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Miyoko Schinner is an award-winning chef, author, entrepreneur and speaker. The founder of Miyoko’s Creamery, she is often credited for bringing vegan cheese to mainstream audiences. She also founded Rancho Compasión, a non-profit farmed animal sanctuary and education center for school-age youth. She currently teaches a food systems course at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Among her many awards as an activist, cultural icon and food innovator, Miyoko was named to the coveted inaugural list of Forbes 50 Over 50, a “Game Changer” by Food and Wine Magazine, a Top 100 Female Founder by INC., and a “Vegan Revolutionary” by UN Women.  Miyoko is the author of seven cookbooks, including the bestselling The Homemade Vegan Pantry, the book credited for launching the vegan cheese revolution, Artisan Vegan Cheese, and her most recent, The Vegan Creamery (September 2025). She was featured in a 4-part Netflix series, You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment, co-hosted the cooking show Vegan Mashup that aired for three seasons on PBS, and currently hosts a show on YouTube. Miyoko has spoken all over the world including at TedX Athens, Saudi Arabia, Italy, and Korea, as well as home in the US at industry conferences and companies such as Google, Dropbox, The Smithsonian, and more. She is regularly featured on podcasts and interviews. Miyoko has three grown children and resides in West Marin with her dogs, cats, and the over 100 animals of Rancho Compasión.

Becoming a Far Messenger by Tony Skrelūnas

Every civilization raised people to carry what mattered across hard ground and arrive with it whole — and then organized itself around honoring them. We stopped. This session is about taking the role back up.

Participants leave with three things: the count — a breath practice from the fourth day of a desert crossing, which you can run before a hard conversation or a race; the test — how to tell whether you are leading from calm or from alarm, and what to do about it; and the charge — what a far messenger is actually responsible for, and who is currently waiting on you.

Drawn from the Diné, Lithuanian and Japanese traditions Tony was raised inside, from Stone Breath and Far Messengers, and from doctoral research on why these practices transfer across cultures that never met.

Runs as a keynote (45–60 min), a half day, or a multi-day course.

Every person on earth once raised far messengers. Not the strongest — the steadiest. The ones trained to carry what mattered across hard ground and arrive with it whole. Somebody crossed the largest sand desert on foot. Somebody lay in the hull of a canoe reading the swells through the wood with their own body. Everything you know reached you because somebody carried it.

Tony Skrelūnas was raised to be one, before he had a word for it. He grew up on Black Mesa with his great-grandparents — no electricity, four hundred sheep, a ceremony every dawn. His great-grandmother Masan knew every animal by the sound of its voice in the dark and held the dawn practice every morning of her life. She did not call it a practice. She called it survival. He learned to read by kerosene lamp, and by that same lamp read the philosophy of Japan, a discipline he has been apprenticed to ever since. His Lithuanian grandfather drove twenty-five miles of dirt road to sit in that hogan and pass on a tradition that had survived Soviet suppression.

Diné and Lithuanian by blood. Japanese by choice. Three lineages, one lesson: the tools were never lost. They were set down. Then college handed him an identity crisis, and for a while he tried to be someone generic. What brought him back was a single realization — he could be who he was. He finished at the top of his class, and everything he has built since is a proof of that one idea.

He spent fourteen years founding and directing the Native America Program at the Grand Canyon Trust. He led the governance restructuring of a still-deeply-cultural nation — a Local Governance Act now adopted by forty-five communities, returning authority to the people who live with the consequences. He co-founded Navajo Power PBC. He chaired the Black Mesa Water Coalition. He served on the National Just Transition Strategy Task Force. He is a trustee of Prescott College, and the first person of Lithuanian and Diné descent inducted into Northern Arizona University’s College of Business Hall of Fame.

Today he writes the story and teaches the practice. He is the author of The Ancestral Watch — Stone Breath, By Lamplight, The Council Fire, and Far Messengers. He holds a faculty appointment at 1440 Multiversity and soon to be announced, where he teaches Ancestral Practice and Human Performance.  His doctoral research at Prescott College examines human and organizational performance through those same three ancestral lenses, and enters dissertation stage early next year. His argument is simple and hard: we are in a crossing, and nobody is being raised for it. Two hundred years from now somebody will be sitting in the dark needing exactly what we are holding right now.

We are the far messengers now. He runs at dawn. He is an aspiring silversmith. He still carries a stone.

The Tree of Plenty: Growing What Matters
Why do we expect linear answers from money and markets when nothing in nature grows in a straight line?

Tree’s branch, bend, shed, rest, and regenerate. Their growth is shaped by changing seasons, unseen roots, and the life surrounding them. Our relationship with money is much the same.

Through the image of the Tree of Plenty Debbie’s workshops invite participants to see wealth not as something static to accumulate, but as living energy: something we can root in our values, grow with intention, and allow to flow toward the people, places, and possibilities that matter most.

You Make Money—Make It Matter
Changing our financial language can change our behaviour. Through stories of people who have used their wealth to profoundly affect those they love and the communities that have supported them, Debbie will explore how generosity can strengthen our sense of purpose, connection, and well-being.

Like a mother tree, we can be deeply rooted in our own worth while using what we have grown to nourish the world around us. Money is not meant to stagnate. It is energy—and energy is meant to move.

Participants will create their own Joy Bubbles, identifying five places where they want to direct their money and energy to grow what matters and help create a better world—right here, right now.

David de la Paz (resident teacher) will deepen the experience through poetry and movement, exploring how changing the way we move can shift the way we think. When we release resistance and allow our bodies, energy, and money to flow, we create space for love, possibility, and meaningful change.

The Joy of Subtraction: Pruning to Make Space for Possibility
We live in a world conditioned for addition: more possessions, more commitments, more goals, and more choices. We add almost automatically, yet rarely pause to consider what we could subtract.

In nature, growth does not come only from adding. Trees release their leaves, shed what no longer serves them, and are sometimes pruned so that new growth can emerge. Subtraction is not deprivation; it is the intentional creation of space.

Letting go of something that matters less can free our time, energy, and money for the people, places, and experiences we value most. It allows us to stop growing simply for the sake of more and begin growing in the direction of what matters.

Through reflection and shared conversation, participants will identify something they have subtracted—or are ready to release—and explore the possibility that choice could open in their lives. What might grow if we gave it more light, time, and room?

Mudita: A Joy That Multiplies When Money Flows
Mudita is a Sanskrit word describing the ability to feel another person’s joy deeply and intensely. While we are often comfortable sharing in someone else’s pain, another person’s happiness or success can sometimes awaken comparison, jealousy, or even guilt—especially when we have access to resources, opportunities, or comforts that others may not.

Mudita invites us to move beyond comparison and experience another person’s joy as though it were our own. In a thriving forest, one tree’s growth does not diminish another’s. Each tree contributes to something larger, creating an environment where more life can flourish.

This workshop will explore the connection between self-worth, personal values, and money. When we recognize our own value and accept that we are worthy of what has come into our lives, we can hold it with gratitude rather than guilt. We can then use it generously and intentionally to create joy for ourselves and others.

Participants will reflect on what they value most in themselves and how those qualities influence what they value, purchase, and share. Something that once felt important—such as buying a new dress for an event—may no longer create the same joy. Borrowing one from a friend might offer greater connection while freeing money for something more meaningful.

Inspired by the idea of “dying with zero,” we will consider how our money and resources can be used during our lives rather than simply preserved for an uncertain future. The goal is not reckless spending, but learning to sprinkle joy into the present through meaningful experiences, thoughtful generosity, and shared moments.

Like fruit on a tree, wealth becomes most meaningful when it is allowed to nourish life.

Sharing Circle: What You Value in You Is What You Value in Life
Gathered around the labyrinth in Emily’s Forest, participants will form a circle and take one another’s hands. One by one, each person will be invited to share something they value within themselves—and consider how that quality shapes what they value in life and where they choose to direct their time, energy, and money.

Together, participants will then walk the labyrinth hand in hand: a physical expression of connection, courage, and trust. The winding path reminds us that neither life nor money moves in a straight line. We may not always see where the path is leading, but we do not have to walk it alone.

The experience will be guided by Emily’s words from Where I Belong:

“Let’s take each other’s hands and find the bravery to lose sight of the shore, so we can cross the ocean.”

This sharing circle will bring the workshops’ themes together: knowing our own value, trusting the unfolding path, and finding the courage to grow, release, share, and move forward in connection with one another.

Debbie Styles, CFP, founded dts lifeStyles, where she is giving life to a new financial language—rooted in joy, pregnant with possibility, and overflowing with purpose.

She invites people to think beyond the conditioning mind, shifting language:

Net Worth Joy Reserve
Retirement Jubilation
Retirement Income Allowance

Debbie questions why we expect linear answers from money and markets when nothing in nature is linear. Our lives unfold in seasons; our needs change; and the things we value grow, branch, and sometimes fall away. Through dts lifeStyles, Debbie helps people become the Tree of Plenty in their own lives: deeply rooted in their worth, intentional about what they grow, and generous with the shade, nourishment, and possibility they can offer others. She has witnessed how shifting our language can change our behaviour for the better—helping people move from Worrier to Warrior and develop a more confident, intentional, and joyful relationship with the flow of their money.

Sarah Livia Brightwood Szekely is President and CEO of Rancho La Puerta. For forty years she has designed the gardens and cared for the wildlands around Rancho La Puerta. As the keeper of the vision and long-range planner she has preserved the soul and culture of Rancho La Puerta while bringing new programs and reviving the earth honoring traditions that inspired the early years at Rancho La Puerta. She is also President of Fundación La Puerta through which she guides Rancho La Puerta’s non-profit work in the region. In 1984 Sarah established Agricola Tres Estrellas, a diverse organic farm that provides food to Ranch La Puerta’s guests year-round and in 2007 she designed and opened La Cocina Que Canta, a culinary center and cooking school to teach commitment to healthy eating and to embrace the joy of harvesting and cooking in community. She is the daughter of philosopher and visionary Edmond Bordeaux Szekely and community organizer and philanthropist Deborah Szekely, the founders of Rancho La Puerta.

Growing What Matters

During Wisdom Keeper Week we celebrate my father’s birthday by breathing life into one of his teachings.  In the 1930’s, my father wrote, “Wisdom is the sum total of knowledge needed for happiness.” In this time of overwhelm, we offer spaciousness, time to step out of the crowded field of accumulation into a sense of purpose that brings clarity to our life, our wealth and our relationships.

My father said, “longevity was bestowed upon the beings that were of greatest service to the planet, and the greatest longevity was bestowed upon the trees”.  How can we be rooted, connected, serving life with all that we have received, giving back with a light heart, and not be trapped by what we accumulate?  We welcome you to explore a liberating flow of giving and receiving, growing what matters.

Our speakers this week are deeply engaged in their purpose and have found unique ways to share their gifts and passions.