Questions About Root Astrolabe, Answered

Still Point is a solo residency (3 to 5 days, one person, no agenda) for leaders who need complete quiet. The Bearing is a curated cohort of 5 to 10 leaders over 3.5 days plus a 90-day return, focused on strategic clarity. Highland is a 4-day team expedition for 5 to 10 people combining physical challenge with leadership realignment. Compare all three.

If you need complete rest and silence, choose Still Point. If you want strategic clarity and a peer cohort, choose The Bearing. If you are bringing a leadership team that needs realignment through shared challenge, choose Highland. Contact us and we will help you decide.

A multi-day leadership retreat that uses the forest environment (physical challenge, navigational uncertainty, and exposure) as a direct training ground for the nervous system regulation required in high-stakes leadership. The Bearing in full.

A combination of field movement, structured reflection, and small-group work, calibrated to stress and then restore your decision-making system. No prior outdoor skills are required. You leave with a 90-Day Operating Plan and a peer crew that lasts beyond the retreat.

The Bearing runs in curated cohorts of 5 to 10 leaders. Cohorts are kept small deliberately, to preserve the depth of the experience. Contact us to check current availability.

A multi-day device-free expedition for executive teams of 5 to 10. Physical challenge, honest dialogue, and a team-authored 90-Day Operating Priorities document. Lead from higher ground. Highland in full.

Executive teams (CEOs, C-suite, and senior leadership groups) who need to align, reset, and leave with a shared direction. Most effective when the full decision-making team attends together. Teams produce a co-authored 90-Day Operating Priorities document: specific, accountable commitments made to each other before leaving the land. No prior outdoor experience is required; the physical challenge is calibrated to the team, not individual athletic performance.

Still Point is a three to five night solo residency for one guest at a time, held in a private luxury safari tent on Root Astrolabe's seven private acres in the Catskills, 90 minutes from New York City. There is no group, no agenda, and no devices from arrival to departure. It exists for a specific kind of exhaustion that a vacation cannot touch: the noise that follows a person home because it was never really about the schedule. What is left when the noise stops is the point. Still Point in full.

Root Astro enterprise engagements range from $7,000 for individual attendance to six-figure multi-phase programs across departments. Every engagement is one all-in figure: discovery, a Human Return Rubric baseline assessment, and the residency itself, with all facilitation, chef-prepared meals, and the Back to Human sessions included, through to the 90-day measurement that tells you what changed. See enterprise tiers.

Four nights on the land, no devices, a curated cohort of five to ten, and a 90-day operating plan you author before you leave: a seat on The Bearing is $7,600, all-in. Still Point, the solo residency, is $1,200 per night for three to five nights; most guests stay four. Highland, the intact-team expedition, is $9,200 per seat. Every figure is complete: all facilitation, chef-prepared meals, lodging, and the Back to Human sessions are included, and there are no add-ons. For reference, a season of weekly executive coaching calls typically runs a comparable figure, and it never takes the phone out of your hand. Contact us and we will send current pricing for the format you are considering.

Every enterprise engagement includes the Human Return Rubric, which measures six dimensions of leadership capacity: Presence, Connection, Capability, Clarity, Resilience, and Reverence. Baseline assessment occurs during the discovery phase, with measurement at retreat completion and at 90-day follow-up.

Executive coaching is ongoing and conversational. Corporate offsites are typically agenda-driven in conference settings. Root Astro is an immersive, device-free leadership accelerator in nature: a controlled environment designed to produce measurable shifts in leadership capacity that neither weekly calls nor hotel ballrooms can achieve.

Before any retreat, Root Astro conducts a discovery phase: stakeholder interviews, a Human Return Rubric baseline assessment, and a leadership context review. This determines which retreat format, facilitation approach, and follow-up structure will produce the highest return for your specific team.

Stephen Kaplan's attention restoration research (1995) established that natural environments restore the specific cognitive capacity that leadership depletes. Voluntary, sustained focus is a finite resource. Natural environments restore it because they engage involuntary attention without demanding directed effort: a forest, a trail, a body of water. They hold your attention without taking it. The restoration this produces is not relaxation; it is the recovery of the capacity to think clearly and judge accurately.

Three conditions matter. First, genuine removal from directed attention demands: no devices, no group agenda, no scheduled facilitation that puts cognitive load back in. Second, unstructured time in a setting that does not require your attention. Third, a clear premise: the retreat should be designed around a specific question the leader needs space to think about, not a general need for rest.

The research is clear: the mere presence of a smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity, even when it is face-down and silenced. For a retreat designed to restore cognitive function, device presence is a direct countermeasure to the retreat's own objective. If the goal is restored clarity and stronger thinking, devices work against it.