SURPRISE FARM RETREAT CENTER
Intentions
Surprise Farm Retreat Center offers educational programs in the surround of nature, organic farming, and heritage sites. The experience of being in place, with creative intentional community, encourages well-being.
Our Intentions include learning from each other about meaning and purpose, in workshops and around the fire-pit. We seek a caring and sustainable interaction between human nature and Nature, inviting Nature to heal us.
What We Do
Surprise Farm Retreat Center (SFRC) is an educational organization offering workshops, seminars, and discussion groups on the relationships between nature, culture, community, self, and well-being.
With educators from the Center, and in collaboration with others, we seek to provide meaningful and effective service to individuals and society. Programs (activities, workshops and events) provide experiential education with the following attributes:
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The physical surround will provide entrance for philosophical ideas and meaning-making regarding our current existence in place.
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An educational structure will provide service for people of all backgrounds and interests,
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to explore our place in nature, discuss our backgrounds, relationship and ideas; and
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to co-create activities, art, rituals and healing in a community of common values and experiences.
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While offering our workshops, we will keep the idea of sustainable experience design in mind. We strive to co-create sustainable (environmental, social and economic) experiences that have lasting positive impact on individual and social well-being (Sustainable Community Development).
Board of Directors & Officers
Irene Castruita
Board Member
Executive Director
Gibran Isaias Lopez
Board Member
Irene Castruita loves people and is passionate about weaving with community. She has over 20 years experience in organizing through the arts, food, culture and healing. Since the birth of her daughters, she felt the inner call to connect with Mother Earth. She's worked proactively on developing community gardens and co-created an EARTH School with her husband for youth so they could learn with nature via food, art, healing and introspection. Her connection with the land inspired her to create a grassroots food kitchen, Irene's Kitchen. She caters and prepares meal packages and juice cleanses using produce she's grown or from local farms. As well, she teaches about nutrition and sharing the benefits of eating local produce. In the summer of 2025, her and her family moved to Surprise Farm and she is inspired to co-create on this land with this amazing group of people who share a similar vision.
Ana Ruth Castillo
Board Member
Ana Ruth Yela Castillo is a mother, an artist, and a community based therapist. Ana Ruth has dedicated over 20+ years of her career by serving children, adolescents, adults, and families as a teaching artist, a mental health clinician and art therapist. Her career and passions have been dedicated to using creative expression as a catalyst for both personal and community transformation. In 2023 she was selected as a recipient of the Far South / Border North Cultural Arts Grant where she had the opportunity to fabricate a Mobile Healing Art Studio that activates public spaces into healing art spaces of belonging. Through her indigenous cultural and spiritual ways of knowing, she continues to bridge the healing of intergenerational trauma into medicine, wisdom, and unyielding resilience for the benefit of our future generations. At Surprise Farm, she collaborates and calls on the ultimate healer herself, Mother Nature, for hosting retreats, providing workshops, and organizing to further activate this beautiful space with the presence of families and community. Her family resides in Ramona where they call the surrounding nature that gives R-town its unique country vibe and sense of resiliency, home. Connect more with her at IG @HummingBird_Divinations.
Victor Silva
Board Member
Victor Hugo Silva is an immigrant from Brazil and an engineering graduate from San Diego State University. His perspective has been shaped by his transition from urban life to rural living, where he developed a deeper appreciation for nature, community, and sustainable off-grid systems.
Victor is interested in nature-based healing, holistic wellness practices, sustainable living, the medicinal use of plants and food, alternative ways of living, and traditional ways of connecting to the land. “SFRC offers a safe space for people to genuinely connect, grow, and foster deeper relationships with themselves, each other, and the natural world.”
After graduating art school in 2008, Gibran Isaias Lopez continued to travel domestically and internationally to share his personal devotion to Peace, Love and Harmony via introspection workshops, speaking engagements and community mural painting. Later Gibran and his family moved to a community farm in Escondido, CA where they created their version of EARTH School. A fun and nurturing environment where homeschooling families would bring their children to participate in multidisciplinary, artistic, musical, play based and nature based learning classes. Simultaneously developing his artist practice further of merging mural art, interactive sculpture and gardening within the beauty of nature’s landscapes. In mid 2025, Gibran and his family moved into the Surprise Farm Home located within the SFRC. “Our intention and prayer in being in this sacred land is to be further connected with our Mother Earth, all sentient loving vibrational beings and continue to do our good work as One.”
Elizabeth Reynoso
Board Member
Elizabeth Reynoso is honored to serve on the Board of Directors at Surprise Farm Retreat Center. She is a Kumeyaay descendant from the San Pasqual Band of Mission Indians, hailing from the Waipuk Clan. With a deep connection to the land and its first peoples, Elizabeth is also a certified sound therapist, Reiki Master, and Native American bodywork specialist. Her passion lies in fostering meaningful connections, paying homage to the land, and creating transformative retreats. Ready to collaborate, she’s eager to help build offerings that honor both healing and the land’s spirit.
Don Eulert, Ph.D.
Co-Founder
For 40 years, Don Eulert served as a Professor at the California School of Professional Psychology, San Diego—where he urged candidates to fit psychology to the history of ideas, and to global and ethical concerns. Founder of the Center for Integrative Psychology which has afforded Native Americans to become mental health professionals; bringing experts in the field of psychology to present to a community of curious folks; and providing community and mentorship to graduate students pursuing their doctoral degrees. His books of poetry include haiku and translations of Romanian poetry. His collection Ritual and Healing won a 2014 San Diego Book Award. Now , as Co-Founder of the Retreat Center, he presents and guides workshops for integration and enactment of Self, with the help of nature.
Ute Jamrozy, Ph.D.
Co-Founder
Leana Bulay
Board Member
Leana Bulay, SFRC Programs Committee, graduated from UC Santa Cruz in Environmental Sciences with an emphasis in Conservation Biology. She boasts two decades with non-profits and governmental agencies in environmental conservation and education; most recently Leana is a leader at San Dieguito River Park and works in trail development and nature interpretation and education. “I grew up in the area, and the Retreat grounds hold a special place in my heart.” She helps establish workshop series, nature preserve, and interpretive materials for SFRC.
Ken Gill
Board Member
Co-Founder of SFRC, Ute Jamrozy holds a Ph.D. in Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management, and has over 20 years of academic experience in Sustainable Tourism and Marketing. In San Diego, she added Integrative and Eco Psychology, and organic farming to her fields of interest. With SFRC, she hopes to implement sustainable experience design-- in retreats and workshops that offer lasting transformations to the individual, and positive impacts for human-environment relationships. Ute brings unbridled passion for the mission of the retreat center to our board and all she does.
Teresa Wells
Board Member
Teresa is an ordained Buddhist monk and teacher of meditation at the Dharma Center in San Diego. She specializes in how music, vibrational frequencies and sound impact the mind and body. She has studied the teachings of Buddha, Yogananda, Gangji, Mooji, Rama and the Theosophical Society. Teresa has experience in running a non-profit and brings those skills to SFRC. She leads a weekly meditation session at SFRC.
Ken Gill, SFRC Marketing Committee, has a diverse background. Music: 58 years as a professional musician: touring, writing, recording, and teaching. Art: Studied art at Northern Arizona University and Mesa College. VP of Clairemont Art Guild for several years. Art in various local galleries. Created a new art form using sustainable plant materials. Business: Thirty years in business, primarily electronics. Go figure.“I see in the SFRC a chance to bring nature, art, music, farming, and personal growth together in a safe, welcoming, beautiful and sustainable place with a group of dedicated and conscious people.”
Katherine Prosser
Board Member
Katherine Prosser serves on the Community Relations and Marketing Committee at SFRC. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and specializes in the application of psychological theory to marketing strategy, organizational structures, and community engagement within psychology-based organizations. She is currently a graduate student in counseling psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, with a scholarly focus on depth psychology and Jungian-oriented approaches. Her academic interests include the psyche, individuation, somatic and embodied processes, dream work, ritual, and the symbolic and spiritual dimensions of human experience. Katherine’s long standing relationship with nature informs both her academic orientation and her work with SFRC. She is committed to advancing awareness of the organization’s mission and fostering community engagement rooted in the psychological, somatic, and restorative potential of meaningful relationship with land, place, and ceremony.
Leslie Ziegenhorn, PhD
Board Member
Leslie’s childhood intimacy with nature inspired a quest to understand the world through science, later evolving into her deep appreciation for the numinous. After completing her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, she deepened her exploration of consciousness with contemplative & ceremonial practices through travel, study, and retreats. Weaving these elements into her career as an Integrative Psychologist, Leslie devotes much of her professional time to her private therapy practice and teaching at UCSD’s School of Medicine. As a SFRC Board member, she invites all ages to co-create with the land and within the alchemical gift of community. Or relish some solitude away from distractions and notice what reveals itself. Welcome whatever Surprise nourishes your inner soil, each other, and these sacred surroundings.
Heriberto (Beto) Escamilla Morales, Ph.D.
Board Member
Beto Escamilla, SFRC Programs Committee, conducts Clinical Psychology program development, interviewing, and focus groups. “Originally from Los Ebanos, a small ranch near Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. My grandparents and parents were farmers. I would say that by nature I am a dreamer, frequently getting lost in my imagination. But, I have been blessed with great teachers and a wife who has taught me about faith and helped me appreciate intimacy. I believe that our children are forgetting how to dream and how to plant. I see the Retreat Center as an opportunity to share some of my experience and to pass along an appreciation for these natural human abilities.”
Marina Dorian, PhD
Board Member
Marina Dorian, PhD, is a SFRC board member. She is a psychologist, associate professor at Naropa University, and a meditation instructor. Marina has been a meditation practitioner in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hahn for almost twenty years and facilitates a sangha for mothers. Her therapy practice focuses on integrating mindfulness into therapy, treatment of mood and anxiety disorders and couple and family therapy. Marina seeks to make mindfulness practice fun and accessible for all people. Her interests include yoga, meditation, dance, travel, hiking, literature and film. Her intention is to help people awaken to a sense of awe at Surprise Farm and experience mindfulness and compassion in their everyday lives.
Greg Shibley
Board Member
Bio coming soon