A Statement · Craig Rose
I've spent the last twenty-five years trying to understand one question:
What happens when the right people gather in the right place?
That question has taken me through more worlds than I ever could have planned — and it has led me here, to Asheville.
✦ The Doorman
I started as a pastor. I built XXXchurch.com. Twenty years later, I launched Christian Cannabis. I became known for walking directly into the places most religious people were afraid to talk about.
I learned early that if you want to reach people, you don't stand outside the door judging them. You walk in. You listen. You become the doorman.
That same instinct followed me everywhere.
✦ The Rooms
I built retreats. I gathered artists. I hosted founders. I opened rooms.
I created pop-ups on Abbott Kinney in Venice. I launched the first figital art gallery in Carmel. I held retreats at Rainbow Ridge in Santa Cruz. I led gatherings in Sedona and Mexico. I built Spiritual Plants. I wrote Bankrupt but Spiritually Rich.
Again and again, the same pattern repeated.
Create the room.
Invite the people.
Give first.
Trust what happens.
✦ Generosity
Long before wellness retreats became an industry, I was inviting people into experiences built around generosity instead of exclusivity. While the market moved toward high-ticket experiences costing thousands — and sometimes tens of thousands — of dollars, I kept hosting gatherings without charging the way everyone said I should.
That philosophy was captured during the rise of the psychedelic retreat movement in The New York Times, where the contrast was clear: while many were building expensive experiences, I was still choosing to give the room away and trust that what was real would eventually come back.
People thought I was crazy. My kids questioned it. My friends questioned it. I never questioned it.
But I kept going because I believed something simple:
If the experience is real, people don't need to be sold. They need to be invited.
That belief eventually became the heart of Bankrupt but Spiritually Rich.
✦ The Landing
And now, after all these years, I understand what all of it was pointing toward.
Asheville.
The Blue Ridge Mountains. A region that already holds the healers, the artists, the builders, the elders, the land stewards and the seekers — in unusually close proximity to one another.
Shope Creek Wilderness — 131 acres stewarded for decades by Stephen and Mary Sedmak — was the birthplace. For more than a decade it quietly served children, families, artists, educators and community builders. It hosted Forest Floor. It held camps, conversations, healing journeys and moments of transformation most people will never hear about.
Shope Creek was never empty land waiting for an idea. It was already alive. It proved the vision. But the vision outgrew one family's land.
Asheville is where the Hollow Bone Initiative will build its first permanent home.
Stephen is the co-founder of SRS Labs, a company that helped bring immersive audio technology into the world before he stepped away from business nearly twenty-seven years ago. He didn't retire into comfort. He walked a spiritual road. He became an author, storyteller, explorer, and what he often calls himself: a doorman.
That word matters to me. Because I understand doormen. Doormen don't own the room. They open it. They welcome people in. They hold the threshold. That is what Stephen and Mary have done at Shope Creek.
I didn't come here to build over it. I came here because everything I have built finally has somewhere to land.
✦ The Hollow Bone Initiative
The work now emerging is called the Hollow Bone Initiative.
It begins with two questions Stephen has been carrying:
Can collective consciousness move beyond fear?
Can we create a new nature of exchange based on participation rather than transaction?
Those questions meet the questions I have been carrying my entire life:
How do we build spaces where people become more themselves?
How do we preserve generosity without depending on personal sacrifice?
How do we invite people into something real without turning it into another luxury product?
How do we create a model where artists, founders, healers, technologists, families and future stewards don't simply consume an experience, but participate in sustaining it?
That is the work now beginning in Asheville.
✦ The Layers
Camp Mary
The gathering.
The Field
The laboratory.
The Deer Trail
The story.
Frequency Underground
The media and archive.
Signal Garden
The regenerative land experiment.
The Hollow Bone Initiative
The philosophy.
Shope Creek Wilderness is the first pilot site where all of it became real.
Asheville is where it will be built to last.
This is not a retreat center. This is not a development project. This is not another brand.
It is a living experiment.
✦ The Companies
At the same time, the companies I have built are entering their own next chapter.
NUMINA Holdings and Your Health Is Your Wealth are currently represented by Post Oak Group as they explore strategic acquisition, private equity and growth opportunities. Together, these companies bring conscious AI, Spiritual Plants, media, publishing, wellness and whole-plant products into one larger ecosystem focused on the intersection of technology, ritual and human connection.
Those companies are businesses.
Asheville is where the philosophy becomes real.
✦ The Door Is Open
I used to say I wanted to retire at fifty. I don't think that means disappearing. I think it means finally doing only the work that matters.
For me, that work is no longer scattered across temporary rooms, pop-ups, retreats, galleries and gatherings. It has a home now.
A mountain region.
A creek that gave it birth.
A sanctuary being born.
A story.
A doorman named Stephen.
A group of artists and builders willing to listen before they build.
And a question big enough to organize the rest of my life:
What wants to emerge here?
That is why I'm going back out into the world. Not to sell a retreat. Not to pitch a company. Not to chase attention. To invite the people who understand.
The people who have been waiting for a different kind of room. The people who don't just want to attend something. They want to help create it.
