form of leadership most of us were trained into was built for a different world, and that the shift now being asked of us cannot be reached by learning more about it. We have set the full case out separately, with the thinkers and lineages it draws on.
Why We Call This an Initiation, Not a Program
In February we cross a frozen Lake Khuvsgul into the taiga, where it falls below minus 30°F and the things leaders rely on stop working: language, schedules, expertise, the ordinary sense of competence. A chance to meet yourself where you don’t already know how to succeed.
If this resonates, we invite a conversation
The circle will be intentionally small.
The February 11–24, 2027 journey is now open.
Tell us about yourself, and we’ll take it from there.
