Exploring Sacred Ground from A Satsang Journey to Taos Pueblo
- Will Brown
- Oct 18
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 21
There’s a particular energy that pulses in the high desert of New Mexico.It vibrates beneath the vast blue sky, echoing through wind-carved mesas and the sunbaked earth. Last summer, alongside my two fellow Satsang traveler friends, Subashini Nadarajah and Michael Ong, we went in search of that vibrational source, not knowing what we’d even find. We didn’t seek a path as tourists, but as three companions eager to learn and experience what the land wanted to share. Our path led us to Taos, where the landscape and spirit of a culture seem to converse in the same space.
A Place Where the Earth Remembers
At Taos Pueblo, history isn’t held in a museum; it breathes out in the open. The adobe dwellings that form the still functioning village, some standing for nearly a thousand years, rise out of the clay in perfect balance with the mountains behind them and the river that runs through the heart of the community. It’s a living architecture shaped over time by rhythm, ritual, and resilience that’s stood up to ancient tensions between Indigenous peoples and waves of settlement.
Our guide, a young woman home from university, spoke of her ancestors with resilient pride. Her dream is to build a museum for her people, not to preserve the past behind glass display cases, but to let others see through it. Listening to her share the history of the land and her people, I realized the pueblo itself was already that museum: living, evolving, and teaching anyone willing to listen.
We ran our hands along earthen walls, feeling the warmth held from centuries of sun. Clay, straw, and water, the simplest ingredients found in nature, have carried forward an unbroken lineage of shelter. Each hand-built wall, each chopped wood beam is a complete conversation and harmony between human intention and natural force.
The Taos Mountains rose like silent guardians; the Rio Pueblo flowed cold and crystal clear down from those same mountains, threading life through the desert. Standing there, you could feel how this community’s very placement was guided by wisdom far older than architecture, a geometry of belonging that also shares similar principles found in Feng Shui where placement and direction are key for prosperity and good fortune.Â
The Quiet Discipline of Simplicity
There is no electricity in the pueblo, no running water. And yet, life thrives, as it has for centuries. That absence was strangely enlivening which made visible the intricate web of convenience we often mistake for necessity. As shadows lengthened across the adobe, I could almost sense how time moves differently here: tethered not to societal schedules or digital screens, but to the slow energetic pulse of the circadian rhythms of life.Â
A Reverent Presence
At the center of the pueblo stands a humble chapel, still in use after centuries. Its adobe walls, thick and earthen, seem to exhale the prayers of generations. The wooden doors are worn smooth by countless hands. Hands that have opened them for weddings, baptisms, feast days, and quiet evenings of candlelight and song. Though we were visitors, stepping near it and into the courtyard carried the same weight as entering a sacred grove. The closer we approached its doors, the quieter and more reverent the visitors became, as if the space itself asked you to soften your voice and still your mind.
Inside, we were told, the walls are lined with hand-carved saints and family offerings, symbols that bridge the Pueblo people’s own spiritual traditions with the influences brought by Spanish missionaries centuries ago. The altar holds both Christian imagery and local adornments made of earth and corn, feathers and flowers. This merging of worlds, rather than erasing either, creates something uniquely whole, a testament to endurance through adaptation.
No cameras were permitted inside, and rightly so. Some places are meant to be felt and remembered, not captured and posted. To take a photo here would have been to flatten something alive into something static. Standing before the chapel, the scent of piñon smoke in the air and the sound of wind brushing across the plain, I understood why reverence doesn’t need spectacle, just a pause.
Tasting History
Our visit ended with warm tortillas and golden empanadas baked in clay ovens darkened by generations of use. The ovens themselves seemed like living artifacts, dome-shaped, hand-built, and burnished by time. Their walls held the scent of smoke, flour, and baked-in sun. Each bite carried more than flavor; it held memory, the unbroken generational line of hands that had kneaded, baked, and shared bread across centuries.
Just beyond the central plaza, I stood before a row of small adobe storefronts, their wooden doors propped open to the breeze. Inside, residents sold jewelry, handwoven textiles, pottery, and baked goods, the same materials, ingredients and crafts their ancestors once exchanged and taught, now offered to visitors as a way to sustain life in a modern economy.
Food grown or served here represents a taste of history. It tells of what the land gives, how families gather, and how culture endures through the simplest acts of daily life. In the taste of those empanadas, I could sense both past and present, the blending of necessity and ritual.
There, at the edge of the plaza, with the scent of piñon and sweet dough still in the air, I realized that continuity isn’t about refusing change. It’s about carrying the essence of who you are one handmade piece, one baked meal, one story at a time.
A Living Continuum
As we prepared to leave, I felt an unexpected sense of compassion. The people of Taos Pueblo live not in resistance to the modern world, but in a parallel rhythm alongside an ancient one of their own. They remind us that cultural endurance is not about preserving what was, but about living fully in what is, grounded in lineage, guided by care, and taught through emissaries of the past.
Taos Pueblo holds the rare distinction of being both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a
U.S. National Historic Landmark. But no accolade captures the quiet power of standing there surrounded by the energetic pulse of the ancient walls, rising mountains, whispering wind, and the steady streaming of water.
 As we left this sacred place, a sense of quiet settled among the three of us. Glancing back through the car window as the golden hour showed upon the desert, the pueblo seemed to breathe with the land itself, adobe glowing like amber, the river whispering through centuries of prayer and perseverance. I felt clearly how Satsang Living is less about where we go, and more about how we meet what’s already here with each other through the stories that shape us.
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—Will Brown