The Temple Builders Panel at AUREA: How the Places Actually Get Built

A year and a half before he took the microphone on this panel, Jesse was homeless. He arrived on the land because somebody asked whether he could fix a golf cart, and he deliberately told nobody who he had been. "I made it a point not to tell anybody who I was, my past, all this stuff I've been demonizing." Then came a meeting about a spreadsheet, an admission that he had once started and sold a software company, and a run of questions that ended with him running the build.

The Temple Builders panel closed out an afternoon at AUREA III with the people who make the physical places this work happens in. On the ledge were the men who built the Moonflower land the event was standing on, a lawyer who sets up entheogenic churches, a woman who has run plant medicine retreats for nearly seven years, a former global operator now moving into regenerative real estate, a capital raiser, a systems designer, and an astrologer. Jackson Strong hosted and asked each of them the same two things: what are you here to create, and what do you need.

How the land AUREA III was held on was designed and rebuilt

The site is called Moonflower, and its layout follows the geometry of the flower it is named for. Its central building is the original 1940s farmhouse, taken down brick by brick and rebuilt on the same footprint.

Bill, the designer among the three partners, named his brief in six words: "Make it strong. Make it simple. Make it beautiful." Asked for the sacred geometry underneath it, he gave one detail and stopped. The moonflower "is a five-sided petal and it spins out like a galaxy," so every axis and line of sight on the property radiates from the fire pit in a spiral. He had stood at that high point nine years earlier, in ceremony under a tent, and known that something belonged there.

The house is the part he tells slowly. The rough concrete bricks were hand cast by the two brothers who first built the place after they came back from the war. Eighty years of additions had been layered on top, and when the crew stripped it back there was not a crack in the foundation or the walls. They sandblasted seventeen layers of paint off, took it apart piece by piece, poured a new foundation, and put it back up where it had always stood. Phase one is finished. Phase two is the reception hall and the lodging cabins down the hillside, and phase three opens the rougher side of the property to camping. When Jackson repeated a rumor that six hundred ceremonies had happened on the land, Bill corrected him cheerfully: most of those came before them, and they were weddings.

What it takes to make plant medicine work legal in the United States

Mike Mamola practices law and spends it on one problem: giving people who work with sacred medicine enough legal ground to sleep at night. He was a founding partner of a law firm for roughly two decades before spirituality and plant medicine reordered what he wanted the practice for.

Much of his work is entheogenic churches, structured to claim as much First Amendment protection as the law allows. He described the goal in ordinary terms rather than lofty ones: "so that they don't have to worry, so that they can do it with a calmness and an ability to sleep at night as much as possible." The other half of his work happens in rooms most of the audience will never sit in, meeting privately with politicians, prosecutors, and decision makers around the country. His report from those rooms was the part that landed. "The prosecutors, the judges, the politicians, they suffer, or they love someone who suffers, and they know that there's change that's available, and it's coming, and they're curious."

He is part of the Texas Ibogaine Initiative, and told the room it is moving toward legal clinical research on ibogaine for PTSD in veterans, with former Governor Rick Perry among its backers. He traced the whole fight back to a single administrative act, when "someone with a stroke of a pen decided that all of these fall into schedule one drugs."

What it took to build a plant medicine retreat practice from $500

Amanda Shandel started with $500, no savings and no backing, and has since taken 1,682 people through her retreats. She had counted them that morning because she wanted to know the number.

Ten years ago she was at the lowest point of her life and got called to ayahuasca in the mountains of Ecuador. She stayed three years and became general manager of the retreat center, and the apprenticeship ran in that order: folding thirty-pound blankets and emptying buckets for years, then being asked to tend the sacred fire, then, near the end, being asked to sing in ceremony. On her last journey there, she says the medicine was blunt with her: "you're going to move to Mexico and you're going to give people mushrooms." She had not lived in Mexico and had not worked with mushrooms since she was twenty-two. She picked Tulum because it sounded fun, found a place the next day, put up a free website, and twenty strangers came to the first retreat.

The California chapter began with a vision on the land in Joshua Tree, of a sharpshooter riding west: "you are riding into the west on your horse and you got your guns and they only shoot love." The land she eventually bought had a donkey corral built like an Old West saloon, complete with fake people drinking whiskey. There are alpacas on it now, five bedrooms have become eight, and two nights before the panel the women who hold it ran the first ceremony in a thirty-foot yurt that put her into debt for the first time in seven years. The stone at the entrance said Lone Wolf Ranch. Loneliness being the fear she knows best, she went out with paint and a Sharpie and renamed it Wolfpack Ranch.

Then she made the ask she came to make. "I'm calling in a new CEO. I'm calling in a place where I can step back." Her body had already told her three times in the last year. She named the shadow underneath the overwork plainly: "if I don't control everything, I am not worthy." And she passed on what her teacher Salvador told her about visibility: "when you turn on a bright light in a dark space, a lot of creatures come toward that light. Some moths, some butterflies, and some really scary creatures."

Why beauty is the design brief for regenerative real estate

Robert Althuis builds places, and his standard for them is beauty. "Beauty is the language of God," he told the room, "and whatever beauty we can bring into the world, we are being a conduit for the most high."

He built at scale internationally, sold most of that business in 2015, and then watched his life come apart. He refused any credit for the turn. "I awoke from that dream, from that old chapter of my life because the universe decided it was time. Not because I was such a great guy and I suddenly saw the light. I fought it. Tooth and nail." He named his own material honestly too, calling a man with that much alpha energy and a deep father wound one of the most destructive things on the planet, and pointing out that the world applauds exactly that.

He left real estate when the work became moving decimals around on spreadsheets. He is coming back to it because a year and a half ago he bought the domain regenr8.com with no idea why, then spent 12,000 miles touring the country with a trailer and a Harley in the back of his pickup, calling it a book tour when it was a pilgrimage. The plan now is regenerative development that reaches a person physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, on the theory that information alone changes nobody. "If it doesn't touch you on a very, very deep level, there's no access point to embodiment. And when there's no embodiment, there's really nothing. There's just information." His proof text is a client who came back from ten weeks in the Himalaya meditating eight hours a day, then treated a grocery store cashier badly. Robert's verdict: "I don't think it worked."

What a wolf pack taught one investor about who to get behind

Alex raises capital for large real estate, and he chooses who to back by watching how they show up for their community. He learned the frame over seven nights spent with an actual wolf pack during a mushroom journey, and he has been studying and teaching A Course in Miracles for more than seven years.

His challenge to the room was direct. Everyone in it has a gift, and a gift is not a private possession: "your gift is your calling. Your gift is your message." Then the question underneath the whole panel: "will we answer the call, or will this just be like an inspiring event that we went to?" He was equally direct about who keeps the world as it is. "It's people sitting on the sideline that has our world be in the state that it's in today." The lever he offers is financial. "What if whatever you wanted to create, there was no financial limitations? Like, what would you even be thinking about?" Jackson added a piece of wolf lore he had picked up: in deep snow the alpha runs last in the line rather than first, keeping the pack together so nobody is left behind.

How to stay in reciprocity with the people whose land and songs you work with

The question came from a couple in their fourth year stewarding a retreat space in Ecuador, a five-story dodecahedron treehouse maloca in the cloud forest with a pure water source. How do you carry indigenous wisdom forward without taking it. Amanda Shandel answered first, and her answer was to tell the truth about who you are.

She described herself as a white woman from Orange County with two adopted parents and almost no traceable roots, who went looking for lineage and found teachers willing to give it. When she asked whether she was allowed to sing their songs, her elder told her that this is the time of integration of all tribes and all songs, and that if she wanted to learn the despacho she should simply ask. "These are not my songs. These are humanity's songs and they just forgot them."

The other half of her answer was money, and she made it concrete. Sitting with her elder two years ago, a number arrived within ten seconds: twenty thousand dollars, delivered the next day. Ten thousand more came six months later. They have since built another temple space with it. "It's not in a spreadsheet somewhere. It's going to be in your heart in those prayers." Her caution was against performance. In eight to ten years of this work, almost nobody has come at her for it, and she credits that to never impersonating anyone she is not.

What the panel actually does in the first hour of the day

Asked for their daily practice, almost every panelist described the same thing in different equipment: getting slow and present before the day starts talking. Nobody defended a fixed routine.

Robert Althuis goes out into his yard in Miami with coffee he refuses to feel guilty about, looks at his bougainvillea and his hibiscus, and sits with the sun on his face for thirty to forty-five minutes because his mind runs too fast. "Just come into your body, land, and you will be told everything you need to know for that day." Another panelist runs a gratitude list at both ends of the day and keeps the bar deliberately low: the first item, almost every morning, is opening his eyes, so everything after that is already a win. He calls it vitamin G. No screens for the first hour, on the grounds that the hour is for programming the day rather than reacting to it. Then water, one ounce for every ten pounds of body weight, with an intention set in it, then a protection prayer, then "I love you" into a mirror on the way out the door.

Two of the answers were about permission. One panelist offered a line from Elizabeth Gilbert to say on waking, "love, what would you have me do today?", and one from Neale Donald Walsch that got the biggest laugh of the segment: "I meditate every day except for the days that I do not." Another put the floor at twenty minutes barefoot on the ground, calling nature the ultimate teacher. Timothy Archer said his practice is listening for what is most needed, and that years of chronic pain from a bike crash taught him more than any protocol, because staying calm and present with it was the only way through.

Timothy Archer also gave the panel its thesis. Connection needs somewhere to happen, environments shape behavior more than intentions do, and the legal system and the capital stack fight you the whole way. "It's a life of work to make this one space, but we need to make millions of spaces like this. This is the heart of the new Earth." Jackson closed the segment with the longer plan behind the panel: a global ceremony on 12/12 aimed at the sacred sites Dr. Samuel B. Lee had mapped for the room the night before, and temples built at or near those sites.

Watch the full talk above.

Frequently asked questions

Who was on the Temple Builders panel at AUREA III?

Jackson Strong hosted. The panel included psychedelics lawyer Mike Mamola, the three partners behind the Moonflower land where AUREA III was held, plant medicine retreat founder Amanda Shandel, author and regenerative developer Robert Althuis, real estate capital raiser Alex, systems designer Timothy Archer, and astrologer Zoe. Each was asked what they are building and what support they need to finish it.

What is an entheogenic church?

A religious organization formed around the sacramental use of plant medicine. Mike Mamola helps people structure them so their practice sits under as much First Amendment protection as United States law allows. He described the purpose in practical terms: letting practitioners do the work without constant fear of prosecution. He also works on the administrative side, meeting privately with politicians and decision makers around the country.

What is the Texas Ibogaine Initiative?

An effort to bring legal ibogaine treatment and research to Texas. Mike Mamola, who is part of it, told the AUREA III audience it is moving toward clinical research on ibogaine for PTSD in veterans, and that former Governor Rick Perry is among its backers. He framed it as the leading edge of a wider shift in how American institutions treat natural healing compounds.

How did Amanda Shandel start her retreat business?

With $500, no savings and no backing, after three years volunteering and then managing an ayahuasca center in Ecuador. On her final journey there she was told to move to Mexico and work with mushrooms. She chose Tulum, built a free website, and twenty strangers came to her first retreat. Nearly seven years later, 1,682 people have been through her retreats.

What did the panel say about burnout in healers and retreat leaders?

Amanda Shandel put it hardest: anyone healing others should take care of themselves many times more than they currently do. Her body had shut her down three times in a year, and she used the panel to ask publicly for a CEO so she could return to being a medicine woman. She named the shadow underneath the overwork as a belief that not controlling everything makes her unworthy.