These encounters invite attentiveness, patience, and respect for rhythms beyond our own.
About Shambala Ranch
A living exploration of embodied liberation and enlightened living.
We gather in the wild generosity of Southern California’s landscape to remember ways of being human that predate performance, productivity, and separation.
We return to what is wild, honest, creative, and interconnected.
Here, you are invited to slow down, sense more deeply, and connect with the wisdom of your body, the land, and community.
Our Mission
Shambala Ranch is a living sanctuary where we explore the radical act of returning to our animal bodies, our indigenous hearts, our place in the web of all living things.
Here in the mountains of the Ojai valley, we immerse ourselves in what it means to be fully human: wild and tender, creative and contemplative, rooted in the earth and reaching toward liberation.
We practice Buddhism with dirt under our fingernails. Our somatic work does not fear the mess. The art we create is a direct path to the sacred.
We are building an experiment in what happens when we step outside the boxes of how we are told to live, work, create, and relate.
Drawing on ancestral wisdom and indigenous ways of knowing, we explore what an enlightened society looks like as a lived practice. One that tends to the inner life, the outer world, and the secret places where they meet.
Rather than offering a destination, we are walking toward something older than language, a knowing that can only be felt in the body, witnessed in community, and remembered through practice.
What you experience here follows you home. The practices, the questions, and the ways of being you discover shape how you move through the world.
What you bring here lingers as well. Your presence becomes part of our story.
In these ways, we change each other.
The Ranch Experience
The property’s spaces, features, and amenities
Shambala Ranch rests on the ancestral land of the Chumash people— a rugged, beautiful expanse shaped by wind, sun, and time.
We are a functioning farm, alive with animals, gardens, orchards, and the daily heartbeat of care.
This land is steeped in spiritual energy, having been witness and participant for generations of prayers and practices.
Life here unfolds through touch, labor, mindfulness, and attention shared with the elemental—where tending the land and being tended by it exist in equal harmony.
The ranch is built on permaculture principles, creating regenerative systems that support the vitality of the soil, the animals, and the people who gather here.
Our stewardship of this land is reverent, ongoing, and woven into everyday life.
What the Ranch Offers
The property includes both open terrain and dedicated structures that complement a wide range of practices— from deep stillness to expressive movement, from reflective silence to connected conversation.
Temple
The Temple is a 600-square-foot, hand-painted space designed for meditation, stillness, and Dharma practice.
Inspired by Balinese architecture, the room is softly dripping with texture and intention. It is equipped with sheepskins, back jacks, and meditation cushions, and has been used consistently for meditation and Dharma for over 14 years.
This space has been consecrated by monks and holds a deep, palpable field of devotion and practice.
Theatre
The Theatre is a fully functioning black box theatre with surround sound, LED lighting, and professionally sprung floors designed for dance.
This is where we practice somatic dance, ritual theatre, and embodied performance.
It also serves as a performance space where visiting artists and retreat participants share work with the wider community.
Fire Pit & Stone Circle
Inspired by the Glastonbury stone circles, this ritual space is oriented to the directions to honor the land and the stones unearthed after the previous home on the property burned down.
It is a place for ceremony, truth-telling, and transformation—a space to gather in circle, release what must be burned, and speak the truths that have long felt too terrifying to say.
Nature Preserve
Our backyard opens directly into a protected nature preserve, home to Sisquoc Creek—a freshwater creek with year-round swimming pools.
Here we enter the uncharted terrain of the wild, reconnecting with land, water, and the untamed world of nature. The preserve is home to giant oaks, ancient stones, and a living ecosystem that invites deep listening and humility.
Organic Gardens & Food Forest
The property includes a large, year-round organic garden where guests can place their hands in the soil and participate directly in the regenerative process of growing and harvesting food.
We also steward a food forest with over 18 varieties of trees—including orange, persimmon, peach, walnut, pomegranate, and avocado—where you can rest beneath the canopy, pick fruit, and eat directly from the land.
Sauna & Cold Plunge
During breaks, guests are invited to unwind through contrast therapy.
Plunge into the cold pool beneath the fig tree, then enter the detoxifying heat of our Swedish dry sauna.
This practice supports nervous system regulation, restoration, and a return to the body’s natural state of vitality and resilience.
Organic, seasonal, farm-to-table meals
Meals at Shambala Ranch are a practice in themselves.
We dine slowly and communally, allowing nourishment to extend beyond the plate.
Everything we serve is fresh, seasonal, and deeply connected to the land:
✓ Fruits and vegetables are harvested from the organic garden and orchard on the property.
✓ Eggs come from the ranch’s flock of chickens and ducks.
✓ Meat is sourced locally, in alignment with the values of care, respect, and sustainability.
Time around our table supports conversation, silence, and the simple intimacy of eating together in rhythm with the day.
The Animal Sanctuary
The ranch is home to an animal sanctuary, and daily life here includes an ongoing relationship with creatures, birds, insects, and the subtle intelligence of the land itself.
Encounters with our horses, chickens, goats, pigs, and ducks offer mirrors, interruptions, learning experiences, and moments of connection that cannot be planned for or explained.
Note: Housing at the Ranch is unavailable, but we are happy to connect you with trusted local accommodation options.
YOUR GUIDES
Walking This Path Together
As partners in every sense, Sah D’Simone and Nathan Hirschaut steward Shambala Ranch as a shared practice rather than a platform.
Their work does not belong to a single lineage, yet honors many, drawing from Buddhism, somatics, ritual theater, animist ways of knowing, and the intelligence of the land itself.
Sah and Nathan share a devotion to truth as something felt, practiced, and lived, rather than explained.
At Shambala Ranch, they serve as hosts, guides, witnesses, and fellow practitioners, walking alongside those who feel called to remember a more embodied, relational way of being human.
Sah D’Simone
Sah D’Simone is a spiritual teacher, somatic practitioner, and the creator of the Somatic Activated Healing Method, a globally recognized approach to embodied healing and liberation that has reached tens of thousands of people worldwide. His work bridges Buddhist philosophy, trauma-informed somatics, ritual movement, and lived devotion to awakening in the body.
Sah’s path has been shaped by more than a decade of Buddhist practice, years of humanitarian service in some of the world’s most fragile regions, and a lifelong inquiry into how suffering is held, expressed, and transformed through the body. His teaching does not bypass pain or transcend the human experience. Instead, it invites a direct, compassionate meeting with what has been stored, silenced, or forgotten.
At the heart of Sah’s work is a commitment to making spirituality embodied and accessible, without diluting its depth. He teaches from lived experience, weaving discipline with tenderness, rigor with reverence.
At Shambala Ranch, Sah’s presence anchors the work in practice that is both ancient and urgently alive.
Sah D' Simone
Nathan Hirschaut
Nathan Hirschaut is a choreographer, ritual artist, and somatic practitioner whose work explores creativity as a path of honesty, repair, and return. His journey into this work emerged through burnout, disillusionment, and a profound reckoning with the cost of living disconnected from the body and its truth.
Trained in movement and performance, Nathan’s path eventually led him beyond choreography and into ritual, somatics, and land-based practice. His work centers on creating spaces where expression is not performative, but necessary; where creativity becomes a way of listening, grieving, remembering, and reinhabiting the self.
Nathan brings a deep sensitivity to threshold moments: the places where identity softens, defenses loosen, and something more essential can emerge.
At Shambala Ranch, his work supports participants in meeting their creative and emotional lives with courage, presence, and care, allowing art to arise as a living conversation rather than a product.
Nathan Hirschaut
A living sanctuary in the mountains of the Ojai Valley. Returning to land, body, and community.
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