The Sphinx Gate is more than immersive art.
It’s a rite of passage that invites you to unlock the wisdom of your challenges through curiosity, play, and peer support.
Featured in Forbes - at the forefront of emotional wellbeing through art. Forbes Magazine ↗
We brush our teeth. We go to the gym. We send our minds to school. But almost nothing in modern life teaches us how to tend our inner worlds. Anxiety, loneliness, and burnout are rising — not because people don’t want to look inside, but because no one has shown them how, or made it feel safe enough to try.
Inner hygiene is the everyday practice of processing experience, supporting self-regulation, and making meaning from what is difficult. Just as physical hygiene became a public health standard, inner hygiene is the layer of human development we have yet to normalize — preventative, culturally accessible, and held by community.
Sphinx Gate is a lived and playful expression of this vision: emotional infrastructure that turns public space into a participatory environment for community, art, and tending to the inner world. Not a replacement for clinical care. Rather a powerful measure that acts as a preventative care.
A self-guided journey moving through four thresholds to unlock the wisdom within.
Name the hard thought that keeps you feeling stuck. Inscribe it on a tag.
Locate that thought as physical sensation in the body — not story, but felt experience.
Offer kindness and acceptance to what you have been carrying. Not to fix it. Just to be with it.
Choose what waits on the other side — abundance, belonging, flow, empowerment, embodiment, or flexibility.
Two 34-foot monumental sculptures, built modularly for travel and future placement in town squares. Debuted at Burning Man 2025 where they received the festival’s largest honoraria. Currently being refined and redesigned as the team raises funds for completion and permanent deployment.
The portable version of the gate. Same four-portal ritual, designed for low-cost replication so it can travel to festivals, parks, and public squares. Already deployed at Everywhen Festival and Full Bloom Festival in 2026, with more deployments scheduled.
“It has truly been one of the most transformational and healing things I’ve ever done. Not only does it need to be at Burning Man — it needs to come to the larger community.”
Loni · Seeker, Burning Man 2025
“I thought I was coming to Burning Man to see DJs and art cars. I didn’t have it on my bingo card that I was going to have a transformative experience.”
Matt · Seeker, Burning Man 2025
“It demanded an exploration of self that was very surprising and rewarding.”
Matthew · Seeker, Burning Man 2025
“So easy and simple and well put together that it’s something anyone could do — even if they don’t have experience with shadow work.”
Lani · Seeker, Burning Man 2025
“The last week and a half I’ve just been so in the flow state, so open to new ideas. The Sphinx Gate was the catalyst.”
Matt · Seeker, Burning Man 2025
“Using your struggles and trauma as a teacher, as inspiration, as wisdom — rather than as baggage.”
Loni · Seeker, Burning Man 2025
The Mini Sphinx Temple’s second deployment, returning to the redwoods of Northern California. Trained peer supporters guided seekers through the four-portal ritual under festival lights.
The portable Sphinx Temple’s public debut. Proof that the ritual works off-playa — in a new field, with a new audience, with the same depth. The first answer to the question: does this travel?
Six years in the making. Two 34-foot monumental sculptures framing a ritual threshold. Over 2,400 seekers walked through. Winner of the largest honoraria grant Burning Man awarded that year. Image: World Wide Citizens.
A regional gathering and a working laboratory for the Sphinx Gate ritual. Quiet, close-knit, and full of conversation that fed the year that followed.
A prototype of the interactive elements that became the four-portal sequence. We tested what people would actually do when invited to name what they carried, and watched the gate take shape in their responses.
The first full experience prototype. Architect Jason Chase joined the team and led design vision for what would become the Big Sphinxes.
The first time the Sphinx journey met the playa. A small, scrappy prototype that proved the question — what is the riddle of your mind? — could hold a stranger’s attention for hours.
The Sphinx Gate was founded by Mareesa Stertz, with a core team that has met consistently since 2019 — iterating through festival installations to learn what it truly takes to make emotional processing accessible, experiential, and fun. We heal better together than alone.
Plus fifty-plus welders, builders, designers, ritualists, peer supporters, camp leads, sound engineers, and logistics crew who bring the gate to life each year.
Fund the installation, the road trips, and the people holding the space.
Support the work →Dispatches from the threshold, event dates, and invitations to participate.
Join the list →Donations are processed through our fiscal sponsor Givsum, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN 88-3852704). For tax-deductible giving — recommended for larger gifts — use the Givsum donation page. For everyday support, the GoFundMe is the fastest path.
