“AWE - the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.”

A Journey to Awe with Professor Dacher Keltner

May 28-June 1,2026 | Segera Retreat, Kenya

There are moments on safari when you find yourself gasping, holding your breath, dropping your jaw, widening your eyes… and then suddenly, something shifts as you absorb what is. Your heart slows, your mind stills, perhaps your shoulders drop and your skin tingles. For years, I have struggled to explain this feeling, this visceral, soul-stirring connection to an inner essence. I have always known, deep in my bones, that it’s more than just a feeling… It’s medicine.

Then I discovered the work of Professor Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder of the Greater Good Science Center. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on the science of human emotion – the reason why we are incredulous at the sight of a sunset or tear up over an act of kindness.

You may know him as the scientific consultant behind Pixar’s film “Inside Out”, or from his best-selling books including Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. His research bridges neuroscience, psychology and the humanities and always with a clear mission: to bring awe and wonder back into how we live. In a world that feels increasingly fragmented and uncertain, Professor Keltner reminds us that awe is not an escape—it’s an essential and evolutionary tool.

His research has uncovered what I have always championed: that awe, especially wild awe, is a biological necessity. Physically, experiencing awe calms the nervous system, lowers blood pressure and reduces inflammation, among other benefits, but it also connects us to something larger than ourselves – something beyond the ‘self’.

It is therefore with the deepest sense of synchronicity that I invite you to join me and Professor Keltner in Kenya for A Journey to Awe, from May 28 to June 1, 2026. Set within the rewilded beauty of Segera, this singular retreat is designed to help you access awe in its most natural form and reconnect you to what it means to feel deeply, expansively alive.

Where vastness lives

If awe is, in Professor Keltner’s words, “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world,” then the wilds of Africa, raw, untamed, pulsing with life, must be its purest form. Our journey will unfold at Segera Retreat, a powerful place of transformation at the foot of Mount Kenya. Once degraded farmland, it is now a thriving sanctuary where elephants roam, giraffes lope, and, most recently 20 black rhino have become resident, the result of a pioneering project to establish one of the largest contiguous rhino sanctuaries in the world.

How we open ourselves to awe

Of course, awe does not always arrive on command. In our daily lives, saturated with digital distractions, pings and lights, it is not easily found. That’s why, alongside Professor Keltner, I’ve gathered a circle of world-class practitioners and some of my most trusted guides in body work to help attune us to this deeper way of seeing and feeling. Together, they will help us create the space and clarity that awe requires, the flow of restoration returning our stolen focus.