Meet Your Magic: The Nonprofit Infrastructure Changing the Model of Immersive Retreats
Written by Ethan M. Stone
Martha Borst has been running the Self Mastery Trilogy for more than four decades; a progressive three-course journey through self-discovery, self-responsibility, and self-mastery that has guided thousands of participants. For most of that time, the organizational weight of running it fell entirely on her.
"The work itself was never the problem," says Jana Wilder, whose nonprofit Meet Your Magic now handles the infrastructure behind the Trilogy. "The problem is everything that surrounds the work: operations, payments, logistics, participant communications, scholarship administration. When one person is carrying all of that alongside the facilitation itself, something begins to suffer."
It's a problem that runs far deeper than any single program. Across the facilitation and arts field, some of the most serious and original work being done today exists in structural precarity; not because the work is weak, but because the people creating it were never meant to be running organizations.
They were meant to be directing the work itself. The operational burden of pricing, administering, marketing, and sustaining a program falls on the people often least positioned to carry it, and most at risk when they do. The result is burnout, compromised work, and offerings that aren’t financially sustainable and cannot grow.
Meet Your Magic (MYM) was founded on that observation. The California-based 501(c)(3) partners with exceptional facilitators and artists to take the operational complexity of running serious programs entirely off their hands, with costs shared across programs so each becomes more sustainable than it could be alone. But MYM is not a general infrastructure provider. It's built around a specific standard: work that is original, rigorous, and that demonstrably changes how people live.
What it looks for in a partner is a particular combination: a practitioner or artist who has already proven real impact, work that has earned its following through the depth of what it delivers, and a structural situation where MYM's model can make a meaningful difference. MYM is deliberately selective about the work it supports, because the integrity of the whole depends on the caliber of each program.
It's a gap Wilder was uniquely positioned to fill. As former CEO of Simon Sinek Inc, now The Optimism Company, the globally recognized leadership and education platform founded by Simon Sinek, she spent over a decade building the organizational systems that allowed its programming to reach millions of people worldwide. She founded MYM knowing exactly what serious infrastructure looks like, and what its absence costs.
The Self Mastery Trilogy is MYM's flagship US program, and the clearest expression of what the partnership model makes possible. Borst's work had already created something difficult to manufacture: a deeply engaged community built around transformation, connection, and a shared commitment to living differently.
What MYM brought was the organizational backbone to match it: the systems, the financial infrastructure, and the administrative capacity that allow the Trilogy to grow without the work suffering under the weight of its own logistics.
Participants move through the program over the course of a year or more, each course building cumulatively on the last, a process designed not for single breakthroughs but to give people the tools and the support for true life transformation.
"What Jana and Meet Your Magic have brought is organizational expertise that genuinely matches the quality of the work," says Borst. "The backend runs beautifully, the community is growing, and now we’re training others to continue the work long after I’m gone."
Access is central to how MYM measures its own success. In just over three years, MYM has distributed more than $20,000 in scholarships and subsidized access across its programs, reducing the financial barriers that have historically kept access out of reach.
The model is designed so that as programs grow their communities, the scholarship fund grows with them, and access expands. Fair compensation for the people leading the work and genuine accessibility for the people who need it are not, in MYM's model, competing priorities. They are built to reinforce each other.
MYM is now expanding its US programming. This fall, it will launch Lead the Way, a professional development course for executives and professionals designed to build the leadership capacity needed for the next stage of their careers, bringing the same organizational rigor and participant care that has defined the Self Mastery Trilogy to a new audience.
It is the next expression of MYM's commitment to work that is genuinely substantive, led by world class professionals, and delivered with the infrastructure to do it well.
MYM also serves as the organizational home for Sapience, the interdisciplinary somatic arts practice of UK-based artistic director Tom Slater. Over more than a decade, Slater has built a body of work that occupies a genuinely distinct space: residential, immersive retreats that find the intersection between physical theatre, art and personal transformation.
The practice has built a devoted following across Europe, Asia, and Central America, selling out on reputation alone without any formal marketing behind it. That kind of reach, built entirely through word of mouth and the quality of direct experience, reflects the seriousness of what Slater has created.
"What MYM has made possible goes beyond the practical," says Slater. "The work is properly resourced and supported in a way that reflects its purpose. The kind of growth we've experienced simply wasn't possible before.”
"There is a lot of content in the personal development space," Wilder says. "MYM is not interested in volume. We are interested in exceptional artists and facilitators with original methodologies… work that moves people, shifts something real, and stays with them long after they leave the room."
That standard is what Meet Your Magic is building toward: an organizational home that over time becomes a recognized mark of quality in a field where that is still rare.
One that sustainably grows with the work it supports, ensures the people leading that work are properly resourced and fairly compensated, and creates invitations and opportunities for participants who would not otherwise find their way in.
“People are hungry for real connection, for meaning, and for experiences that genuinely change something in their lives,” Wilder says. “When we find work that can do that, we want to help protect it, strengthen it, and make sure it continues reaching people for generations.”
Meet Your Magic holds confirmed 501(c)(3) status. Information on programs and scholarship applications is available at meetyourmagic.org.
