Exile trains and develops leaders who are ready to make history by opening to new possibilities. Exile is drawing together a community of individuals who are ready to go into the wilderness, to the edge beyond the edge, in search of the possibilities that customary thinking has excluded. 
ANDREW MARKELL
When I was 20 I went to live in Nepal, climb mountains and study with a special group of Tibetan monks. The time I spent in the Himalaya was decisive for me, for it was there among the high peaks that I first caught a glimpse of the true potential for human beings. I saw and experienced a form of power, in the mountains and in the monks that lived there, that has guided me ever since.
Two decades later, I have traveled all over the world and studied under some of the finest teachers one could ever hope to meet. For twelve years I lived as an apprentice to what we in the west might call a medicine woman and her daughter. In a methodical and disciplined manner, I was trained in a foundation of the healing and medicine arts. In keeping with what I learned from the monks in Nepal, I have built a daily self-cultivation practice over the last twenty years in the martial arts that sustains my body and my work. My ambition has been to wake up my mind and nervous system, reduce self-delusion and win a feeling of health and confidence taught to me by my first teachers in Nepal.
I have intentionally chosen to find my growth and career outside of typical arenas. I won a scholarship to pursue my graduate studies at Harvard University and turned it down to continue my apprenticeship, driven in no small part by a certain naivete and innocence that has since unfortunately diminished.
I worked with hard-core gangsters on the west coast for ten years beginning in 1995 while the vast majority of my friends and peers found their fortunes in the dot-com era because I was fascinated and awed by the intelligence, honesty and courage of these young men and women.
For six years I developed a series of wonderfully disruptive courses that I taught to graduate students while an adjunct at The Graduate Program for Conflict Resolution in Portland State University that examined leadership, education, violence and change-agency from a place far outside the status-quo way of teaching. I have built companies around my conviction that the core principles grounding the martial and the healing arts are crucial for leaders, entrepreneurs, and designers.
Exile is the culmination of my life’s work up to this point. I have consulted to leaders in nearly every institutional setting of American society, and have spent a good deal of time training corporate leaders in Europe. Our company gets its name from an anomaly mostly overlooked in the world; collectively we are in exile from the familiar and the known. Institutions, nations, and certainties of all shapes and sizes are collapsing at an accelerating rate. Every leader feels the ground shifting, and very few know what to do. In concert with the worlds leading consultants, top leaders are left throwing darts at a wall, hoping against hope that something will work.
Exile is about growth as liberation: liberation from the status quo, liberation from predatory social and economic norms, and liberation from an unfocused mind and poorly trained nervous system. Twenty years ago the Himalaya opened my eyes to a world of possibility for human excellence. My goal today, through this vehicle named Exile, is to impart this same expanse of possibility into the mind and imagination of the finest and most important leaders in the world.
And on a personal note, because we often work with our clients in wild and beautiful settings, I get to spend lots of time in the mountains climbing, telemark skiing and snowboarding or in the ocean surfing. My world really opened up for me when I began climbing on the east coast in high school, and climbing on crags soon led to the mountains. Six years ago I fell to the ground soloing on a local crag – a classic case of daydreaming and light rain – after a great climbing trip to Spain. The rehab led to surfing, and impossible visions of surfing perfect waves one week and climbing perfect granite the next.
KATE MARKELL
Kate Markell is an accomplished facilitator with a special expertise providing leadership and guidance for families and family businesses. Her background is quite unique and rare. At the age of 16 she left the United States to visit Russia directly after the fall of the Soviet Union captivated by the possibility of witnessing first-hand the emergence of a new nation. There she found that tremendous change is possible in people and societies no matter the background or history. There she decided that her path would take her deeper into understanding the art of leading such change.
After completing high-school, Kate went to live and work in Mumbai, India where she helped to organize the many communities in that area around the idea of community organization through women’s health. She put together trainings, facilitated groups and educated mothers and girls in many areas crucial to their well being and that of their families and communities. She also created and implemented a dynamic set of programs that organized families, health workers, social workers, church leaders, business and community leaders around expansive and powerful dynamics of community and human development. The model that she developed provided a decisive foundational element for the improvement of life in that area.
Upon completing her work in India, Kate went to work and study in Bali, Indonesia. It was in Bali where Kate came to understand that a big part of her work and destiny was to become a midwife – the kind of midwife that in times previous provided essential leadership for families and communities, the kind of midwife that ensured that the ceremonies and practices of birth and death were maintained with wisdom and discipline. In Bali she studied and apprenticed under a powerful midwife and healer, Robin Lim. She attended many births, and continued to develop her skills working intimately with communities and families as a community organizer.
When she had received the foundation that she needed, Kate returned to the United States where she completed her degree at Birthingway College of Midwifery. She practiced in Oregon for 2 years, and then left for Guatemala to assist Clinicas Maya in Midwifery, community development and training. This is a clinic located in rural Guatemala that serves its own and the many outlying villages. Kate trained Guatemalan Midwives in healthy practices, adding onto their already rich skill set by working with them individually and in groups to encourage sharing, support and strength together. She attended the most difficult births in order to train the midwives and to facilitate a healthy outcome, and worked with the community to develop healthy family practices and greater community strength. After three years of work, Kate felt that the clinic was strong enough to prosper into the future without her. She returned once again to the United States to develop a new model for strategic leadership, family development, and community design.
LANG DAVISON
Lang Davison has worked for 25 years in two worlds that, on the surface at least, couldn’t be more dissimilar: business and the healing arts. As an energy healer, Lang has trained extensively with the Reverend Rosalyn Bruyere, the internationally acclaimed healer, clairvoyant, medicine woman, and acknowledged oracle for the Tibetan Bon Po, Sixth Lineage of the Pre-Buddhist Tradition. He’s also trained or apprenticed with Barbara Brennan, Greg Schelkun, and Hyemeyohsts Storm.
Lang is a clairvoyant visionary, Christian mystic, and member of a traveling band of energy healers that’s reincarnated together every 500 years since the Lemurian Epoch. He knows Fortune 500 chiefs and Native Indian Chiefs. He talks to entrepreneurs and to spirit guides and to at least one Archangel.
Previously Lang was a partner in a big consulting firm, a best-selling author of business books (Net Gain, The Power of Pull), and the editor-in-chief of the “Rolls Royce” of business publications—The McKinsey Quarterly.
Lang’s experience walking in two worlds allows him to navigate and integrate aspects of life that are too-often kept separate. He helps bring more intuitively oriented people the grounding they need to thrive while helping more material-world folks expand their awareness and calm their energies.
Prior to establishing Sun Circle, Lang Davison co-founded the Center for the Edge in 2007, where he designed and published ground-breaking research into digital technology’s transformation of the global business environment. This research formed the foundation for Lang’s best-selling book The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (co-written with John Hagel and John Seely Brown (Basic Books in 2010)), which calls on individuals and companies to make a radical break from the past.
Bloomberg Businessweek called The Power of Pull “this year’s must-read book on innovation” while Strategy + Business magazine named it a Best Business Book of 2010.