Hero’s Journey® Foundation
Impact Reporting 2025
Opening doorways to awaken vital living.
A note from our founder
Michael Mervosh
As we close out 2025, I’m struck by how much can happen when people choose to show up fully for what matters in their lives. This year, our work at the Hero’s Journey® Foundation has never been more demanding and expansive. Our programs have continued to bring people deeper into vital contact with themselves, with others, and with the living world that they inhabit.
Lifebridge Sanctuary has become a steady ground for our ways of working. It is a space that holds the sacred, and provides a threshold for people to cross. It provdes a safe and welcoming space for those who need to risk real change. And it is beautiful space that supports the aliveness that people come to renew. Behind the scenes, our team has been working ever so diligently to strengthen the structures that keep our facility vibrant and responsive, as our community of Lifebridge retreat groups expands.
We were excited to bring two new HJF programs forward this year, as well as completing the move from years of programming in West Virginia. We now anchor most of our work at Lifebridge Sanctuary — a shift that allows us to open doorways to vital living for more people, in a space we now call home.
Come, Come, Whoever you are,
Wanderers, worshippers, lovers of leaving.
Come, even if you have broken
your vows to yourself a thousand times.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Just come,
And come here, again and again.
– Rumi
Our Impact Through Place & Practice
Shining a light on Practice.
HERO’S JOURNEY PROGRAMS AS A CATALYST FOR CHANGE
This year, we offered ten weeks of Hero’s Journey® programming – including two new Immersion Journey offerings rooted at Lifebridge Sanctuary in Rosendale, NY.
A profound Men’s Journey took place once again in the mountains of West Virginia, and our community continued to gather online through the Ensemble Hero winter journey.
Altogether, we’ve reached 200 participants in a dynamic variety of ways in 2025. Through generous giving, we have been able to extend our program accessibility further in 2025 than we ever have before.
Shining a light on Place.
Lifebridge Sanctuary as a home for transformation.
⚘ In 2025, Lifebridge Sanctuary hosted 26 weeks of group programming. We welcomed diverse trainings and retreats ranging from Gestalt therapy and Tai Chi learning to Yoga Teacher Training certification. We continue to be grateful to share our retreat space with the groups who bring their work to our Sanctuary, furthering the kind of transformational opportunities for growth that our space provides.
⚘ Alongside these group rentals, we completed major capital improvements that strengthen the long-term safety and resilience of the Sanctuary.
⚘ Through the generosity of last year’s end-of-year campaign, all three fireplaces were fully replaced, restoring warmth to the heart of our buildings. We replaced the fire-suppression sprinkler system to bring our facility into its next chapter of readiness and safety.
⚘ We continued to expand and improve our trail system, and installed a new memorial garden near the front door to honor the life of a young man-son of a program participant – whose memory now lives at the threshold of the Sanctuary.
⚘ We upgraded our Wi-Fi network at the main building, extending and improving our coverage for guests.
⚘ Members of the Men’s Journey stewarding community offered a weekend of service, clearing and organizing the basement to support the ongoing care of the Lifebridge Sanctuary.
⚘ This year, we built out new comprehensive operational systems, to support long-term stewardship.
⚘ We also continued our role as Adopt-a-Highway participants, removing over 25 bags of trash along our road between High Falls and Rosendale, NY, this year as part of our commitment to tending the land and our surrounding community.
⚘ This year also brought a widening community connection. We partnered with Holistic Health Community to host monthly healing practices, offered free of charge.
⚘ We filled the entry and lobby with rotating art exhibitions and opened our doors for three community open houses to share that work and welcome community onto the land.
New fireplace in action
Holistic Health Care welcomes guests
Creating the new Dawson White Journey Garden
Seasonal views from the trail’s lookouts
Our Impact – Behind The Scenes!
In a world that often pulls us towards numbing information streams, endless distractions, and dissociative habits – this space and the work that happens in it, offers what sometimes feels rare: spaciousness, timelessness, a quality of embodied presence, and the encouragement to step towards vitality and aliveness.
Group Facilitation Training, Ensemble Hero Online Journey, Fall Immersion Voice Journey, Construction on the Dawson White Memorial Garden, Art Opening, Lifebridge in the Snow, Holistic Health Community welcomes guests, Adopt-A-Highway crew!
Holistic Health Community, Hanging Art, Group Facilitation Training, Recording at Lifebridge, Gardening, Trail Maintenance, Peach Harvest
Our Impact is Meaningful
We Are Opening Doorways To Awaken Vital Living.
There is a moment in every transformational journey when a person steps across a threshold, a moment when something in them knows they can’t stay where they are, how they are.
What unfolds from that moment cannot be willed or contrived. It requires steady presence, a deep trust in transformational forces and processes, a significance sense of risk, and a willingness to surrender – to be moved by forces larger than our own familiar patterns.
This is the work we do at The Hero’s Journey® Foundation.
At Lifebridge Sanctuary, and through the programs of the Hero’s Journey® Foundation, we open doorways to awaken vital living. We create spaces where people reclaim what has been dormant, and remember a belonging to something deeper and more alive.
When someone learns to show up fully, the world around them shifts- quietly, steadily, and irreversibly. These changes are inwardly experienced and outwardly lived into. They impact our families, our communities, and the wider world we share.
This is why showing up matters. It’s how we learn to live lives that are truly, authentically our own.
A Look Ahead
Join Us
The kind of transformation work we do doesn’t happen by accident.
It requires real places to gather, skilled facilitators who can hold the heat of the work, devoted staff who tend every detail behind the scenes, and sacred land that offers a steadfast support beneath our feet.
To open doorways that awaken vital living, we must build and sustain the structures that support it.
Each donation, every act of generosity, makes it possible for someone to step through a threshold they could not cross alone – someone seeking healing, clarity, courage, or renewed capacity to serve others.
Your support strengthens our Sanctuary space, and allows us to keep our programs accessible and vibrant. It ensures that this work continues to reach outward into our loved ones, our communities, and the wider world.
What we do here matters, and we invite you to join us.
Take your own Journey in 2026.
HERO’S JOURNEY PROGRAM CALENDAR
We’re excited to share a powerful year of programming ahead in 2026, including the Group Facilitation Training, Vitalization Training, Men’s Journey, Fall Immersion, and the return of Ensemble Hero online.
If you feel called to deepen your presence, strengthen your capacity, and step into community, we invite you to join us in the year ahead.
Come be part of what’s unfolding.
Bring your retreat to Lifebridge.
More information about Lifebridge Sanctuary
Lifebridge Sanctuary is a place that was built to hold meaningful work. In 2026, we intend to welcome retreat leaders, teachers, and facilitators who feel inspired to bring people to a setting that supports depth, connection, and transformation.
With 96 acres of wooded land, beautiful gathering spaces, and a team committed to thoughtful hospitality, Lifebridge offers a home for work that matters.
If you’re looking for a place where your group can step away from the noise and into privacy, beauty, and quiet – bring your work here. Be a part of what’s unfolding.
Thank You
Thank you for taking the time to read this Impact Report. You are a witness to the work we are stewarding. It is a privilege to help create and hold space for purposeful, deep work at a time when the world needs it so urgently.
Your involvement, your financial support, your belief in what happens within our programming spaces, and your participation in our home at Lifebridge Sanctuary make this all possible.
I’m grateful to be doing this alongside you.
Warmly,
Anna Noack
Programs & Operations Manager
Hero’s Journey® Foundation at Lifebridge Sanctuary
333 Mountain Rd, Rosendale, NY, 12472
(845) 658-3439
Questions? Email our staff here.