The Canyon Within

The work of Tony Skrelūnas is enlivened at 1440 through his wellbeing curriculum. Each workshop resource is drawn from his novel Stone Breath and the body of work Tony has built for decades: Stone Breath, Gratitude Session, Ancestral Council, The Centering, Canyon Exercise, Museum of Proof, and the Headlamp Circle. Attendees will explore:

• Stone Breath — find your center in sixty seconds, anywhere.
• The Canyon Within — come back up carrying what you’d been avoiding, not running from it.
• Gratitude & Reflection — build resilience and soften a hard inner voice.
• Story & Journal — reframe your hardest chapters into strength.
• Belonging — a circle that remembers it was never meant to be carried alone.
• The Harvest Table — taste healing in the Ancestral Kitchen, and celebrate the year.
• And much more

This intimate workshop is limited to just 18 attendees, ensuring an immersive experience in the redwoods.

Guests will arrive at the Canyon Within from every direction and every season of life. You might recognize yourself here:

• The one who gives everything — to work, to family, to everyone — and quietly wonders who refills them.
• The person in a hard passage — a loss, a divorce, an empty nest, a career turning over — who needs a safe place to set it down.
• The high-achiever who looks fine from the outside — successful, capable, admired — and knows some part of them has been running on empty.
• The younger seeker — a son or daughter at a crossroads, looking for ground to stand on.
• The elder — with a life's worth of wisdom, ready to pass it on.
• Anyone — of any age or background — who has been walking in the dark and wants to remember the way home.

You do not need to be fit, or a hiker, or experienced in any of this. Many arrive on their own and leave with a circle. 

One afternoon, the weekend gathers in the Teaching Kitchen with Missy and Henry Webster, a Navajo family from Gray Mountain, Arizona. Along with their family, they turn the making of the harvest feast into a hands-on teaching: blue corn, juniper ash, frybread, the old knowledge carried hand to hand and nearly lost. In the Ancestral Kitchen, food is medicine and cooking is a lineage you can taste. What comes off the fire is the celebration the whole weekend rises toward.

This immersive retreat is all-inclusive, so you can focus on wonder, learning and growth. Pricing starts at $1,100 plus tax for this weekend program ($430 per night plus $240 workshop tuition), and includes:

• The Canyon Within program workshops
• Overnight accommodations (shared Pod or private room)
• A complimentary digital copy of Tony's novel Stone Breath: An Ancestral Code for Modern Lives — guests receive a download code before the weekend, so they arrive having met the stories the tools come from
• A printed Ancestral Watch guided journal — to write in through the weekend and keep
• All sustainable, locally sourced meals beginning with dinner on Friday and ending with lunch on Sunday
• Daily signature classes such as yoga, meditation, art, and movement activities (hiking, tai chi, and qigong)
• Access to campus amenities including 4 miles of walking trails

As a nonprofit philanthropic campus, each booking contributes to serving our community by providing scholarships and volunteer services in support of creating hope for living well.

DINÉ · LITHUANIAN · ENTREPRENEUR, AUTHOR · PhD CANDIDATE

“The wealth is not in front of you, waiting to be earned. It is behind you, waiting to be claimed.” – from The Ancestral Watch

Tony was raised on Black Mesa by his great‑grandmother Masan, who taught him to run at dawn with a stone in his mouth—not as ritual, but as technology. His Lithuanian grandfather drove 25 miles of dirt road each year to sit in a hogan and pass on a tradition that survived Soviet suppression. His grandfather Dineh Yazzie walked six miles a day and died at 103, surrounded by family.

He carries two lineages that have survived displacement, suppression, and the modern world’s noise. He spent decades leading economic development for the Navajo Nation, co‑founding clean energy companies, and running nationally acclaimed programs at Grand Canyon Trust. He is writing three books on what ancestral systems can teach the modern world.