SACRED GROUND: A Satsang Journey to Taos Pueblo.

Story by Will Brown

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.

Photo by Michael Ong

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 their 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 quiet 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. 

Top left photo by Michael Ong. Remaining photos by Will Brown.

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.

Photo by Will Brown

A Reverent Presence

At the center of the pueblo stands a humble chapel, still in use after centuries. It’s where weddings, baptisms, and communal gatherings are held and though we were visitors, stepping near it carried the same weight as entering a sacred grove. Cameras were forbidden, and rightly so. Some places are meant to be felt and experienced, not documented. There was a quiet understanding that reverence isn’t always declared; sometimes, it’s simply practiced.

Our visit ended with warm tortillas and golden empanadas baked in clay ovens darkened by generations of use. The flavors were deep, earthy and unhurried, The taste of sustenance shaped by memory folded and mashed into the very flour that created the food, which, in this place, was not just nourishment; it was generational storytelling, legacy and pride.

A Living Continuum

As we prepared to leave, I felt an unexpected sensation of tenderness. The people of Taos Pueblo live not in resistance to the modern world, but in a profound continuity with 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 song of water.

  As we left this sacred place, a sense of quiet settled among the three of us. Glancing backthrough the car window as the golden hour showed upon the desert, the pueblo seemed to breathe with the land itself, adobe glowing like ember, 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.

Photo by Subashini Nadarajah