Nuns sell Bay Area retreat center for $11.5 million

The Dominican Sisters of San Rafael have sold their retreat center, Santa Sabina, to a not-for-profit organization for $11.5 million.

The buyer is the Hoffman Institute, which, according to its website, is “dedicated to transformative adult education, spiritual growth, and the personal dimensions of leadership.”

The organization will use the San Rafael center, built in 1939 to house young women preparing to enter the Dominican order, to conduct its seven-day residential courses.

The institute, which has its administrative offices on Fourth Street in San Rafael, has been conducting its classes at 101 San Antonio Road in northern Novato. It purchased the property from the Institute of Noetic Sciences for $16 million in 2021.

The Hoffman Institute sold the 193-acre property to Marin Creek, a Delaware-based limited liability company, for $20 million in May. Representatives of Marin Creek could not be reached for comment.

“We had owned a place called White Sulfur Springs in St. Helena, California, which had been our home for 25 years,” said Matthew Brannigan, the Hoffman Institute’s vice president and director of faculty. “That burned in the Glass Fire, so we really needed to find a home quickly.”

However, the Novato property included more land than the institute needed, Brannigan said.

“A lot of our time and attention was needing to be spent beyond our core program,” he said. “It’s been challenging for us to sustain that.”

“The new buyers have expressed to us a vision for that site that extends beyond what we had intended for it,” he said. “They helped us discover Santa Sabina, and it appears to be a win-win-win for three organizations.”

The Dominican nuns have used Santa Sabina as a retreat open to spiritual seekers of various traditions since 1970. They put it up for sale in September 2023 at an asking price of $11.5 million, citing the order’s dwindling numbers and the increasing costs of maintaining the center.

“We had several different groups to dialogue with, but Hoffman came in on all the measures that we were looking for,” said Margaret Diener, director of the center and a member of the Dominican Sisters of San Rafael. “It turned out to be a very positive fit. We feel lucky that we have found someone who wants to continue using the center as a retreat site.”

The Hoffman Institute charges $5,350 for its weeklong retreats that feature its trademarked methodology, the “Hoffman Quadrinity Process.”

The process was created in 1967 by Bob Hoffman, an Oakland tailor with no formal training in psychology, psychiatry or psychotherapy. Hoffman claimed to have had a vision of his deceased psychiatrist, Siegfried Fischer, telling him that the key to emotional healing is for people to reconcile themselves with the emotional trauma caused by their parents.

In its initial form, the process involved engaging a spirit guide to establish psychic contact with one’s parents when they were children. People undergoing the process were encouraged to discharge their pent-up resentment toward their parents by crying, screaming and beating pillows.

Brannigan, who has undergone the process and works as one of the institute’s 40 certified instructors, said that Hoffman, like developmental psychologists, attributed many emotional problems to parenting in early childhood.

“We do invite people to look at their own parents’ childhood,” Brannigan said, “to find a place of compassionate understanding for what their parents must have experienced in their own childhood.”

“To that extent, yes, we are inviting people to form a kind of connection to their mother and father through their own imagery and understanding,” he said, “but I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a psychic connection.”

As for beating pillows, Brannigan said, “We do expressive, cathartic work that helps people discharge held energy. It doesn’t necessarily require screaming.”

Diener said, “Their work has to do with holistic integration of the self, as far as I understand it. Many of the groups that currently use Santa Sabina have similar kinds of programming, so they fit in.”

Celebrities such as Katy Perry and Justin Bieber have undergone the process, and stories about the Hoffman Institute have appeared in such magazines as British GQ and Cosmopolitan.

The Hoffman Institute began offering its multi-day retreat in 1985. Brannigan estimates that 120,000 people worldwide have undergone the process. He said the instruction is being provided in 13 or 14 countries.

The organizations offering the retreats in other countries are separate financial entities. Brannigan said that Hoffman Institute International, an umbrella organization, ensures that best practices are being maintained across the different locations.

Brannigan said he has a master’s degree in psychology from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, but a bachelor’s degree in any subject is the only academic requirement to work as a Hoffman Institute instructor.

“Because we’re not doing therapy, we don’t require credentialed therapists,” Brannigan said. “We look for people with really great empathy.”

Brannigan said there will be some refurbishment at Santa Sabina but no major changes.

“We’re not doing any kind of teardown or anything like that,” he said. “We do see some renovation of the classrooms, adding air conditioning, some things like that.”

The building’s Tudor-Gothic architecture was inspired by the Dominican Monastery at Stoke-on-Trent in England. The center includes a chapel that accommodates 40 to 60 people, a prayer room suitable for a gathering of a similar size, a conference room that seats 100 people, a dining room that seats 60 people, 38 bedrooms, a library, a pillow room adjacent to the library with a wood-burning fireplace, a smaller meeting room that fits about a dozen people, three staff offices, an inner courtyard garden, a straw bale hermitage and a yurt.

Diener said the money from the sale will help cover the ongoing cost of caring for members of the order and maintaining its remaining property. Diener and a few staff members who live at the center will be forced to relocate.

“This is a hard place for us to let go of,” Diener said. “It’s deep in our history. It’s a place we love dearly. Many sisters who are still active in the order made their novitiate here, so it holds a special place in their hearts.”